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

Zachary Bolduc

Seventeenth overall in 2021, and 25 games at 12:01 to show for it so far.

Season	Team	GP	G	A	PTS	+/-	PIM	PP	SH	GW	S	S%	TOI
2023-24	STL	25	5	4	9	0	6	0	0	0	38	13.2	12:01
2024-25 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	25	5	4	9	0	6	0	0	0	38	13.2	12:01

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

25 games, 5 goals and 4 assists for 9 points, 6 penalty minutes, 12:01 a night and even. He took 43.3 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 283 minutes, the 18th percentile, and his ice went 12-12 against an expectation of 8.68-11.38.

Three goals of finishing above what the chances were worth across 283 minutes. Five goals in 25 games at twelve minutes a night is a good first look and nothing more than that.

The Finesse Game

51 attempts at a median of 33 feet with 24 per cent of them from inside twenty, 37 of those on goal, converted at 13.2 per cent.

Five career goals and 4 assists in 25 games. He shoots from distance and gets it away quickly, which is the part of his game that was always going to arrive first; everything else is unwritten.

The Physical Game

He is 6-0 and 187 and took 6 penalty minutes.

Six penalty minutes in 25 games. He is an ordinary-sized winger who is not yet strong enough to hold a puck against NHL defencemen on the wall, and there is weight to add before the rest of the game works.

The Intangibles

Seventeenth overall in 2021 by St. Louis, one season, and 9 points in 25 games.

He is 21 and was a first-round pick three drafts ago. Twenty-five games is not a verdict on anything, and a club that finished thirtieth in chance share has room to give him more.

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.

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.

net-fronta strength· lives in the blue paint; the screens and the tips
“He shoots from distance and gets it away quickly, which is the part of his game that was always going to arrive first; everything else is unwritten.”
wins-the-wallhe lacks it· the corners and below the goal line
“He is an ordinary-sized winger who is not yet strong enough to hold a puck against NHL defencemen on the wall, and there is weight to add before the rest of the game works.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 283 minutes

Expected goals: 43.3%; 12th pct
Shot attempts: 43%; 8th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 12 for, 12 against. Expected: 8.7 and 11.4.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

62nd

Numbers

12th

The report ranks him 50 points above where the numbers do. 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. 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 652 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, 2023-24 · 25 games

Top speed: 22.1 mph; 46th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.84 a game
Distance: 2.07 miles a game
Hardest shot: 80.6 mph; 21st 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.

Usual linemates

2023-24 · 283 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: STL took 44.8% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 43.3% — 1.5 below the club he did it on.
The role: 283 minutes at five-on-five — 5th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Brayden Schenn	39.9%	45.9%	44.0%
Kevin Hayes	49.5%	40.2%	43.8%
Colton Parayko	43.1%	43.4%	44.5%

39.9% together, 45.9% for him apart and 44.0% for Schenn apart. Both were better apart than together — the pairing was doing neither of them any favours.

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

51 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 5 of them goals. His median goal came from 21 feet. 24% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 27% from beyond forty.