Brock Boeser

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

18 goals and 37 assists in 74 games — 55 points — at 17:14 a night. Minus-20, 178 shots at 10.1 per cent, six on the power play, 24 penalty minutes.

18 goals in 74 games is the lowest goal rate of his career.

44.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 13th percentile, across 1,020 minutes, with his ice at 53-67 against an expectation of 38.82-48.67.

Read that row slowly, because it is unusual. Fourteen more goals were scored on his ice than the chances called for, eighteen more were allowed than the chances called for, and the two together produced a minus-20 on a 13th-percentile chance share. The finishing at both ends was extreme and the underlying ice was among the worst on the club.

He started 51.9 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 57th percentile, so none of it is deployment.

The Finesse Game

178 shots at a median of 23 feet, with 45 per cent of his attempts from inside twenty.

Inside twenty feet: 74 shots on goal and 12 goals — 16.22 per cent, below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 71 shots and four goals, 5.63 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 32 shots and two goals, 6.25.

That middle band is where the season went. Seventy-one shots on goal from the mid-slot returned four goals, half the league rate, and a career 12.7 per cent across 398 games says he is a better finisher than that.

On 178 shots the difference between last season’s 10.1 and his career rate is about five goals.

243 tracked attempts, 120 of them wrist shots and 39 tip-ins, a 16.0 per cent share. 93.3 mph at the 66th percentile.

The shot itself has never been the question. 139 goals in 398 games from a man who releases it early and from further out than most wingers is a real record, and the 37 assists were a career high.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 208 pounds, with 24 penalty minutes in 74 games and 112 in 398 career games.

Top speed 21.5 mph at the 15th percentile, 0.6 bursts above twenty a game at the 29th, 2.57 miles a game at the 50th. Slow, rarely quick, and covering exactly average ground.

That is the file’s second problem and it is not new. He has been among the slower wingers in the league for several seasons and the injuries have not helped.

He is not physical and does not forecheck hard, and on a club that finished twenty-fourth in chance share the second half of that sentence matters more than the first.

He gets to the net-front on the power play and will take a cross-check to stay there, which the six power-play goals and 39 tip-ins between them record.

The Intangibles

Twenty-third overall in 2015, seven seasons, 398 games, 311 points, all of them here.

139 goals and 172 assists at a career 12.7 per cent, and a minus-31.

He is twenty-six, on a club that has made the playoffs once in his seven seasons, and has been the subject of trade speculation for most of the last three.

What the file describes is a genuinely good shooter attached to slow feet and a chance share in the 13th percentile. The 55 points say the offence is intact. The 13th-percentile chance share says the rest of the shift is not.