Photo by Lisa Gansky from New York, NY, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0

Pavel Zacha

Also shot better than 20 per cent, and has a better excuse for it than his linemate.

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

2015-16	NJD	1	0	2	2	+4	0	0	0	0	3	0.0	16:51
2016-17	NJD	70	8	16	24	-17	19	5	0	2	83	9.6	14:18
2017-18	NJD	69	8	17	25	-3	30	2	1	0	112	7.1	14:22
2018-19	NJD	61	13	12	25	-6	15	4	2	2	99	13.1	16:05
2019-20	NJD	65	8	24	32	-12	14	3	2	1	97	8.3	16:16
2020-21	NJD	50	17	18	35	-11	10	5	0	4	103	16.5	17:09
2021-22	NJD	70	15	21	36	-21	22	4	0	1	148	10.1	16:51
2022-23	BOS	82	21	36	57	+26	16	3	0	3	131	16.0	16:03
2023-24	BOS	78	21	38	59	+12	18	6	0	6	148	14.2	18:06
2024-25	BOS	82	14	33	47	-8	21	2	2	5	132	10.6	19:04
2025-26	BOS	78	30	35	65	+4	28	11	0	4	131	22.9	16:51
2026-27 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	706	155	252	407	-32	193	45	7	28	1187	13.1	16:34

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

30 goals and 35 assists in 78 games — 65 points and a career high, at 16:51 a night. 131 shots on goal, which is 22.9 per cent.

The Finesse Game

2 Bostonians shot better than a fifth last season and the shot charts tell different stories. Geekie’s median attempt came from 30 feet. Zacha’s came from 19 — 51 per cent of his unblocked attempts were inside 20 feet, and only 11 per cent from beyond 40.

That is a man scoring from the paint, which is the one place a high percentage is partly earned rather than borrowed. 6-4 with soft hands in a crowd, arriving late and unmarked. It will still regress — nobody holds 23 per cent — but he has built a shot profile that will keep him in the twenties when it does.

The playmaking has quietly become good. 35 assists from a player who spent years being called a disappointment.

The Physical Game

6-4, 211, and he protects the puck properly below the goal line. 28 penalty minutes; he is big without being mean, which was the knock on him in New Jersey and is now just a description.

The Intangibles

6th overall in 2015 and written off twice before this. He is 29 and has finally had the season the pick implied.

The underlying numbers were poor — 46.9 per cent of the expected goals, 28th percentile, the lowest of any Boston forward with real minutes. 13 points in his last 10 games. Both of those are true at once, and the shot profile is the reason to believe the scoring more than the process.

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
78 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 · 948 minutes

Expected goals: 46.9%; 28th pct
Shot attempts: 48.4%; 41st pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 54 for, 42 against. Expected: 37.8 and 42.7.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted

Report

73rd

Numbers

28th

The report ranks him 45 points above where the numbers do. It was written with these numbers on screen and departs from them anyway, which makes the gap a judgment rather than an oversight. Why the numbers land there sets out the club he did it on, the minutes he played and the men he played them with.

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 — 76 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 · 78 games

Top speed: 22.4 mph; 58th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 0.79 a game
Distance: 2.67 miles a game
Hardest shot: 93.0 mph; 92nd 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 — 7 goals, 6 assists, 18 shots

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

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 948 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: BOS took 48.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 46.9% — 1.1 below the club he did it on.
The role: Second line, 948 minutes at five-on-five — 54th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Casey Mittelstadt	49.1%	41.0%	53.7%
Viktor Arvidsson	49.1%	41.9%	52.3%
Nikita Zadorov	45.7%	47.6%	46.8%

49.1% together, 41.0% for him apart and 53.7% for Mittelstadt apart. He was the one being carried: the share went with Mittelstadt and did not follow 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

200 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 30 of them goals. His median goal came from 14 feet. 52% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 11% from beyond forty.