Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2024-25 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 2024-25 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.
← 2024-25 edition

This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

12

Matt Boldy

Minnesota Wild Left Wing

Seventy-five goals in 203 games at 23, and the highest chance share on the club.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2021-22MIN47152439+171030211313.315:23
2022-23MIN81313263+13980525512.218:30
2023-24MIN75294069+548100722712.818:55
2024-25 so far—————————————
Career—2037596171+23972101459512.617:56

This Season So Far

The 2024-25 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

75 games, 29 goals and 40 assists for 69 points, 10 on the power play, 48 penalty minutes, 18:55 a night and plus-5. He took 56.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,058 minutes, the 93rd percentile, and his ice went 57-44 against an expectation of 49.06-37.87.

Eight goals of finishing above expectation and six more conceded than the chances called for. That is the highest chance share of any regular forward on the club and the second-best point total.

The Finesse Game

345 attempts at a median of 27 feet with 37 per cent from inside 20, converted at 12.8 per cent against a career 12.61.

96 career assists in 203 games. The shot is heavy and it comes off quickly from the top of the circle, and the passing has arrived faster than the scouting expected. He beats a defenceman with a move rather than with speed.

The Physical Game

He is 6-2 and 201 and will go to the front of the net without enjoying it.

48 penalty minutes in 75 games is an ordinary rate and most of it is a stick. He does not forecheck hard and he does not win many walls, which at that size is the part of his game that has not developed.

The Intangibles

Twelfth overall in 2019 out of Milford, Massachusetts, two years at Boston College, three seasons, and 171 points in 203 games.

He is 23 and has scored 29 and 31 in his two full seasons. On a club whose chance creation is twenty-sixth in the league, a 93rd-percentile winger at 23 is the second thing worth keeping.

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
  • 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.

  • drives-play· the shot clock turns his way while he is out there

    56.4% of the expected goals at five-on-five with him on, 49.1% for his club in the minutes he sat: +7.3, 95th percentile among forwards

    Season to season, this measure repeats moderately (0.39) · 29% keep it

  • net-fronta strength· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips

    “He is 6-2 and 201 and will go to the front of the net without enjoying it.”

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

    “He does not forecheck hard and he does not win many walls, which at that size is the part of his game that has not developed.”

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

    “He does not forecheck hard and he does not win many walls, which at that size is the part of his game that has not developed.”

  • hard-to-movea strength· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand

    “He is 6-2 and 201 and will go to the front of the net without enjoying it.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 1,058 minutes

Expected goals
56.4%
93rd pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
53.9%
85th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 57 for, 44 against. Expected: 49.1 and 37.9.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
76th
Numbers
93rd

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 652 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, 2023-24 · 75 games

Top speed
23.2 mph
93rd pct

fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.1

Bursts over 20 mph
0.96 a game

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

Distance
2.84 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
93.8 mph
87th pct

one shot; the league's average best is 84.5

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

2023-24 · 1058 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, 2023-24

The club
MIN took 51.3% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 56.4% — 5.1 above the club he did it on.
The role
First line, 1,058 minutes at five-on-five — 66th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Joel Eriksson Ek56.6%56.2%50.4%
Kirill Kaprizov60.6%50.8%51.2%
Brock Faber55.4%57.5%47.7%

56.6% together, 56.2% for him apart and 50.4% for Eriksson Ek apart. Eriksson Ek was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Eriksson Ek than for 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

345 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 32 of them goals. His median goal came from 21 feet. 37% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 23% from beyond forty.