Welcome to this edition of “From The Archive”. In this recurring series, we open The Hockey News’ vault and display some of the top Vancouver Canucks related articles from the past. Today’s article comes from Volume 72, Issue 9, where Ken Campbell wrote about Canucks rookie Elias Pettersson.
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Rare Rookie, Volume 72, Issue 9, January 29, 2019
When Guy Lafleur was five years old, his father built a small rink in the backyard of their home in Thurso, Quebec. After school and on weekends, the rink was crowded with Lafleur and his friends, but on weekdays, rushing through lunch before returning to school, it was his alone for half an hour or more. A few years later, anxious for more ice time, on Saturday and Sunday mornings he would sneak in the back door of the local arena, finding his way unseen through the engine room, under the seats, and onto the ice. There, from 7:30 a.m. until just before the manager awakened about 11 a.m., he played alone; then quickly left. Though he was soon discovered, as the manager was also coach of his team, Lafleur was allowed to continue, by himself, and then a few years later with some of his friends.
– Ken Dryden in his best-selling book, The Game, talking about the childhood of Montreal Canadiens teammate and fellow Hall of Famer Guy Lafleur
YOU’D BE EXCUSED FOR thinking that the days of the Guy Lafleurs freelancing their way to hockey glory are over. NHL careers are stage managed now more than ever, meticulously planned from childhood, complete with full family moves to play in superior big-city hockey associations, an obsession with playing up an age group and families with seemingly unlimited resources and a willingness to pour them into on- and off-ice instruction from scores of people who make their living off the dreams of others.
And it might make you a little depressed. If that’s the case, you should really know about Vancouver Canucks rookie Elias Pettersson. He never had a skills coach growing up, and he still doesn’t. Like Lafleur, Pettersson grew up in a tiny place. Ange is geographically in the center of Sweden, and in 2010 its population was 2,872. Apparently nobody has bothered to update it since then. Before Pettersson, the most famous person from Ange was Sami Pahlsson, who played 11 seasons in the NHL and won a Stanley Cup with the Anaheim Ducks. It’s a place that has produced no fewer than six heavy-metal bands, including Corroded, which recorded a song called Age of Rage for the play-for-free version of the video game Battlefield 4, so it sounds like they’re doing all right. The lead singer Jens Westin is friends with Pettersson’s parents and was his older brother’s music teacher in middle school.
And like Lafleur, Pettersson developed his eye-popping array of skills essentially on his own. His father sometimes watched him do drills and helped him, “but he only played hockey from 10 to 12 years old.”
Ange has one arena, the Kastbergshallen. It’s right there off National Road 83, just past the ICA Supermarket. Get onto Bagskyttevagen (Archery Road) and bear right once you get to the skeet-shooting range and you’re there. Pettersson’s father, Torbjorn, who owns and maintains several apartment buildings in town, was also the manager of Ange IK, which meant he also occasionally drove the Zamboni, which also meant he had keys to the rink. Elias and his older brother, Emil, a 24-year-old prospect for the Nashville Predators who plays for AHL Milwaukee, would take the keys and head down to the rink anytime they wanted. And there, without a badgering wannabe Scotty Bowman teaching systems or doing cycle drills, they worked on their skills. “Just a couple of boys having fun with the puck,” said Tommy Ostrom, who, along with Johan Altberg, recruited both brothers as an agent in Sweden.
Prior to his record-breaking season in the Swedish League last year, Pettersson wasn’t happy with his shot. So he broke it down into 12 different motor movements and worked tirelessly on each one until it got better. By himself. “I wanted to (improve) at one-timers and get a quicker release,” he said. “Every day after practice I would stay for 15 minutes extra and work on one-timers. One day I’d just work on my balance, another day I’d get my stick in a certain position, another day I’d shift my weight, each one one day apart.”
The way Emil recalls, Elias was good at every sport he tried, but he combined that with an unwavering passion and stubborn streak. When he and Elias were growing up, their father’s old unicycle was sitting in the basement. “I tried to learn (how to ride it) for about 10 or 15 minutes, and I got so angry I just threw it away,” Emil said. “(Elias) tried it about a year after, and he just kept trying until he got it.”
And the results of that determination are on full display. Unless an opponent takes him out for the season, which isn’t out of the realm of possibility given how much he has been targeted in Year 1, Pettersson will make a mockery of the Calder Trophy race. Last season, Mathew Barzal was named rookie of the year by scoring 85 points, which was the highest total by a rookie since Evgeni Malkin, who had the same number in 2006-07. Pettersson, who had missed seven of the Canucks’ first 45 games, was scoring at a pace that would see him record 91 points in a full 82-game schedule. Over the past 25 years, only Alex Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby have scored more points as a first-year player. Of course, Pettersson is no stranger to putting up mind-boggling numbers. Last season, his 24 goals and 56 points with the Vaxjo Lakers were the most ever recorded by a junior player in the SHL, breaking a mark set more than 40 years ago by Kent Nilsson. Along the way, he also won the league scoring title, was MVP of both the regular season and the playoffs, rookie of the year and a champion in both the SHL and the World Championship for Sweden.
