Where are you basing this on exactly?
Petterson isn’t even close to being one of the best forwards in the game so vision or what? And why would it make it easy to pick over Heiskanen?
Pettersson is an advanced stats monster, which of course doesn't carry certainty on its own, but it correlates well with how he plays the game. He's steadily developing into one of the highest IQ players in the entire league, and is the #1 play driver for the Canucks. His elite vision and reading of the play when combined with his compete level, which allows him to battle way above his weight class, translate to being absurdly strong on both sides of the puck. He's drawing a lot of comparables to Datsyuk in that regard, beyond just their shifty skill that drew their initial comparison in his rookie season.
Including the playoffs, he's already PPG in his second season in the league as a 21 year old, rapidly adjusting to becoming the #1 target of opposing teams shutdown efforts. He's tied with Nathan MacKinnon for the lead in playoff scoring, with MacKinnon himself having a notably dominant postseason himself that are making some question whether he's the 1B to McDavid's 1A (or better, perhaps, if you take into account his dominant high-impact play in the playoffs). And Pettersson racked up these numbers chiefly against a strong, physical, defending champ in St. Louis that took every opportunity to match him with ROR, arguably one of the best top-line matching centers in the league, and otherwise sought to impose their physicality on him to wear him down.
It didn't work.
Against such stiff competition and stifling attention from some of the premier playoff talent in the NHL with a grinding bully style that turned teams to dust last year, Pettersson elevated and had 4 multi-point outings in the past 5 games. Even when you take the Canucks hilariously hot powerplay out of the equation, with him on the ice, the Canucks outscored the blues 8-3 5v5.
He's playing a style that you could almost call "optimal", or at least as close as a hockey player could get analytically, where he's maximizing high% plays nearly all the time and minimizing chances against while maximizing chances for. His RAPM, GAR, and WAR are off the charts, usually up in the top 3-5 in the entire NHL. It's sort of silly to call a PPG 21 year old 1C "underrated" but Pettersson makes a good of a case as any for being just that. It cannot be understated just how disproportionate his impact is on the Canucks vs anyone else not in net, including Hughes.
