Armchair Hockey Scout

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2025-26 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 2025-26 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.

This is the 2025-26 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

22

Mavrik Bourque

Dallas Stars Center

A first full NHL season at 23 in twelve minutes a night, and 25 points to show for it.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2023-24DAL10000000020.010:56
2024-25DAL73111425+681018013.812:41
2025-26 so far—————————————
Career—74111425+681018213.412:40

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

11 goals and 14 assists in 73 games for 25 points, plus-6, on 12:41 a night — his first full NHL season.

51.3 per cent at five-on-five, the 65th percentile, which is a perfectly respectable share for a rookie in bottom-six minutes. 80 shots from a median of 24 feet with 43 per cent inside 20.

The Finesse Game

A skilled, small-area player who was an American League scoring champion and has had to learn that the NHL does not give him that time. The hands and the vision are genuine — he sees a seam a beat before the man he is passing to does — and the shot is better than the goal total.

What has not translated yet is the pace of decision. He holds the puck a half-second longer than the league allows and loses it, which is the standard first-season problem and the one that decides whether he becomes a top-six forward or a useful thirteenth.

The Physical Game

5-11 and 187, and there is nothing here. He does not win pucks, does not forecheck heavily, and is removed from possessions by NHL defencemen without difficulty.

8 penalty minutes in 73 games. He will need to add strength simply to keep the puck long enough to use the skill.

The Intangibles

A first-round pick who dominated junior and the minors and has arrived at the level where that stops being enough. Nothing about the first season suggests he is discouraged by it.

The realistic projection is a middle-six forward with power-play value, and the realistic risk is the one that catches most 5-11 skill forwards: a club chasing a Cup does not have a lot of patience for a man learning to protect a puck.

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.

  • disciplined· stays out of the box

    0.11 penalty minutes a game over 73, 4th percentile among forwards

    Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.75) · 35% keep it

  • playmakera strength· passes up the shot a scorer takes

    “The hands and the vision are genuine — he sees a seam a beat before the man he is passing to does”

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

    “He does not win pucks”

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

    “does not forecheck heavily”

  • hard-to-movehe lacks it· cannot be shifted from where he decides to stand

    “is removed from possessions by NHL defencemen without difficulty”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2024-25 · 792 minutes

Expected goals
51.3%
66th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
52%
73rd pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 32 for, 29 against. Expected: 31.3 and 29.6.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight
Report
49th
Numbers
66th

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 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 · 73 games

Top speed
22.1 mph
42nd pct

fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.2

Bursts over 20 mph
1.29 a game

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

Distance
2.05 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
84.4 mph
40th pct

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 · 792 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
DAL took 50.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.3% — 0.6 above the club he did it on.
The role
Second line, 792 minutes at five-on-five — 35th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Esa Lindell55.0%49.3%49.6%
Thomas Harley49.0%52.6%53.7%
Jamie Benn50.2%52.0%48.0%

55.0% together, 49.3% for him apart and 49.6% for Lindell 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

128 unblocked shots in 2024-25, 11 of them goals. His median goal came from 12 feet. 44% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 17% from beyond forty.