This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Brendan Gallagher

21 goals at 33 on a 14.2 per cent rate, and a 52.1 per cent chance share nobody expected.

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	MTL	77	16	15	31	-24	74	1	0	2	154	10.4	13:47
2024-25	MTL	82	21	17	38	-6	39	5	0	1	148	14.2	13:55
2025-26 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	834	239	225	464	+26	555	49	1	27	2391	10.0	15:26

This Season So Far

The 2025-26 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

21 goals and 17 assists in 82 games for 38 points, minus-6, on 13:55 a night — his best season in five years.

51.9 per cent at five-on-five, the 69th percentile — tied for the best figure among the club’s forwards. 148 shots and 14.2 per cent conversion, with 43 per cent of his attempts from inside 20 feet.

The Finesse Game

Limited and pointed entirely at the crease. He does not carry the puck, does not create off the rush, and does not make a difficult pass; he arrives at the net front and is ready.

17 assists is a fair reflection. 21 goals from those locations at 33 is the season nobody thought he had left, and it is a location profile rather than a skill one.

The Physical Game

5-9 and 185, and among the most physically committed forwards of his generation. He takes cross-checks in the crease and stays, he forechecks with real force, and he has broken a great deal of himself doing it over thirteen seasons.

39 penalty minutes over 82 games. 82 games is the surprise — he had cleared 60 twice in five years before this.

The Intangibles

A fifth-round pick, thirteen seasons in one organisation, and a body that has been rebuilt more than once.

At 33 the projection is 15 goals and a decline that has been predicted for four years and keeps not arriving. He is the last player left from the club’s previous era.

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
he lacks itraised, and he does not have it

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.

durable· was available
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
net-fronta strength· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips
“he arrives at the net front and is ready”
transitionhe lacks it· carries it out; gains the line under control
“He does not carry the puck, does not create off the rush”
playmakerhe lacks it· passes up the shot a scorer takes
“does not make a difficult pass”
hard-to-movea strength· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand
“He takes cross-checks in the crease and stays, he forechecks with real force, and he has broken a great deal of himself doing it over thirteen seasons.”
forechecks-aggressivelya strength· first man in, and on the puck
“He takes cross-checks in the crease and stays, he forechecks with real force, and he has broken a great deal of himself doing it over thirteen seasons.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 965 minutes

Expected goals: 51.9%; 69th pct
Shot attempts: 48.6%; 39th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 38 for, 42 against. Expected: 44.8 and 41.5.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

76th

Numbers

69th

The two rank him within 7 points of one another. 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.

Both bars are percentiles among the 637 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 77 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, 2024-25 · 82 games

Top speed: 22.3 mph; 53rd pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.29 a game
Distance: 2.14 miles a game
Hardest shot: 80.9 mph; 24th pct

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

2024-25 · 965 minutes at five-on-five

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, 2024-25

The club: MTL took 48.6% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.9% — 3.3 above the club he did it on.
The role: Second line, 965 minutes at five-on-five — 56th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Christian Dvorak	52.7%	50.3%	37.4%
Josh Anderson	51.4%	52.9%	43.3%
Lane Hutson	53.7%	50.7%	51.7%

52.7% together, 50.3% for him apart and 37.4% for Dvorak apart. Dvorak was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Dvorak than for him.

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

220 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 21 of them goals. His median goal came from 18 feet. 43% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 17% from beyond forty.