Adrian Kempe
Los Angeles Kings Right Wing #9
The rare winger who is his team's leading scorer and its best defensive forward at the same time.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-17 | LAK | 25 | 2 | 4 | 6 | -3 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 32 | 6.3 | 12:14 |
| 2017-18 | LAK | 81 | 16 | 21 | 37 | +11 | 49 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 119 | 13.5 | 13:20 |
| 2018-19 | LAK | 81 | 12 | 16 | 28 | -10 | 50 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 118 | 10.2 | 14:30 |
| 2019-20 | LAK | 69 | 11 | 21 | 32 | -10 | 29 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 148 | 7.4 | 16:01 |
| 2020-21 | LAK | 56 | 14 | 15 | 29 | -18 | 28 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 127 | 11.0 | 16:56 |
| 2021-22 | LAK | 78 | 35 | 19 | 54 | -2 | 46 | 6 | 3 | 7 | 247 | 14.2 | 18:35 |
| 2022-23 | LAK | 82 | 41 | 26 | 67 | +22 | 55 | 11 | 3 | 6 | 250 | 16.4 | 18:45 |
| 2023-24 | LAK | 77 | 28 | 47 | 75 | +13 | 72 | 5 | 3 | 4 | 246 | 11.4 | 18:56 |
| 2024-25 | LAK | 81 | 35 | 38 | 73 | +22 | 36 | 7 | 1 | 5 | 237 | 14.8 | 19:09 |
| 2025-26 | LAK | 81 | 36 | 37 | 73 | +14 | 58 | 4 | 0 | 8 | 226 | 15.9 | 19:18 |
| 2026-27 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 711 | 230 | 244 | 474 | +39 | 429 | 40 | 13 | 40 | 1750 | 13.1 | 17:07 |
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
36 goals and 73 points in 81 games, plus-14, on 19 minutes a night — a career high in goals and the third straight season he has carried this team’s offense without much argument about it.
The Finesse Game
The skating is the engine. He is a genuinely fast straight-line skater with a long stride, and unusually for a player that quick, he does not need the puck to be dangerous — he beats defencemen to open ice and arrives with his stick down.
The shot is a real one. A hard, quick wrister he releases while still moving, and he scores a lot of goals from the tops of the circles that most wingers do not attempt. He is not a natural playmaker; the passes are honest rather than creative, and he does his best work as the finisher on somebody else’s play.
He killed penalties and spent 61 percent of his 5-on-5 ice time with Kopitar, which is the strongest forward partnership on the roster and the reason both of their numbers look the way they do. What he did not do was take the defensive-zone starts: 59.1 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 84th percentile.
The Physical Game
6-2 and 205 and he plays a full-contact game without being a hitter for its own sake. He goes to the net, takes the punishment that comes with it, and is hard to knock off a puck in open ice because of the skating base. 58 penalty minutes is about right for a player who is engaged rather than reckless.
He plays a heavy schedule and misses very little.
The Intangibles
He arrived as a first-round pick who took 5 years to become anything, and the patience has been repaid several times over. He is now the player this team leans on when it needs a goal and the one it sends out to protect a lead, which is a combination almost nobody offers.
The honest limit is that he is a very good first-line winger rather than a driver. On a team without a genuine number-1 centre, that distinction gets exposed in a playoff series.
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.
- perimeter· shoots from the outside, by choice or because he cannot get in
38.8% of his attempts from 40 feet or beyond, 100th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
- durable· was available
81 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 · 1,169 minutes
- Expected goals
- 49.6%
- 52nd pct
- Shot attempts
- 52.1%
- 75th pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 55 for, 38 against. Expected: 47.0 and 47.8.
The eye and the numbers
SightedThe report ranks him 46 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 — 84 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 · 81 games
- Top speed
- 23.7 mph
- 97th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 2.77 a game
- Distance
- 3.11 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 95.3 mph
- 97th pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.2
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 83.6
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
14
points in his last 10 games — 11 goals, 3 assists, 36 shots
Each bar is one game by points. Filled bars are games he scored in.
Usual linemates
2025-26 · 1169 minutes at five-on-five
- Anze Kopitaroff the roster61%
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
- LAK took 51.9% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 49.6% — 2.3 below the club he did it on.
- The role
- Second line, 1,169 minutes at five-on-five — 79th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anze Kopitar | 52.3% | 45.3% | 44.6% |
| Brandt Clarke | 54.4% | 45.6% | 54.2% |
| Joel Edmundson | 49.2% | 49.9% | 49.7% |
52.3% together, 45.3% for him apart and 44.6% for Kopitar 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
338 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 41 of them goals. His median goal came from 18 feet. 26% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 38% from beyond forty.