from Patrick Johnston of the Vancouver Province,

The agent for Elias Pettersson and Quinn Hughes would sign a contract today.

Pat Brisson, the super agent who has long represented Hughes and who added Pettersson as a client earlier this year, told Postmedia this week.

“But sometimes these things take time,” he said.

Why it’s taking so long, he wouldn’t say. Now would he say what he thought might be the tipping point.

Simply: “We know how important they are to the Canucks.”

“There’s no holdup,” he said of why his two star clients and the Vancouver Canucks have yet to reach a deal on new contracts.

“It’s a process. It’s Aug. 12. If there were a deadline tomorrow I’m sure we would be talking 10 hours a day,” he said. “So I don’t get too emotional with it. I go with the process.

“You look around, a lot of these deals are done during camp,” Brisson added. (Brock Boeser’s contract in 2019 wasn’t signed until the end of training camp). “But this isn’t our goal, our goal is to get it done. There’s no animosity.”

And while the Canucks’ salary cap space has been narrowed down to a final total in which Pettersson and Hughes’ new deals will have to fit into — once Jason Dickinson’s deal is done, be it in arbitration or through simple negotiation, which is the Canucks’ preference — Brisson said the door remained open to both short- and long-term deals.

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