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Elias Pettersson is staying in Vancouver and is already back on the ice at Rogers Arena

In a normal offseason, Pettersson would start with dryland training and wouldn’t take to the ice for a couple of months.
Daniel Wagner
Daniel Wagner
elias-pettersson_ben-nelms-cp
The Vancouver Canucks' Elias Pettersson celebrates a shootout goal against Carter Hart of the Philadelphia Flyers. photo: Ben Nelms / CP

The Canucks season may have just ended a couple of weeks ago, but Elias Pettersson is wasting no time getting back on the ice.

Most players take some time after the season ends to decompress and spend some time with family and friends before throwing themselves into their offseason training. Pettersson, however, isn’t even flying back to Sweden. The young Canucks superstar is still in Vancouver and hit the ice at Rogers Arena on Monday.

In a normal offseason, Pettersson would start with dryland training and wouldn’t take to the ice for a couple of months. This isn’t a normal offseason, however, and Pettersson already followed his typical summer routine back in Sweden between the end of the regular season and the start of the playoffs. When he started skating prior to the start of the Canucks’ playoff training camp at the beginning of July, it was his first time in skates since the season went on hiatus due to COVID-19.

Evidently, the normal summer routine has gone right out the window with this unprecedented second offseason of the year. Considering all other normal routines have likewise defenestrated themselves, it makes sense. Instead of needing recovery time after a long, arduous season, Pettersson just needed to recover from the one month of the playoffs before starting some skill work on the ice.

Another wrinkle with this offseason is that no one is sure how long it will last. On the weekend, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said the league has to be “flexible” when it comes to next season, suggesting that it could start at the end of December or even push into January. 

Given this additional time to prepare for next season, it will be interesting to see if the Canucks’ young stars like Pettersson, Quinn Hughes, and Brock Boeser can take a significant step forward.

In the meantime, Pettersson is making the most of staying in BC rather than returning to Sweden. Last week he hit the links at Northview Golf and Country Club with his teammate Troy Stecher, Sportsnet’s Dan Murphy, and Canadian professional golfer Nick Taylor.

Aside from teasing Murphy about his overly-Swedish pronunciation of his last name — “PEE-ter-suhn, come on” — Pettersson demonstrated a smooth stroke with an iron and some slick golfing attire. One Canucks fan couldn’t help but edit Pettersson’s swing into the golf trick shots Pettersson posted on his Instagram during the suspended season.

Perfect shot.