Photo by CloutsnChara Sports Cards, CC BY 3.0

Casey Mittelstadt

The 8th overall pick is now a useful third-line centre, which is not nothing and is not what was promised.

Season	Team	GP	G	A	PTS	+/-	PIM	PP	SH	GW	S	S%	TOI

2017-18	BUF	6	1	4	5	+1	2	1	0	0	9	11.1	14:01
2018-19	BUF	77	12	13	25	-19	10	3	0	1	118	10.2	13:27
2019-20	BUF	31	4	5	9	-5	2	1	0	1	34	11.8	12:46
2020-21	BUF	41	10	12	22	-10	10	3	1	2	61	16.4	15:53
2021-22	BUF	40	6	13	19	-14	4	1	0	1	79	7.6	16:07
2022-23	BUF	82	15	44	59	-8	22	4	1	2	135	11.1	15:44
2023-24	BUF/COL	80	18	39	57	+10	32	3	0	1	127	14.2	17:44
2024-25	COL/BOS	81	15	25	40	-29	24	3	0	3	105	14.3	17:04
2025-26	BOS	71	15	27	42	+12	12	2	0	2	80	18.8	15:10
2026-27 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	509	96	182	278	-62	118	21	2	13	748	12.8	15:41

This Season So Far

The 2026-27 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

15 goals and 27 assists in 71 games — 42 points, plus-12, at 15:10 a night. 12 penalty minutes all year.

The Finesse Game

The hands and the vision were always the selling point and they are still the best things about him. He makes plays through traffic at speed and he draws defenders to himself before releasing the puck, which is a skill you either have at 27 or never will.

The shot is secondary and he treats it that way — 80 shots on goal in 71 games, 16 goals from a median distance of 24 feet. He would rather pass, sometimes when he should not.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 205 and almost entirely uninterested. 12 penalty minutes in 71 games is a player who is never in a battle, and along the wall he can be simply removed.

That is the reason a top-10 pick has ended up in a middle-6 role rather than driving a line.

The Intangibles

509 games and 278 points, which is a real NHL career and a long way short of what the eighth pick in 2017 was supposed to be.

The 5-on-5 results were the least bad among Boston’s veteran forwards — 50.2 per cent of the expected goals, 56th percentile — and even that is below the line. He is a skilled player on a team that got outplayed, and he was not one of the ones dragging it down.

8 points in his last 10. He is what he is now, and what he is has value on the third line.

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

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.

disciplined· stays out of the box
0.17 penalty minutes a game over 71, 9th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.75) · 35% keep it

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 932 minutes

Expected goals: 50.2%; 56th pct
Shot attempts: 50.4%; 63rd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 54 for, 39 against. Expected: 39.3 and 39.0.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted

Report

33rd

Numbers

56th

The numbers rank him 23 points above where the report does. It was written with these numbers on screen and departs from them anyway, which makes the gap a judgment rather than an oversight. 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 656 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 69 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, 2025-26 · 71 games

Top speed: 22.3 mph; 53rd pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.99 a game
Distance: 2.44 miles a game
Hardest shot: 78.2 mph; 15th 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.

Recent form

Last 20 appearances, 2025-26, oldest first

points in his last 10 games — 2 goals, 6 assists, 13 shots

Each bar is one game by points. Filled bars are games he scored in.

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 932 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, 2025-26

The club: BOS took 48.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 50.2% — 2.2 above the club he did it on.
The role: Second line, 932 minutes at five-on-five — 52nd percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Pavel Zacha	49.1%	53.7%	41.0%
Viktor Arvidsson	51.3%	46.4%	42.4%
Nikita Zadorov	49.0%	50.8%	45.9%

49.1% together, 53.7% for him apart and 41.0% for Zacha apart. He was carrying it: the share stayed with him and left Zacha behind.

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

135 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 16 of them goals. His median goal came from 12 feet. 44% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 16% from beyond forty.