Armchair Hockey Scout

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2025-26 edition Ask a direct question about this edition of the book — who, how many, how common, which group more — and it is answered with a table computed on this page from the edition’s index: the season line, height and age, the on-ice percentiles, the grades and the traits read out of every report. Ask for a view on named players — what a comparison comes down to, what makes a man — and you get the book’s reading of their own pages, and only those. The model turns your question into a query and phrases the result, or reads the pages it is handed; it never originates a figure, and an answer carrying a figure that is on neither the table nor the pages is withheld. It does not forecast, and it says so when a question is outside what the book holds.

Tables are computed on this page from the 2025-26 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.

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

6

Brock Boeser

Vancouver Canucks Right Wing

25 goals and a minus-25, in the last season of a contract he re-signed in the summer.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2016-17VAN9415002012516.016:13
2017-18VAN62292655-516100417916.217:30
2018-19VAN69263056-22260320912.419:10
2019-20VAN57162945+4145031699.518:34
2020-21VAN56232649-31681114116.319:19
2021-22VAN71232346-520110619511.818:36
2022-23VAN74183755-202460317810.117:14
2023-24VAN81403373+2314160420419.618:36
2024-25VAN75252550-251690314517.218:10
2025-26 so far—————————————
Career—554204230434-3314273128144514.118:20

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

25 goals and 25 assists in 75 games — 50 points at 18:10 a night, minus-25, the worst figure on the club, with 9 power-play goals on 145 shots, converting at 17.2 per cent.

47.6 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 36th percentile. His ice went 36-40 against an expectation of 35.61-39.20 — five goals better than expected for and level against, which does not look like a minus-25 and says the damage was done away from five-on-five.

The Finesse Game

145 attempts at a median of 30 feet with 31 per cent from inside 20, converting at 17.2 per cent — a very high rate from that distance. The release is the reason he has been in the league for nine years: it is quick, it is heavy, and it goes where he intends.

25 assists. The passing is fine and the skating is the limitation; he does not beat a defenceman wide and he has never had to.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 208 and he does not use it. He does not forecheck with force, he does not win pucks on the wall, and 16 penalty minutes in 75 games is a winger who is barely in that half of the game.

He takes a hit to make a play and does not answer it. The physical game has never been part of the appeal and he has scored 40 goals in a season without it.

The Intangibles

Twenty-third overall in 2015 and 554 games and 434 points, all of it here, including a 40-goal season in 2023-24.

He is 28. He was the subject of trade speculation for two full seasons, went to free agency, and re-signed in the summer — which is the club’s clearest statement about who it intends to keep.

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.

  • 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.

  • forechecks-aggressivelyhe lacks it· first man in, and on the puck

    “He does not forecheck with force, he does not win pucks on the wall, and **16 penalty minutes in 75 games** is a winger who is barely in that half of the game.”

  • wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line

    “He does not forecheck with force, he does not win pucks on the wall, and **16 penalty minutes in 75 games** is a winger who is barely in that half of the game.”

  • retaliateshe lacks it· answers the cross-check, and takes the second penalty

    “He takes a hit to make a play and does not answer it.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 996 minutes

Expected goals
47.6%
32nd pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
48.5%
38th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 36 for, 40 against. Expected: 35.6 and 39.2.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
49th
Numbers
32nd

The two rank him within 17 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 — 72 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 · 75 games

Top speed
21.8 mph
28th pct

fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.2

Bursts over 20 mph
0.59 a game

how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes

Distance
2.65 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
94.9 mph
96th pct

one shot; the league's average best is 83.9

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

2024-25 · 996 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
VAN took 49.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 47.6% — 1.5 below the club he did it on.
The role
First line, 996 minutes at five-on-five — 60th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Quinn Hughes50.3%45.2%56.3%
Jake DeBrusk50.0%45.9%46.5%
Tyler Myers46.8%48.0%51.5%

50.3% together, 45.2% for him apart and 56.3% for Hughes apart. He was the one being carried: the share went with Hughes and did not follow 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

223 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 25 of them goals. His median goal came from 18 feet. 31% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 25% from beyond forty.