Photo by Sandro Halank, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

JJ Peterka

The one arrival whose underlying numbers are better than anything Boston had.

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

2021-22	BUF	2	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	3	0.0	16:08
2022-23	BUF	77	12	20	32	-15	26	2	0	1	125	9.6	13:39
2023-24	BUF	82	28	22	50	+10	28	3	0	5	226	12.4	16:24
2024-25	BUF	77	27	41	68	-1	34	6	0	3	173	15.6	18:11
2025-26	UTA	82	25	22	47	+6	28	3	0	4	159	15.7	15:59
2026-27 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	320	92	105	197	0	116	14	0	13	686	13.4	16:04

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

25 goals and 22 assists in all 82 games, plus-6, at 16 minutes a night. His 5-on-5 work was done in Utah, where he was on for 53.4 per cent of the expected goals — 83rd percentile — with the goals going 51-38 in his favour.

The Finesse Game

Quick and slippery, and the skating is what makes the rest work. He beats a defenceman to the outside and then cuts back inside him, which is a young player’s move that most young players lose by 25 and he has not.

The shot is good without being a weapon: 236 unblocked attempts, 25 goals, median distance 30 feet. He would score more from closer and does not always get there.

297 points in 320 career games at 24 is a genuine top-6 forward’s development curve.

The Physical Game

6 foot even, 189 pounds, and it is the limitation. He does not win pucks along the wall and gets bumped off plays by defencemen who are simply bigger. 28 penalty minutes.

In a Boston line-up built on size, he is the small skilled one, and how the club protects him will matter.

The Intangibles

This is the most important thing in the section, so it is worth being plain. Every Bruins forward of consequence posted a below-average on-ice rate last season. Peterka posted an 83rd-percentile one somewhere else.

If that travels, Boston has added the thing it actually lacked — a forward who tilts the ice rather than one who outscores his chances. If it was Utah’s system, the club has bought a 47-point winger at a price that assumed more. Watch the first 30 games.

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.

durable· was available
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 1,138 minutes

Expected goals: 53.4%; 79th pct
Shot attempts: 53.3%; 83rd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 51 for, 38 against. Expected: 50.1 and 43.8.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted

Report

67th

Numbers

79th

The two rank him within 12 points of one another. It was written with these numbers on screen, so the agreement is not corroboration — the arithmetic is on both sides of it.

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 — 75 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 · 82 games

Top speed: 22.6 mph; 67th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 2.59 a game
Distance: 2.49 miles a game
Hardest shot: 84.5 mph; 48th 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 — 3 goals, 2 assists, 24 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 with UTA · 1138 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: UTA took 53.1% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 53.4% — 0.3 above the club he did it on.
The role: Third line, 1,138 minutes at five-on-five — 76th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Nate Schmidt	51.0%	54.6%	57.2%
John Marino	53.2%	53.4%	55.4%
Mikhail Sergachev	52.9%	53.6%	50.6%

51.0% together, 54.6% for him apart and 57.2% for Schmidt apart. Both were better apart than together — the pairing was doing neither of them any favours.

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

236 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 25 of them goals. His median goal came from 25 feet. 28% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 25% from beyond forty.