Article content
A fourth Canuck is up for an NHL award.
Article content
A day after his hard work along the boards helped set up the series-clinching goal for the Vancouver Canucks against the Nashville Predators Friday, Elias Pettersson is one of three finalists for the Lady Byng Trophy, the NHL announced Saturday.
Article content
The Lady Byng is awarded to “to the player adjudged to have exhibited the best type of sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct combined with a high standard of playing ability,” as voted on by the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association.
Pettersson has been nominated alongside Carolina’s Jaccob Slavin and Toronto’s Auston Matthews.
This is the first time that a Canuck has been nominated for the Lady Byng. Pettersson was penalized just six times all season, while being the Canucks’ third-leading scorer and one of their top penalty killers.
Article content
Pettersson scored 10 game-winning goals for the Canucks, fourth-best in the NHL; don’t forget the four-game stretch in January where he scored the winning goal in each game, a historic run that saw him one game short of tying the NHL’s century-old record for most consecutive games with the game-winning goal.
Among the NHL’s top 80 scorers, only Nashville’s Gustav Nyquist took fewer penalties than Pettersson.
Matthews has been nominated twice before, in 2020 and 2021, while Slavin won the award in 2021 and was a finalist in 2022.
Slavin is considered one of the NHL’s smartest defencemen, who smartly uses his positioning and his stick to defend while rarely taking a penalty. Matthews led the league in goals this year — 69, the most by any player in a season since 1995-96 — while taking just 20 minutes in penalties, the lowest amount among the NHL’s top 15 scorers.
Recommended from Editorial
ROUND 2! SIGN UP TO GET YOUR FREE CANUCKS PLAYOFF POSTERS: We are proud to partner with the Vancouver Canucks to bring you this year’s edition of the longtime Province tradition, the Canucks Playoff Poster series. CLICK HERE to get a new player poster emailed to you every game day, plus all the posters from Round 1!
Share this article in your social network