I CALL HIM ‘THE MINI PAVEL DATSYUK.’ YOU SEE HIM SHIMMY – SHAKE GUYS– Vancouver Canucks teammate Brock Boeser
His play earned him a nickname. Teammates in Vaxjo called him ‘The Alien’ because of his otherworldly talents. “It’s pretty funny, but I don’t know if I like it too much,” Pettersson said. “That puts a lot of pressure on me.”
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Now that he’s in the NHL, he’s earning a few other monikers. “I call him ‘The Mini Pavel Datsyuk,’” said teammate Brock Boeser, who knows a little bit about impressing as a rookie in the NHL. “You see him shimmy-shake guys, it’s pretty impressive. He’s always thinking one step ahead of the play.”
Among his bag of tricks this season was a penalty shot he took on Pekka Rinne in early December. Pettersson slowed up in front of the net, then prompted Rinne to bite on a fake backhand before going forehand with lightning speed and tucking the puck under the Nashville Predators goalie. That move didn’t surprise Boeser. He first saw it in a shootout during the Canucks’ rookie development camp in 2017. “I thought, ‘This guy is legit,’” Boeser said.
It’s actually a little surprising that Pettersson is accomplishing so much at such a young age. Because until now, he’s always been a little behind his peers, largely because he was so much smaller than them. Consider this: the Swedish Ice Hockey Federation has been holding its TV-Pucken tournament since the 1950s, which brings together 24 teams from different regions in a tournament for the best under-16 players in Sweden. Of the 561 of them who played in the 2013-14 tournament, only two of them were lighter than Pettersson (one of them was a goalie) and only 37 were shorter. Pettersson was 5-foot-6 and 103 pounds at the time, and in the intervening years has grown eight inches and added 73 pounds. “He’s freakishly strong, and he catches guys by surprise,” said teammate Bo Horvat. “At the same time, being that skinny, he weasels his way through everybody.”
He’s still slight by NHL standards, but in today’s game if you have superior brains, legs and hands, it mitigates a lack of size more than ever. “Being smaller has been good for my game,” Pettersson said, “because of that I can take a hit and still have good speed. If I were a bigger guy and stronger than everybody else, maybe I never learn to take a hit.”
Minnesota Wild defenseman Ryan Suter raises another valid point: “It’s a little easier to come into the game now. You don’t have to worry about getting your head taken off.” Added Suter’s teammate Zach Parise: “The confidence with the puck, it’s crazy. He’s a rookie, and he’s cutting to the middle of the ice, buying time, holding onto the puck. It’s awesome, it’s great to see.”
That’s exactly what Canucks coach Travis Green was thinking before Pettersson arrived at training camp this season. Green saw no point in putting a player as lightly built as Pettersson on the wing in his first season and expect him to dig pucks out of the corner, reasoning that he would get the puck a lot more down the middle of the smaller rink. The Canucks had drafted him as a center, but he broke all the Swedish scoring records as a winger, so there was going to be a period of adjustment. That lasted throughout the Canucks’ rookie tournament, where Pettersson was decidedly ordinary. But with every passing day, he got better and more comfortable, and now the Canucks don’t even make any attempt to hide the fact they know he’s their best player.
SPECIAL TALENTS PLAY THE WAY YOU DID WHEN YOU WERE A KID PLAYING ROAD HOCKEY– Canucks coach Travis Green
With players such as Pettersson, those with elite hockey minds, it’s almost as though the game they are seeing and playing is different than the one the other nine skaters on the ice are experiencing. For those players, everything moves more slowly, which gives them the ability to think two or three plays ahead. “I remember when I played,” Green said, “when you played with special talents, it was almost like they played the game the way you did when you were a kid and you were playing road hockey. I remember when I was playing road hockey I felt like I could do anything I wanted with the (ball), and that’s a nice feeling, but there’s only a few guys in the world who get that feeling on the ice.”
In his four seasons with the Toronto Maple Leafs in the mid-1970s, Inge Hammarstrom scored 20 goals three times. As one of the first players in NHL history to come over from a European league, he acquitted himself well. That didn’t prevent Leafs owner Harold Ballard, however, from opining that Hammarstrom could “skate into the corner with a half-dozen eggs in his pocket and not break any of them.” It was a xenophobic remark that helped set an inaccurate and unfair tone that European players carried with them for years. A couple decades later, someone might have said Hammarstrom could walk into an arena in Europe and come out with superstar players. It was Hammarstrom who convinced the Canucks to take the skinny kid from the Allsvenskan, Sweden’s second-tier professional league, with the fifth overall pick in the 2017 draft.
With Hammarstrom’s track record for identifying talent, the Canucks were willing to listen. As a scout with the Philadelphia Flyers in 1991, he had to talk his bosses into taking a chance on another skinny Swede, Peter Forsberg, at No. 6. “The year before that I was pushing for Jaromir Jagr (at fourth overall), but we took another really good player, Mike Ricci,” Hammarstrom said. “We also got Mikael Renberg from Sweden, and Chris Simon. It was a pretty good draft year.”
