Former Canucks Teammate Defends J.T. Miller In Elias Pettersson Feud

Wednesday, September 16, 2026 , ,
The Miller-Pettersson saga has mostly been told through reporters, front-office statements and vague quotes from the two players involved. 

This time it's coming from someone who played on the same team with both players.

He Wasn't The Problem, Says Zadorov

Nikita Zadorov, who played alongside Miller and Pettersson in Vancouver during the 2023-24 season before signing with Boston that summer, didn't hedge when the topic came up on the Cam & Strick Podcast this week. 

Asked about the chaos that engulfed the Canucks the following season, Zadorov pushed back hard on the idea that Miller was the source of it. "It just pisses me off when people make it like it's his fault over there," Zadorov said. "It wasn't his fault." 

He went further, calling Miller one of his favorite teammates across 13 NHL seasons and praising his competitiveness. "He's going to go on the ice, and he's going to die for you," Zadorov said. "That's all that matters. He's a great teammate, he's competitive, he wants to win." 

Zadorov didn't pretend Miller is easy to play with all the time, saying he can be blunt and occasionally moody. "Sometimes he's too straightforward," he said. "Sometimes he has bad days, and he's a little bit grumpy, but that's J.T., we love him." 

He also pointed people toward Miller's own recent joke about the situation on a Spittin' Chiclets golf outing, where Miller responded to a chirp about Pettersson by saying "I went to rehab for that," and dismissed the outside narrative around the feud as something blown out of proportion by people without real insight into the room. 

"You have 16-year-old idiots sitting on Twitter and tweeting out that stuff, so it's all getting blown up right now," Zadorov said.

The Fallout That Still Follows Miller

Zadorov's comments come after one of the more damaging stretches in recent Canucks history. 

Vancouver won the Pacific Division and came within one win of the Western Conference Final the year Zadorov was still on the roster, but the following season unraveled around the reported tension between Miller and Pettersson, with team president Jim Rutherford eventually acknowledging publicly that a long-term solution keeping both players together didn't appear realistic. 

That ended with Miller traded to the New York Rangers on January 31, 2025, in a deal that sent him along with defenseman Erik Brannstrom and prospect Jackson Dorrington to New York, while Vancouver received forward Filip Chytil, defenseman Victor Mancini and a conditional 2025 first-round pick in return. 

Miller has mostly avoided relitigating what happened, though he did describe the year as "exhausting" and "a year I'd like to forget about" once he settled in with the Rangers, later adding that he felt the whole situation with Pettersson had been overblown by outside noise even if there was more happening behind the scenes than either side has fully explained.

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