This is the 2022-23 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Jake DeBrusk

Twenty-five goals in the season after he asked to be traded, on a 57.4 per cent chance share — the 95th percentile.

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

2017-18	BOS	70	16	27	43	+13	19	2	0	5	143	11.2	14:22
2018-19	BOS	68	27	15	42	+2	18	8	0	4	156	17.3	16:10
2019-20	BOS	65	19	16	35	-1	14	7	0	5	161	11.8	16:03
2020-21	BOS	41	5	9	14	+1	6	2	0	1	92	5.4	14:54
2021-22	BOS	77	25	17	42	+6	10	3	0	8	184	13.6	15:02
2022-23 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	321	92	84	176	+21	67	22	0	23	736	12.5	15:19

This Season So Far

The 2022-23 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 17 assists in 77 games — 42 points at 15:02 a night, plus-6, with 3 power-play goals and 8 game-winners on 184 shots and 10 penalty minutes.

He asked to be traded in November and scored 25. Both of those are facts about the same season and nobody has satisfactorily explained the order of them.

57.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 976 minutes, the 95th percentile. His ice went 40-38 against an expectation of 45.07-33.49 — five goals of scoring that the chances said should have arrived and did not, and four and a half more conceded than they predicted.

9.54 shots per 60 is the 84th percentile on 15:02 a night, the 46th. He shoots when he is out there.

The Finesse Game

184 attempts at 90.9 mph and 53 per cent of his attempts came from inside the slot at a median of 23 feet. That is a genuine goal-scorer’s chart — close, central, and repeatable — and 13.6 per cent conversion off it is the honest rate rather than a hot streak.

17 assists in 77 games and 84 in 321 career games. The passing is the limitation; 2.26 even-strength points per 60 at the 74th percentile is a good winger and not a driver.

The Physical Game

6-1 and 198, and 3.21 hits per 60 at the 39th percentile with 1.30 blocks at the 30th. He is not a physical player.

What he does not do is give away power plays. 0.26 penalties taken per 60 is the 7th percentile — one of the lowest rates of any forward in the league — and plus-0.57 on drawn against taken is the 90th. Ten penalty minutes in 77 games.

Top speed 22.7 mph at the 68th percentile with 7.3 bursts above 20 mph per 60 at the 71st. Quick without being fast.

The Intangibles

Fourteenth overall in 2015, 321 games, 176 points, and a public trade request that the club declined to act on.

He is 26, re-signed in the summer, and the awkward truth is that his measured season was the best of his career. Boston kept a player who did not want to be kept and got 25 goals for it — and on a club whose top line is 34, 37 and 26, a 26-year-old who scores at that rate on a third of the ice time is worth considerably more to it than the trade request suggested.

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.

disciplined· stays out of the box
0.13 penalty minutes a game over 77, 5th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.75) · 35% keep it
net-fronta strength· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips
“53 per cent of his attempts came from inside the slot at a median of 23 feet”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2021-22 · 976 minutes

Expected goals: 57.4%; 95th pct
Shot attempts: 56%; 92nd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 40 for, 38 against. Expected: 45.1 and 33.5.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

48th

Numbers

95th

The numbers rank him 47 points above where the report does. 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 649 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 60 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, 2021-22 · 77 games

Top speed: 22.7 mph; 79th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.83 a game
Distance: 2.49 miles a game
Hardest shot: 90.9 mph; 71st 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

2021-22 · 976 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, 2021-22

The club: BOS took 56.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 57.4% — 1.2 above the club he did it on.
The role: First line, 976 minutes at five-on-five — 59th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Charlie McAvoy	65.6%	51.1%	59.3%
Brad Marchand	65.5%	51.7%	62.8%
Mike Reilly	58.0%	57.0%	57.7%

65.6% together, 51.1% for him apart and 59.3% for McAvoy 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

218 unblocked shots in 2021-22, 25 of them goals. His median goal came from 20 feet. 44% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 18% from beyond forty.