Matthew Poitras
Boston Bruins Center
33 games at 21, a 51.4 per cent chance share, and the best underlying numbers of any forward on the roster.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-24 | BOS | 33 | 5 | 10 | 15 | +4 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 40 | 12.5 | 13:24 |
| 2024-25 | BOS | 33 | 1 | 10 | 11 | -5 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 29 | 3.5 | 13:05 |
| 2025-26 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 66 | 6 | 20 | 26 | -1 | 14 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 69 | 8.7 | 13:15 |
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
1 goal and 10 assists in 33 games for 11 points, minus-5, on 13:05 a night.
51.4 per cent at five-on-five, the 66th percentile — the best figure among the club’s forwards, in a season where the roster average was the 30th. 29 shots and 1 goal is the other half of it.
The Finesse Game
The vision is the skill. He sees a play before it is available and delivers the puck into space rather than onto a stick, which is a rarer instinct than it sounds and is why 10 of his 11 points are assists.
The shot is not there yet. 29 shots in 33 games is very low volume and 1 goal from them is worse; he defers when he should fire, and until that changes a defenceman can play him as a passer and be right.
The Physical Game
6 feet and 189, and light. He loses pucks to NHL defencemen on the wall and cannot yet protect one long enough to make the play he sees.
8 penalty minutes in 33 games. The strength has to arrive before the rest of it means anything, and the club has been careful with his workload while he waits.
The Intangibles
A second-round pick who made the NHL at 19, had shoulder surgery, and has spent two seasons being brought along slowly.
On a rebuilding club with an ageing centre group, he is one of the two or three players whose development actually matters. The chance share says the hockey sense is already NHL-standard. Everything else is a weight room.
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 391 minutes
- Expected goals
- 51.4%
- 66th pct
- Shot attempts
- 51.3%
- 68th pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 10 for, 9 against. Expected: 14.3 and 13.5.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 19 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 357 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.
Usual linemates
2024-25 · 391 minutes at five-on-five
- Justin Brazeaunow PIT23%
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
- BOS took 48.4% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.4% — 3.0 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- Fourth line, 391 minutes at five-on-five — 10th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trent Frederic | 53.3% | 50.2% | 48.8% |
| Nikita Zadorov | 50.2% | 52.0% | 49.1% |
| Andrew Peeke | 49.9% | 52.1% | 48.5% |
53.3% together, 50.2% for him apart and 48.8% for Frederic 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
53 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 1 of them goals. His median goal came from 9 feet. 36% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 17% from beyond forty.