the weird thing watching hughes is that he is an undersized 19 year old dman in his first 3 games who to me plays like a veteran. he is right in the play and reacting to it. he looks calmer and better composed than hutton. it's weird to watch.
pettersson is like that too, especially defensively, playing a game years ahead of his age, but offensively pettersson still seems young and awkward a lot with bursts of passion that often turn out to be overreach. quinn so far just looks poised in both ends.
i've seen teenaged rookies before and even very good ones and they all looked like teenagers with immature often awkward games and were succeeding on sheer effort and talent with the polish and maturity to round out their game come. these guys are something different. it's like hughes and pettersson are both old souls. the canucks have never had guys who look like that as teenagers. when their physical maturity catches up with their brains it could be truly amazing.
We've never seen something like this because we haven't seen players this smart as rookies, in like... 20 years. These top ends kids are so smart, they were just destroying their competition.
Now they come to the NHL with other top end talented minds and they can do so many more things they couldn't do at a younger level because their teammates were always worse than them