This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Brendan Gallagher
Montreal Canadiens Right Wing
Two thirty-goal seasons behind him, and four straight years of missing at least a quarter of the schedule.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012-13 | MTL | 44 | 15 | 13 | 28 | +10 | 33 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 117 | 12.8 | 13:52 |
| 2013-14 | MTL | 81 | 19 | 22 | 41 | +4 | 73 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 211 | 9.0 | 15:58 |
| 2014-15 | MTL | 82 | 24 | 23 | 47 | +18 | 31 | 3 | 0 | 6 | 254 | 9.4 | 16:35 |
| 2015-16 | MTL | 53 | 19 | 21 | 40 | +13 | 24 | 7 | 0 | 0 | 173 | 11.0 | 16:35 |
| 2016-17 | MTL | 64 | 10 | 19 | 29 | +7 | 39 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 187 | 5.3 | 15:06 |
| 2017-18 | MTL | 82 | 31 | 23 | 54 | -13 | 34 | 8 | 1 | 4 | 278 | 11.2 | 16:09 |
| 2018-19 | MTL | 82 | 33 | 19 | 52 | +10 | 49 | 4 | 0 | 4 | 302 | 10.9 | 16:24 |
| 2019-20 | MTL | 59 | 22 | 21 | 43 | +9 | 29 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 226 | 9.7 | 16:55 |
| 2020-21 | MTL | 35 | 14 | 9 | 23 | +10 | 16 | 3 | 0 | 2 | 106 | 13.2 | 15:01 |
| 2021-22 | MTL | 56 | 7 | 17 | 24 | -7 | 69 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 142 | 4.9 | 15:01 |
| 2022-23 | MTL | 37 | 8 | 6 | 14 | -5 | 45 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 93 | 8.6 | 14:17 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 675 | 202 | 193 | 395 | +56 | 442 | 43 | 1 | 24 | 2089 | 9.7 | 15:49 |
This Season So Far
The 2023-24 season has not started. The empty row above is his, and both it and this paragraph fill in on their own from the morning after he first plays: what he has done, what it is worth against his own last season, and the run he is on when the two disagree.
Last Season
8 goals and 6 assists in 37 games — 14 points — at 14:17 a night. Minus-5, 93 shots at 8.6 per cent, 45 penalty minutes.
49.8 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 50th percentile — the best figure of any Montreal forward — with his ice at 19-20 against an expectation of 17.51-17.66 across 459 minutes.
Four hundred and fifty-nine minutes is a quarter of a season and the figure carries the uncertainty that comes with it. What it does say is that the play did not run away from him when he was on the ice, which on this club was rare.
Eleven seasons, 675 games, 395 points.
The Finesse Game
93 shots at a median of 23 feet, 39 per cent from inside twenty and 21 per cent from beyond forty.
Beyond forty: 19 shots on goal and no goals. Inside forty: 71 shots, 8 goals, 11.27 per cent.
Ninety-three shots in thirty-seven games is 2.5 a night, which is the rate that made him a thirty-goal scorer twice. He took 302 shots in 2018-19 and 278 the season before.
82.9 mph at the 6th percentile, on five slap shots. The shot has never been the point: everything he scores comes from three feet in front of a goaltender.
The Physical Game
5-9 and 185, and 45 penalty minutes in 37 games.
Top speed 22.1 mph, the 42nd percentile; bursts 1.5 a game, the 72nd; 2.13 miles a game, the 22nd.
He has built an eleven-year career on standing in the blue paint at 5-9 and refusing to leave, and the cost of it is on the injury sheet: 59, 35, 56 and 37 games in the last four seasons.
That is the whole story of the second half of his career. The method that made him a two-time thirty-goal scorer is the method that has taken a hundred games out of him.
The Intangibles
One hundred and forty-seventh overall in 2010, out of Vancouver, and 395 points in a Montreal shirt.
47.4 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 34th percentile.
He is thirty-one, signed for four more years, and has not played sixty games since 2019-20. The compete is not in question and never has been; the body is, and the book has no metric that says how much is left.
What kind of player
The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.
- measuredcomputed here from the season's own data
- a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed
Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.
- drives-play· the shot clock turns his way while he is out there
49.8% of the expected goals at five-on-five with him on, 43.4% for his club in the minutes he sat: +6.4, 94th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats moderately (0.39) · 29% keep it
“The shot has never been the point: everything he scores comes from three feet in front of a goaltender.”
“He has built an eleven-year career on standing in the blue paint at 5-9 and refusing to leave, and the cost of it is on the injury sheet: 59, 35, 56 and 37 games in the last four seasons.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 459 minutes
- Expected goals
- 49.8%
- 50th pct
- Shot attempts
- 49.6%
- 49th pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 19 for, 20 against. Expected: 17.5 and 17.7.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe report ranks him 24 points above where the numbers do. It was written for a back edition, with the seasons that followed already known. Neither the agreement nor the gap says anything about the eye, and this report is excluded from the club-level comparison for the same reason. Why the numbers land there sets out the club he did it on, the minutes he played and the men he played them with.
Both bars are percentiles among the 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 71 on their own scale — against every other report's mean. The numbers bar ranks his share of expected goals. A gap is a disagreement about where he belongs, not two scales talking past each other.
Tracked
NHL Edge, 2022-23 · 37 games
- Top speed
- 22.1 mph
- 50th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.46 a game
- Distance
- 2.13 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 82.9 mph
- 27th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.0
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 84.9
A top speed is a season's best, and a man who takes more shifts gets more tries at one; the percentile is the feed's own, against every skater, and says less between a top-pair defenceman and a fourth-line wing than it does between two men in the same job. The counts are shown per game for the same reason.
Usual linemates
2022-23 · 459 minutes at five-on-five
- Jake Evans24%
Share of his five-on-five ice time spent alongside each player, measured from shift charts. Special teams are excluded: a power-play unit is not a line.
Why the numbers land there
Five-on-five, 2022-23
- The club
- MTL took 44.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 49.8% — 5.8 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- Third line, 459 minutes at five-on-five — 13th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Christian Dvorak | 51.1% | 48.1% | 38.7% |
| Johnathan Kovacevic | 57.2% | 45.7% | 46.0% |
| Jordan Harris | 57.8% | 45.9% | 45.4% |
51.1% together, 48.1% for him apart and 38.7% for Dvorak apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.
Expected-goal share while both were on the ice, and for each man in the minutes he played without the other. Apart is the pair subtracted from his own totals. It does not settle who was carrying whom — apart from each other, both were still playing with somebody — but it does say whether the share travelled when the pairing broke up.
Where he shoots from
goal on goal missed
121 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 8 of them goals. His median goal came from 20 feet. 40% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 21% from beyond forty.