When we talk about players having breakouts in their career, it’s usually just one season in which they break out, and it’s almost always offensively. Something will click for the player and they begin to drive offence, score goals and rack up the points.

That’s what happened for Evan Bouchard in the 2023-24 season, becoming a point-per-game defenceman with 18 goals and 82 points in 81 games, adding six goals, 26 assists and 32 points in 25 playoff games. He broke Paul Coffey’s single-playoff record for assists by a defenceman and couldn’t stop producing offence.

But the 2024-25 campaign was a bit different for Bouchard. He actually saw some regression in terms of his offence, scoring just 14 goals and 67 points in 82 games, but he still had a breakout season.

This time it was defensively.

The raw numbers don’t provide the full context, however, as all of his underlying numbers — which were still very strong — actually dipped in both this regular season and the playoffs from last year. You may be asking yourself “How could this be Bouchard’s breakout year defensively if his numbers actually got worse?”

For one, despite the dip, his numbers were still outstanding. The Oilers consistently controlled the pace of play with Bouchard on the ice, outscoring the opposition at a good clip in the regular season and an even better clip in the playoffs.

This year Bouchard had to do a lot of the heavy lifting himself, especially in the playoffs, where his most common defensive partner Mattias Ekholm, missed nearly all of the games. And even when Ekholm returned, he didn’t look like the Ekholm we’ve seen before.

What we can see is that while Bouchard still posted strong numbers away from Ekholm over each of the last three playoffs at five-on-five, it was in a limited sample size. Expanding that sample size this year, and he continued to dominate with much more time spent without Ekholm. That, to me, constitutes a defensive breakout, as Bouchard would spent 151 minutes and 96 with Darnell Nurse.

His individual impacts were strong this year, according to HockeyViz, driving offence at a five percent rate above league average, defence at a one percent rate below league average, league average work on the power play and penalty kill work at a two percent rate above league average. Overall, his impacts were that just above a high-end first-pairing defenceman.

Bouchard cashed in this summer with a four-year, $10.5-million AAV extension that will walk him to his age 29 season, and one that’s well deserved for the blueliner.

Zach Laing is Oilersnation’s associate editor, senior columnist, and The Nation Network’s news director. He also makes up one-half of the DFO DFS Report. He can be followed on Twitter, currently known as X, at @zjlaing, or reached by email at zach.laing@bettercollective.com.