How much will disappointing 4 Nations Face-Off hurt Elias Pettersson’s trade value?
A third-place finish and no points through three games was not the bounceback Elias Pettersson was looking for at the 4 Nations Face-Off.
On Tuesday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, Frank Seravalli and Tyler Yaremchuk highlighted Pettersson’s poor showing with Sweden at the 4 Nations Face-Off, a continuation of his disappointing season to date with the Vancouver Canucks.
Tyler Yaremchuk: We talked coming into the tournament that, or at least my concern for [Sweden], the blue line is so good, and they had guys who were interesting on the wings, but it was like, ‘Okay, down the middle can you get a throwback performance from Mika Zibanejad, can you get a coming out of his shell party for Elias Pettersson?’ Neither of those really happened. Zibanejad was okay and Pettersson was, to put it bluntly, flat out bad in this tournament. Those are two guys who had to be difference makers for them.
Frank Seravalli: Totally agree. And I think the fascinating part of this conversation as you look at Elias Pettersson’s tournament, he had sub-10 minutes in the last game. He played two shifts in the third period. I think it significantly damages his trade value. I think the rest of the league was kind of looking at this tournament like, ‘Let’s get him out of the Vancouver bubble. Let’s get him out of that situation and see if playing with his countrymen, maybe some familiarity, does he find his confidence again?’ And not only did he not find his confidence, I think in some ways he displayed a confidence that was so badly shaken with the way he threw pucks away, the way he flubbed on shots. I don’t want to hear again from anyone – like never again – about Elias Pettersson and how he is playing good defense. That’s not why you make $11.6 million. No one is paying you for that. We can get a guy who makes $1.8 million to go play defense. That’s not it. The bar is different for Pettersson. He was supposed to find it. His Swedish teammates told us that we would see a different Elias Pettersson. We saw the same. And we saw the same that we have seen for the last calendar year.
You can watch the full segment and the rest of the episode here: