4 ES points behind Miller during the best year of Miller's career. Better analytics than Miller too, and depending what you look at it's a huge gap.
Doing it all with a revolving door of middle sixers while being compared to guys who have Rantanen/Makar/Marner/Point stapled to them.
The fact that he can put up a 90 point season like this and yet everyone who watches him knows his ceiling is way higher than what he's showing and has come to expect way more out of him is proof enough of his worth.
I have to disagree and it's a perception thing. If Petey was an overachiever and paid $8M a year that's fine. If we surround him with crap and he did his best to drag the team along with him that's fine. But there are expectations and championships matter. Petey is being paid like he's a top 5 player in the league. He should be capable of putting together a Hart trophy-calibre season.
He was getting Hart chatter in his sophomore year and you're comparing him to guys who have Rantanen/Marner/Point stapled to them. Put the lotto line together for a year and deploy Hughes every time they touch the ice and he'll get that Hart, if Hughes doesn't take it from him.
I said over and over again the last couple years that Hughes would never have left the Makar/Fox norris conversation if he'd had Tanev/Toews/Cernak as a partner instead of the waiver bait #6's he was stuck with and had to adapt to playing with.
Pettersson is more mercurial and more frequently injured than Hughes but is dealing with the same issue where the best winger on his line for most of the season was Mikheyev.
Also. There is the fact that because he has a Scandinavian personality it seems that North American fans just hate the way he looks on the ice when he is frustrated. If he was doing Miller-esque leadership stick swings there would be far less hate, at least from certain posters, not saying you are one of them.
Agreed but it's also the Boeser issue of playstyle. Both play a high IQ game heavily reliant on reads, anticipation and smart passing. A lot of the good flies over people's heads when watching them whereas Miller's power forward style is impossible to ignore. And when a read or anticipation is slightly off it looks visually uglier than other types of errors.
It's something I've been noticing for awhile and it stems from how years ago I simply could not understand how on earth some people could have watched Pettersson's sophomore season and somehow concluded that Miller was better that year.
The Pettersson hater extraordinaire docbenton helped me figure it out when he posted about how Pettersson has "no discernable skills" while also admitting that he was puzzled by Pettersson's "midas touch" where everything he did inexplicably led to points despite the aforementioned lack of skills.