While Vancouver Canucks fans anxiously await the arrival of Elias Pettersson, the 19-year-old capped off one of the greatest seasons in SHL history, all while leading the Vaxjo Lakers to the league championship.
The Lakers finished tops in the regular season with 116 points, with Pettersson also racking up 56 points in 44 games to win the scoring title. If that wasn’t impressive enough already, Pettersson turned even more heads during the playoffs.
On Sunday, he led the Lakers to the SHL championship, where they completed the four-game sweep over Skelleftea AIK. As Ryan Biech pointed out, this was quite a season for the 2017 first-round pick:
#Canucks prospect Elias Pettersson's season:
Led SHL in regular season scoring (56)
Set record for scoring by U20 player in single regular season
Led SHL playoffs in scoring (19)
Set record for scoring by U20 player in single playoffs
Named SHL Playoff MVP— Ryan Biech (@ryanbiech) April 22, 2018
Anything Pettersson touches turns into gold, as the rising star showed on his Instagram page:
A post shared by Elias Pettersson (@_eliaspettersson) on Apr 22, 2018 at 10:06am PDT
Pettersson was ranked by The Hockey News as the second best NHL prospect, only behind Casey Mittelstadt of the Buffalo Sabres.