If you were building the archetype of a regression candidate in a laboratory, you would end up with something close to Morgan Geekie's season. A career depth forward with modest previous numbers suddenly scores 39 goals, at 27, on a mediocre team, in the sort of leap that career trajectories are not supposed to make. Every instinct trained by preview season says sell. Then you look at how the goals were actually generated, and the tidy story falls apart in an interesting way.
| Player | Goals | Points | On-ice xGF% |
|---|---|---|---|
| David Pastrnak | 29 | 100 | 56% |
| Morgan Geekie | 39 | 68 | 55% |
| Pavel Zacha | 30 | 65 | 54% |
| Viktor Arvidsson | 25 | 54 | 56% |
Start with what Geekie actually did. Thirty-nine goals and 68 points, more goals than David Pastrnak, on a Bruins team that controlled just 47 percent of the expected goals overall. His own shifts ran at 55 percent against a team that was 43 without him, a plus-12 swing. That last number is the one that complicates the fluke story, because players who are merely riding a hot shooting percentage do not usually drag their team's territorial numbers up by twelve points at the same time.
The case for regression, made fairly
The skeptics have real ammunition and it deserves a hearing. Geekie's previous seasons never hinted at this, 39 goals from a player with his history is a large outlier, and the simplest explanation for a career year at 27 is that the puck went in more often than it usually does. Shooting percentage is the most volatile stat in hockey, and betting that a late-blooming scorer repeats his best season is historically a losing wager. If you told me he scores 25 next year, I would not argue hard. That is what regression looks like and it is the base rate.
Why the plus-12 changes the question
But the on-off number reframes what we are actually debating. A player can shoot the lights out and contribute nothing structurally; that combination is the classic fluke, and it shows up as high goals with flat or negative territorial impact. Geekie's shifts made Boston meaningfully better at controlling play, which means he was doing more than converting chances, he was helping create the conditions for them. The honest read is not "this was luck" but "the goal total probably overstates a player who is genuinely good." Those are very different conclusions, and only one of them is useful to a general manager.
What Boston actually has
Which matters because of where the Bruins are. I argued recently that Pavel Zacha is the test case for whether Boston admits it is retooling, and that the team's defensive respectability was a goaltending mirage. A 47 percent team with Pastrnak's 100 points and not much else needs to know which of its secondary pieces are real. If Geekie is a genuine middle-six driver who scores 25 to 30, he is a useful part of whatever comes next. If he is a one-year mirage, he is an asset to sell at peak value right now, this month, while the 39 is still on his résumé.
The market inefficiency hiding here
There is a front-office angle that makes this more than a stat argument. The league prices players on goals, and Geekie's 39 will make him look expensive to Boston and attractive to buyers. The underlying numbers say the truth sits in between: better than the fluke narrative, worse than the goal total. A club that understands that distinction either extends him at a sensible number or trades him to someone who does not, and both are defensible. What a club cannot afford is picking a side based on the headline figure, in either direction.
The honest counter
The strongest argument against everything above is sample size and context. One season of positive relative impact does not establish a talent level, some of that plus-12 reflects favourable deployment on a bad team, and 27-year-olds who break out this dramatically do sometimes simply revert. Betting on Geekie as a durable 30-goal scorer requires believing a career changed shape in one year, which is possible but not the way to bet. Caution here is not cynicism; it is the base rate doing its job.
What the comparable cases teach
Late-blooming scorers are not actually rare, and the history is more encouraging than the reflex suggests. The league is full of forwards who spent their early twenties in defensive roles, got a genuine offensive opportunity around 26 or 27, and produced at a level nobody projected. What separates the ones who sustained it from the ones who vanished is almost always whether the underlying play travelled with the goals. Players who broke out on percentage alone fell back within a season. Players whose territorial impact improved alongside their scoring generally held a decent share of the gain.
Geekie sits in the second group, which is the whole reason this piece exists. His plus-12 swing means the breakout came with a change in how he affected games, not merely how often the puck went in. The realistic projection is not a return to his old depth-forward baseline but a settling point somewhere in the middle: fewer goals, similar impact, a genuinely useful top-nine forward. That is a considerably more valuable player than the fluke narrative allows, and considerably less valuable than the 39 implies.
The complicating factor is Boston's situation rather than Geekie's talent. On a contender, a 27-year-old who might score 28 goals and drive play is a keeper without hesitation. On a 47 percent team drifting toward a retool, he is an asset with a shelf life, and the value of trading him is highest right now, in the weeks after a career year, before a regression season resets the market's opinion. The Bruins have to weigh a useful player against an inflated price, which is a genuinely difficult call rather than an obvious one.
What would settle the argument is the first thirty games of this season, and specifically the shot share rather than the goal total. If Geekie is still driving play while scoring at a reduced clip, the breakout was real in the way that matters and Boston should keep him. If the territorial numbers collapse alongside the shooting percentage, the skeptics were right and the window to sell has closed. Watch the underlying numbers, not the scoresheet, because for this particular player they have been telling the more accurate story all along.
Where this lands
The fluke hunt picked the right suspect and reached the wrong verdict. Morgan Geekie almost certainly does not score 39 again, and the shooting percentage will do what shooting percentages do. But the plus-12 swing says the player underneath the outlier is genuinely useful, a middle-six forward who improves his team's control of the game, and that is a different asset than a mirage. Boston's task is to price him accordingly, neither paying for the 39 nor discarding the player who produced it. That nuance is where most teams get these decisions wrong, and where this one will be won or lost.