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.
51.2 per cent at five-on-five, the 64th 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.
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.
- sheltered· is started in the attacking end
63% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 93rd percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 47% keep it
“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.”
“He loses pucks to NHL defencemen on the wall”
“cannot yet protect one long enough to make the play he sees”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 391 minutes
- Expected goals
- 51.2%
- 65th pct
- Shot attempts
- 51%
- 64th 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: 12 for, 13 against. Expected: 14.5 and 13.9.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 16 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 637 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.
Tracked
NHL Edge, 2024-25 · 33 games
- Top speed
- 21.2 mph
- 12th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 1.06 a game
- Distance
- 2.17 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 78.2 mph
- 16th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.2
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 83.9
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
2024-25 · 391 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, 2024-25
- The club
- BOS took 48.4% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.2% — 2.8 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 | 53.1% | 50.0% | 47.8% |
| Nikita Zadorov | 50.5% | 51.5% | 48.8% |
| Mason Lohrei | 53.6% | 50.0% | 47.1% |
53.1% together, 50.0% for him apart and 47.8% 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.