This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Elias Pettersson

Twenty-eight games at 20 from a third-round pick who arrived two years ahead of schedule.

Season	Team	GP	G	A	PTS	+/-	PIM	PP	SH	GW	S	S%	TOI
2024-25	VAN	28	1	2	3	-4	17	0	0	0	19	5.3	12:49
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	28	1	2	3	-4	17	0	0	0	19	5.3	12:49

This Season So Far

The 2025-26 season has not started. The empty row above is his, and both it and this paragraph fill in on their own from the morning after he first plays: what he has done, what it is worth against his own last season, and the run he is on when the two disagree.

Last Season

1 goal and 2 assists in 28 games — 3 points at 12:49 a night, minus-4, with 17 penalty minutes. They were the first NHL games of his career, at 20.

47.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 34th percentile, across 296 minutes. His ice went 4-8 against an expectation of 9.88-11.02, which on a sample that size says nothing at all.

The Finesse Game

19 attempts in 28 games at a median of 55 feet with 79 per cent from beyond 40 and 5 per cent from inside 20, and 1 goal. He shoots from the blue line and nowhere else.

2 assists. The first pass is simple and mostly correct, and he does not attempt anything that becomes a rush the other way. That is the right decision at 20 and it is not yet a puck game.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 185 and still filling out. He finishes checks, he defends the front of his own net, and he is not yet strong enough to move a grown forward out of it.

17 penalty minutes in 28 games is a slightly high rate and most of it is the stick foul of a defenceman playing at the edge of his speed.

The Intangibles

A third-round pick in 2022 — 80th overall — and he shares a name with the club’s highest-paid forward, which is the sort of coincidence that follows a player around.

28 NHL games. He is 21, he was expected to need two more American League seasons, and he did not.

What kind of player

The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.

a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed
he lacks itraised, and he does not have it

Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.

clears-the-creasehe lacks it· moves grown men off the front of his net
“He finishes checks, he defends the front of his own net, and he is not yet strong enough to move a grown forward out of it.”
punishinga strength· finishes checks; hurts people legally
“He finishes checks, he defends the front of his own net, and he is not yet strong enough to move a grown forward out of it.”
fouls-when-beatenhe lacks it· the stick foul that follows losing a step
“**17 penalty minutes in 28 games** is a slightly high rate and most of it is the stick foul of a defenceman playing at the edge of his speed.”
transitionhe lacks it· carries it out; gains the line under control
“The first pass is simple and mostly correct, and he does not attempt anything that becomes a rush the other way.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 296 minutes

Expected goals: 47.3%; 29th pct
Shot attempts: 49.9%; 51st pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 4 for, 8 against. Expected: 9.9 and 11.0.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

36th

Numbers

29th

The two rank him within 7 points of one another. It was written for a back edition, with the seasons that followed already known. Neither the agreement nor the gap says anything about the eye, and this report is excluded from the club-level comparison for the same reason.

Both bars are percentiles among the 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 70 on their own scale — against every other report's mean. The numbers bar ranks his share of expected goals. A gap is a disagreement about where he belongs, not two scales talking past each other.

Tracked

NHL Edge, 2024-25 · 28 games

Top speed: 23.7 mph; 99th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.64 a game
Distance: 1.90 miles a game
Hardest shot: 92.1 mph; 62nd pct

A top speed is a season's best, and a man who takes more shifts gets more tries at one; the percentile is the feed's own, against every skater, and says less between a top-pair defenceman and a fourth-line wing than it does between two men in the same job. The counts are shown per game for the same reason.

Usual linemates

2024-25 · 296 minutes at five-on-five

Share of his five-on-five ice time spent alongside each player, measured from shift charts. Special teams are excluded: a power-play unit is not a line.

Why the numbers land there

Five-on-five, 2024-25

The club: VAN took 49.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 47.3% — 1.8 below the club he did it on.
The role: 296 minutes at five-on-five — 6th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Brock Boeser	41.5%	49.5%	48.1%
Filip Hronek	53.3%	44.6%	53.4%
Drew O'Connor	40.4%	50.0%	50.5%

41.5% together, 49.5% for him apart and 48.1% for Boeser apart. Both were better apart than together — the pairing was doing neither of them any favours.

Expected-goal share while both were on the ice, and for each man in the minutes he played without the other. Apart is the pair subtracted from his own totals. It does not settle who was carrying whom — apart from each other, both were still playing with somebody — but it does say whether the share travelled when the pairing broke up.

Where he shoots from

goal on goal missed

43 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 1 of them goals. His median goal came from 40 feet. 5% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 79% from beyond forty.