Just for clarification, you have been a mostly reasonable poster and that is why I am happy to converse with you, and disagreeing is where the fun can be.
However there are some posters that are just terrible and keep putting forth faulty logic, and bad faith arguments. Or when someone mentions Petterssons knee they just go oh another injury. I think they really hold decent conversation back.
Anyway back on topic.
I think it totally could point to other things we may need to be concerned with including confidence issues, or even having shot knees.
All we can do is look at this players past when healthy. He has proven to be a champion in the SHL and in the bubble playoffs was one of our best players. We absolutely need him to be at his best to have a shot at doing anything.
With his current defensive play I am more than willing to give him time to come back healthy and try to show he can bring back his offensive game too. I think it could be different if what we were seeing was a player not engaging in the defensive side as well it would show a player truly with a lack of fight in him. But it is because of that play that I do have belief he can bring back both and be the dominant centre we desperately need.
I also think if we trade him, we may as well just fully rebuild, we would never get back the assets we need to be a championship team at least not in time for Hughes to stick around.