A half-season into his NHL career, it’s difficult to fathom that Pettersson fell that far in the first round, though Nico Hischier, Nolan Patrick, Miro Heiskanen and Cale Makar are all fine players in their own right. One executive whose team didn’t have a shot at Pettersson said his European scouts were adamant that he was the superior talent in the draft, despite not doing much to impress their North American counterparts in tournaments in Europe or the World Junior Championship. And nobody, but nobody, could project that Pettersson would improve so much in such little time. The exec marvelled at how much Pettersson’s shot has improved since then. “He was absolutely not shooting the puck like that in his draft year,” he said.
As is the case with rare finds, there was some luck involved. Pettersson left home when he was 16 to play in Timra, about 70 miles east of his hometown. Hammarstrom lives in Timra and is a regular at the rink. He would often attend Timra’s practices and stay and chat with Pettersson on the bench, as well as teammate Jonathan Dahlen, who is former NHLer Ulf Dahlen’s son, who just happens to be good friends with Hammarstrom. (It should come as no surprise that Dahlen was the return for the Canucks when they dealt Alexandre Burrows to the Ottawa Senators two years ago.)
During those chats, Hammarstrom got to know Pettersson as a person, and the two became close friends. Hammarstrom saw a young man who was a little difficult to get to know at first, but one who became an open book once he was comfortable. He also saw a young man who was stubborn, in a good way, one whose passion for the game drove him to continue to practice something until he perfected it. “I knew he was an exceptional person with a very strong character who knows what it takes,” Hammarstrom said. “When you talk to him, you immediately know he understands all it takes. For me, it was Elias all the way from the beginning of his draft year. Every meeting it was Elias. I liked some other guys, too, but for me his hockey sense, smarts and hand speed, that kind of control and moves are exceptional.”
From there it was matter of convincing Judd Brackett, the Canucks’ director of amateur scouting, and the rest of the staff, that Pettersson was worth a few trips to Europe for extended viewings. In the end, it was an easy sell, and the Canucks went into the 2017 draft unanimous that Pettersson would be their choice, provided he was still there at No. 5. At the time, Pettersson was listed generously at 161 pounds. He was rated No. 9 in THN’s Draft Preview, where one scout opined that he tended to stay away from high-traffic areas on the ice. “So you have to ask yourself whether it’s smart to not put yourself in those situations, or is it because he’s scared?” the scout asked. “Only one person can answer that. You have to determine whether it’s intelligent self-preservation or a lack of accountability.” Fifteen pounds and a year-and-a-half later, we all know the answer to that question.
I KNEW HE WAS AN EXCEPTIONAL PERSON WITH A VERY STRONG CHARACTER WHO KNOWS WHAT IT TAKES– Scout Inge Hammarstrom
The Canucks were blessed by the fact that at least the four teams choosing ahead of them were thinking the same thing. “He didn’t get much exposure (in his draft year) because he was very skinny and he looked very weak,” Hammarstrom said. “But what I noticed right away on the ice was his quickness. His mind was so quick that he solved problems on the ice that I haven’t seen a young player do in a long time. He was like Peter Forsberg, you know? Someone special. I remember playing against Wayne Gretzky, and you can see when they’re special.”
Speaking of solving problems, Pettersson is going a long way toward solving many of them in Vancouver. Prior to the season, the Canucks were far more likely to be in a position to unite the Hughes brothers – the Canucks’ 2018 seventh overall pick, Quinn, and his younger brother, Jack, the overwhelming favorite to go first overall in 2019 – than they were to be in contention for a playoff spot. But there they were in January, hanging in and competing for a post-season berth. They likely won’t make it, but more importantly, led by some promising young talent in Pettersson, Boeser and Horvat and with more on the way in the form of Hughes and goalie Thatcher Demko, the Canadian west coast is not a barren wasteland. The Canucks, at the very least, have been fun to watch this season, and there is real, tangible hope they can elevate themselves, led by the best player they’ve had since Pavel Bure.
Pettersson is scoring at crucial times, too. Seventeen of his first 42 points came on goals that put the Canucks ahead in a game, and nine times he scored goals that lifted his team into a tie, which was tied with the Boston Bruins’ David Pastrnak for the league lead in that category.
In the Canucks’ first game of 2019, Pettersson scored a hat trick against Ottawa, including the overtime-winner on his second breakaway of the 3-on-3 competition that was the talk of the NHL. He also hit two performance bonuses, on the same day, that bumped his rookie salary from $925,000 to $3.8 million, by scoring his 20th goal of the season and being named to the NHL All-Star Game. (In the next game, Pettersson sustained a mild MCL sprain in his right knee as the result of being pulled down by Montreal Canadiens rookie Jesperi Kotkaniemi in an exchange that had nothing to do with being a hockey play.)
Is his coach surprised at the dominance Pettersson has displayed in his rookie season? “Yeah, I am,” Green said. “I really am. We didn’t know exactly what we were getting. We think we have a special player, and I think we’re just starting to see what he can do.”
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