Elias Pettersson isn't all the way back. Through five games he's putting up points, but the team around him just got taken apart 7-2 in Raleigh. Those are two different stories, whatever Vancouver wants to believe.
Logan Stankoven scored three times for his first career hat trick. Andrei Svechnikov scored twice on the power play. K'Andre Miller and Mark Jankowski added goals too. Carolina, the defending Stanley Cup champion, won its third straight game and did it comfortably, outshooting Vancouver by a wide margin. Kevin Lankinen got pulled in the third period after allowing six goals. Jake DeBrusk scored both of Vancouver's goals. Pettersson picked up two assists, pushing him to eight points through his first five games.
Eight points in five games is real. Nobody's disputing the number. The Canucks entered the night 2-2-0, alternating wins and losses to open the year, and Pettersson had been the one consistent engine, with six points in the first four games before he added two more Thursday. After a 2025-26 season that saw him post 15 goals and 36 assists with a career-worst minus-30, anything that looks like competence reads like a miracle in Vancouver right now. People are already measuring him against the 39-goal, 102-point season he put up back in 2022-23, and there's a trade-value conversation bubbling up around his name because of these five games. All of that is getting ahead of itself.
Two assists in a 7-2 loss are a footnote. A player can rack up helpers while the whole structure around him collapses, and that's what happened in Raleigh. Carolina scored on the power play, shorthanded, and at even strength. Vancouver's goaltending got shaky enough to need a mid-game change. That's on a defense that's let teams score in bunches, and on goaltending that hasn't held up its end.
Pettersson has been noticeably more physical to start the year, averaging close to five hits a game through his first four outings and briefly flirting with the league's hit leaders. That's a real stylistic choice, and it's a better signal that something's different in his approach than two assists collected while his team gets buried.
Both things can be true at once. Pettersson looks like a player who's decided to play angry again, and that's worth watching closely over the next few months. The Canucks still got run out of a building by seven goals Thursday, and that loss belongs to the group in front of him and the goaltending behind him. Anyone selling you his counting stats from a five-goal defeat as proof he's found his peak form again is selling you something that isn't there yet. Check back in a couple of months. Five games settles nothing except that the people on this team who are supposed to stop Andrei Svechnikov twice on the power play still haven't figured out how.
