This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →

Adrian Kempe

Fourteen goals at twenty-three, forty-one at twenty-six, and he converts from beyond forty feet at twice the rate a forward should.

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 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	472	131	122	253	-10	263	24	9	23	1041	12.6	16:06

This Season So Far

The 2023-24 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

41 goals and 26 assists in all 82 games — 67 points — with 11 on the power play and three shorthanded. Plus-22, 18:45 a night, 250 shots at 16.4 per cent, 55 penalty minutes, six game-winners.

The career line: 2, 16, 12, 11 and 14 goals in his first five seasons, then 35 and 41. He turned into a scorer at twenty-five and there is now enough of it — 76 goals in 160 games across two seasons — to treat it as real rather than as a spike.

53.9 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five, the 80th percentile, with his ice at 50-36 against an expectation of 49.00-41.84.

Seven seasons, 472 games, 253 points, all of them in Los Angeles.

The Finesse Game

250 shots at a median of 31 feet, 24 per cent from inside twenty and 31 per cent from beyond forty.

Beyond forty: 71 shots on goal and 6 goals, 8.45 per cent — against a league rate for forwards of 4.16. Inside forty: 172 shots, 35 goals, 20.35 per cent.

Both of those rates are unusual and the second one is more meaningful than the first. Seventy-one long shots is a small enough sample that six goals could be a good month; a hundred and seventy-two close shots at 20.35 per cent is a season’s worth of evidence that he finishes.

85 snap shots out of 342 tracked attempts — the highest snap-shot count on the club, and the shot he actually scores with. Wrist and snap are recorded together in this book because the scorekeeping between them moved; taken together it is 249 of 342.

95.4 mph at the 80th percentile, on fifty-three slap shots.

The Physical Game

6-2 and 205, and 55 penalty minutes.

Top speed 23.3 mph, the 93rd percentile; bursts 2.8 a game, the 95th. He is the fastest forward on this roster by both measures and one of the few Kings who registers as quick at all — this is a heavy, deliberate club and he is the exception in it.

2.95 miles a game, the 78th percentile.

The three shorthanded goals come from the speed. He forechecks the first man on the penalty kill and gets to loose pucks that a slower forward would concede.

The Intangibles

Twenty-ninth overall in 2014 out of Sweden, six seasons before the goals arrived, and never anywhere but Los Angeles.

48.5 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 39th percentile — a shade to the defensive side of even. The forty-one goals were not handed to him by the deployment and were not made much harder by it either.

That is the strongest single argument in his file. A 20 per cent close-range conversion rate is not something a player holds forever, but the deployment says the goals were earned rather than handed to him.

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
a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed

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
31.2% of his attempts from 40 feet or beyond, 95th percentile among forwards
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it
durable· was available
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
transitiona strength· carries it out; gains the line under control
“He is the fastest forward on this roster by both measures and one of the few Kings who registers as quick at all — this is a heavy, deliberate club and he is the exception in it.”
penalty-killera strength· trusted a man short
“He forechecks the first man on the penalty kill and gets to loose pucks that a slower forward would concede.”

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,128 minutes

Expected goals: 53.9%; 81st pct
Shot attempts: 52.2%; 73rd pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 50 for, 36 against. Expected: 49.0 and 41.8.

The eye and the numbers

Hindsight

Report

92nd

Numbers

81st

The two rank him within 11 points of one another. 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.

Both bars are percentiles among the 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 78 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, 2022-23 · 82 games

Top speed: 23.3 mph; 95th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 2.78 a game
Distance: 2.95 miles a game
Hardest shot: 95.4 mph; 94th 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

2022-23 · 1128 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, 2022-23

The club: LAK took 53.5% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 53.9% — 0.4 above the club he did it on.
The role: Second line, 1,128 minutes at five-on-five — 76th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Anze Kopitar	54.5%	48.5%	52.6%
Drew Doughty	55.9%	52.1%	52.1%
Quinton Byfield	56.4%	52.0%	45.2%

54.5% together, 48.5% for him apart and 52.6% for Kopitar apart. He was worse away from Kopitar, who was no better away from him — he needed that pairing more than Kopitar did.

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

340 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 45 of them goals. His median goal came from 23 feet. 25% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 31% from beyond forty.