For two seasons in the mid-1980s, Brent Peterson wore the orca and skated for a Vancouver Canucks club still finding its way in a tough Smythe Division.
Those years were only a chapter in a long hockey life, but they belong to this city as surely as the later ones belong to Nashville.
Peterson died Friday at 68 after more than two decades living with Parkinson’s, leaving behind a reputation for grit on the ice and uncommon generosity off it. The Predators announced his passing.
The Calgary-born centre arrived in Vancouver via the 1985 NHL Waiver Draft after four seasons in Buffalo. In 1985-86 he played 77 games, scoring eight goals and adding 23 assists.
Three of those goals came shorthanded, a career high that spoke to the two-way reliability coaches wanted. That same season the Canucks cut their goals against by a wide margin and earned a playoff berth, only to be swept by Wayne Gretzky’s Edmonton Oilers. Peterson scored twice in the three-game series.
The next year, he contributed another 22 points in 69 games before Hartford claimed him in the following waiver draft.
In 146 regular-season games, as a Canuck he finished with 15 goals and 53 points, numbers that never made him a star but made him useful on a team that needed depth and work ethic.
After hanging up his skates in 1989 he coached, first as an assistant in Hartford and then as head coach of the Portland Winter Hawks, where he won a Memorial Cup in 1998.
Barry Trotz then brought him to the expansion Nashville Predators, and Peterson spent more than a decade behind that bench.
Diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2002, he eventually stepped away from coaching in 2011 but never left the game or the cause. With his wife Tami he founded the Peterson Foundation for Parkinson’s, which raised millions through events that became Predators traditions.
He later joined the Nashville radio booth, his voice pairing with Pete Weber on some of the franchise’s most memorable nights. Even after he left the microphone he remained a fixture at home games.
Canucks fans who remember the mid-80s teams will recall a hard-working forward who killed penalties and competed every shift. Those who followed his later years saw the same stubbornness turned toward something larger than hockey. Peterson could have withdrawn after his diagnosis.
He chose instead to keep showing up, for his family, for his foundation, and for the people who still needed help.
Vancouver was only two seasons of his 620-game NHL career, yet the qualities that defined him in those Pacific Coliseum nights never changed. That is the part of Petey that still belongs here.
