The Islanders have a scoring problem, and if Mathieu Darche wants to fix it through a trade, Elias Pettersson is the kind of name that has to be on the board.
New York isn’t exactly thin down the middle, but the goals haven’t been there, and with no additions since the first day of free agency, the trade market looks like the most obvious place to hunt for help. That’s where Pettersson enters the picture. The Vancouver Canucks center has been the subject of rumors for the past few seasons, and it now feels like his run in Vancouver could be nearing its end.
The concern is obvious: Pettersson has not looked like the player he was a couple of years ago. He finished 2024-25 with 45 points, including 15 goals and 30 assists, in 64 games.
The season before that, he had 51 points, with 15 goals and 36 assists. Those numbers are a steep drop from the production he put up in the two seasons before that, when he posted 102 points, with 39 goals and 63 assists, and then 89 points, with 34 goals and 55 assists.
That dip matters even more because of the contract attached to him. Pettersson carries an AAV of $11.6 million for the next six seasons, and that kind of money demands far more than what he has delivered lately.
Still, Vancouver might be willing to move him while his value is down, and at 27 years old, there’s at least a path back to the kind of player he was before. A change of scenery could be the reset that gets him there.
“On Pettersson, I think you’re probably looking at something similar to the Darnell Nurse trade return as a best-case scenario,” Thomas Drance of The Athletic said. “In that trade, Edmonton was able to clear the balance of Nurse’s contract, and there’s massive value in that.”
The Islanders do have enough prospects to put together a package along those lines. The real question is whether Darche wants to gamble on Pettersson rediscovering his game, or whether he’d rather avoid being stuck with that contract if the bounce-back never comes.
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