Photo by Sandro Halank, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Jackson LaCombe

48 assists and more ice time than anyone on the roster, and still not the name anyone leads with.

Season	Team	GP	G	A	PTS	+/-	PIM	PP	SH	GW	S	S%	TOI

2022-23	ANA	2	0	0	0	-1	0	0	0	0	1	0.0	18:29
2023-24	ANA	71	2	15	17	-24	24	0	0	1	55	3.6	19:23
2024-25	ANA	75	14	29	43	0	28	2	0	2	134	10.4	22:18
2025-26	ANA	82	10	48	58	-2	19	3	1	0	157	6.4	24:15
2026-27 so far	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—	—
Career	—	230	26	92	118	-27	71	5	1	3	347	7.5	22:04

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

10 goals and 48 assists in all 82 games, 24:15 a night — the heaviest workload on the club by 2 minutes. 1,497 minutes at 5-on-5, also the most.

The Finesse Game

He skates the puck out of trouble rather than passing it out, and he is good enough at it that the club has built its breakout around him. The edges are the best part: he can take a forechecker’s angle away by changing his own, which is how a defenceman survives 24 minutes a night without a physical game to fall back on.

The 48 assists are not power-play inflation — he had 3 power-play goals and the bulk of his work is at even strength, where he ran the first pair. The shot is a means of creating rebounds rather than goals: 57 per cent of his attempts came from beyond 40 feet and 10 went in.

The Physical Game

6-2, 208, and he defends with position and stick rather than contact. 19 penalty minutes in a full season of top-pair minutes tells you how he plays it — clean, and rarely in a position where he has to grab.

Against heavy forechecks he can be worn down over a series. That is the part of his game that has not been tested in a meaningful spring.

The Intangibles

A second-round pick who has become a legitimate number one, and the underlying numbers back it: 53.9 per cent of the shot attempts, 86th percentile among all skaters, while facing the other team’s best.

The goals went 66-70 against him, on chances that were 5 in his favour, on a club outscored by 19 overall. That is doing your job while the building burns behind you.

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.

slot-man· shoots from where goals are scored
23.2% of his attempts in the slot, 98th percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.69) · 44% keep it
durable· was available
82 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 · 1,497 minutes

Expected goals: 51.9%; 70th pct
Shot attempts: 53.7%; 85th pct

Goals while he was on the ice: 66 for, 70 against. Expected: 70.0 and 64.9.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted

Report

73rd

Numbers

70th

The two rank him within 3 points of one another. It was written with these numbers on screen, so the agreement is not corroboration — the arithmetic is on both sides of it.

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 — 76 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 · 82 games

Top speed: 22.6 mph; 85th pct
Bursts over 20 mph: 1.34 a game
Distance: 3.61 miles a game
Hardest shot: 95.4 mph; 81st 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.

Recent form

Last 20 appearances, 2025-26, oldest first

points in his last 10 games — 1 goals, 8 assists, 24 shots

Each bar is one game by points. Filled bars are games he scored in.

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 1497 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, 2025-26

The club: ANA took 50.6% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 51.9% — 1.3 above the club he did it on.
The role: First pair, 1,497 minutes at five-on-five — 97th percentile in ice time.

With and without

Teammate	Together	Him apart	Mate apart
Jacob Trouba	51.8%	52.1%	47.0%
Beckett Sennecke	48.8%	53.4%	52.8%
Cutter Gauthier	49.2%	52.9%	52.5%

51.8% together, 52.1% for him apart and 47.0% for Trouba apart. Trouba was worse away from him while his own share held — the pairing was doing more for Trouba than for him.

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

237 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 10 of them goals. His median goal came from 34 feet. 20% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 57% from beyond forty.