I don't typically write about just one player each week, but I thought I would expand on something I had dabbled with a few months back on my own and look into the progression of Elias Pettersson of the Vancouver Canucks on a much deeper level.

Pettersson had an excellent rookie season in 2018-19 with 28 goals and 38 assists in 71 games. He won the Calder Trophy over the likes of Jordan Binnington, Rasmus Dahlin, Miro Heiskanen, Brady Tkachuk, Andrei Svechnikov and Anthony Cirelli.

He was prematurely labelled a star by some in Vancouver after his rookie season, but he hadn’t truly reached that level until this season in my opinion.

We are going to look at Pettersson’s progression by season and by using player game ratings, show how he did game by game each year. The breakdown will show the consistency needed in each game to be close to where Connor McDavid and Nathan MacKinnon are with their overall ratings above 7.2.

Player game ratings (PGR) are an algorithm I developed a few years ago to give each skater a game rating based on goals, assists, shots on goal, hits, blocked shots and face off wins. The average league rating is 6.41 and I have found that an off-night or ineffective game is 6.2 or lower and anything above 7.0 is usually good for one of the three stars in the game. Connor McDavid leads the league with a 7.26 overall rating so far this year which is the highest rating going back to at least 2007-2008.

There are very few off nights for players like McDavid, MacKinnon, David Pastrnak or Auston Matthews (who led the league last year at 7.09).

No doubt, due to his wrist injury in 2020-21 and lengthy recovery, Pettersson would have been on pace to break out in his fourth season rather than his fifth.

In Pettersson’s rookie year, he had 14 games with a game rating of 6.2 or less, which was 19.7% of the games he played which were sub-par. He had 14 games above 7.0 which were 19.7% of his games that year were very good efforts. The graph above shows two games at 8.57 (game 9) and 8.48 (game 26) and another at 7.94 (game 37) at which point we can see he faded a little after that which was to be expected from a 19-year-old coming from the SHL.

He had moments of excellence but a fairly inconsistent 71 games for a rookie to finish off with an overall rating of 6.65. He deserved the Calder Trophy.

In his second season, Pettersson played 68 games and had 27 goals and 39 assists and showed a little more consistency but less of the top-end talent we had seen the year before.

Only 11 of his 68 games (16.2%) had a rating of less than 6.2 and he had 19 games above 7.0 (27.9%). He had his two best games (7.79 and 8.08) in back-to-back games 11 and 12. He showed an overall progression in the year but was missing a bit of the wow factor he flashed the prior year. He finished with a rating of 6.69.

In his third season, Pettersson only played 26 games and managed 10 goals and 11 assists in the bubble and ended up missing 30 games because of a wrist injury. He had four games under a 6.2 rating (15.4%) but only had four games over 7.0 (15.4%). His season high was 7.32 in game number nine.

He was able to finish with a rating of 6.59 and be more consistent than his first two years in a limited number of games.

Pettersson entered his fourth year in the NHL in 2021-22 and was still not 100% from the wrist injury he sustained the year before. He finished with 32 goals and 36 assists in 80 games after a very slow start where he had 10 goals and 12 assists in his first 42 games.

From game 14 to game 37 he had only one game above a 7.0 rating and had 11 games below 6.2 which was almost half the games during that stretch. On the season he had ratings of 6.2 or lower 23 times (28.8%) and ratings over 7.0 eighteen times (22.5%).

He did rate above 7.0, 13 times in his last 31 games of the season (41.9%) which was perhaps a sign of things to come for 2022-23.

He had a terrible start to the year, but started to show some of the high-end skills he had shown in his rookie year in the second half. Overall he had a player rating of 6.63.

After 57 games this season, Pettersson has had 28 goals and 47 assists which has him on pace for 108 points.

He has rated at 7.0 or above 25 times (43.9%) and has only been below 6.2 twice (3.5%). He didn't have a game under 6.2 until his 22nd game of this season.

Pettersson had a career-high 9.15 rating in his 11th game when he had his first of three five-point nights this year. On his other five-point nights he had ratings of 8.72 and 8.80.

On the season, he sits sixth overall for skaters in the NHL with a 6.99 rating.

From the graph above, we can see how consistent his season has been this year compared to his first four seasons.

For comparison, McDavid has played 60 games this season with just two games below 6.2 (3.3%) 32 games above 7.0 (53.3%) and 11 games above 8.0 (18.3%). Pettersson has had eight games in his career over 8.0. That is the difference between a generational superstar and a star.

Thanks very much for reading and if you have any comments or suggestions, please leave below or follow me on Twitter @gampbler15