This draft arguably saved Benning’s job. Taking Elias Pettersson has worked out extremely well for the Canucks, and he’s helping the franchise turn a corner.
The Canucks had lost Daniel and Henrik Sedin, the two franchise scoring leaders, to retirement. The question became where would the offence come from? Boeser just had an amazing rookie season, but he had a severe back injury that left his recovery up in the air.
The preferred player at the time was not so certain.
Pettersson leads his draft class in points per game with 0.97, which is 30 percent better average than first overall pick Nico Hischier with 0.65. A close, close second is Cale Makar with at the time of writing 28 points in 29 games for an average of 0.96.
There are very few redrafts for 2017, seeing as though players have only played two to three seasons max. Two redrafts I found both have Pettersson as being redrafted 1st overall ( DraftSite.com and TheComeback.com. It’s not very hard to see; Pettersson is second in points for that draft class, 16 behind Hischier with 74 less games played (at the time of this writing).