The Elite Tag on LaCombe Is Earned. What Comes After Him on That Blue Line Is the Problem.

Jackson LaCombe just landed on NHL Network's list of the league's 17 best defensemen. That's not a participation trophy — it's confirmation of what the numbers said all season. He logged 24.4 minutes a night across 49 games, put up 34 points from the blue line, and did it while anchoring a back end that was quietly falling apart around him. The ranking is deserved. The question it raises is the one Anaheim can't answer yet: who's second?

Because the gap between LaCombe and the rest of that defensive corps was the structural fault line that cracked open when it mattered most. Over the final 10 games of the season, the Ducks surrendered 4.1 goals per game — nearly a full goal more than their pace over the prior 20. That's not a goaltending blip or a scheduling quirk. That's a depth problem announcing itself at full volume. When the back end needed a second voice, there wasn't one. Pavel Mintyukov was thrown into 21.3 minutes a night in that final stretch, up nearly five minutes from where he'd been operating — a workload spike that reflected desperation more than development. He's talented enough to absorb it eventually. He wasn't ready to absorb it then.

The offseason has since made the depth question sharper, not softer. Olen Zellweger is gone to Buffalo. John Carlson has moved on to Carolina. What those departures leave behind is a blue line where LaCombe is elite, Mintyukov is promising, and the names behind them are either injured — Nick Jensen and Drew Helleson are both currently out — or unproven at this level. I wrote last week that the roster around Gauthier isn't built to match his ceiling. The same sentence applies to LaCombe, and it's arguably more damaging, because defensive depth failures show up in the standings faster than offensive ones do.

The 67% win rate in one-goal games last season flattered this team considerably. When you win nearly two-thirds of games decided by a single goal, you can paper over a lot of structural weakness — and Anaheim did exactly that, finishing 43-39 in a season where the underlying defensive numbers pointed toward a team that had no business being that close to a playoff spot. That variance is not a system. It doesn't travel into the following year. The Ducks now enter 2026-27 without that cushion, without Terry for the start of the season, and without the secondary defensive pieces they traded or let walk this summer.

My read is this: LaCombe's ranking matters because it confirms the franchise has at least one legitimate building block on the back end — the kind of player you construct a defensive identity around over a decade. But a 17th-best defenseman playing 24 minutes a night on a thin blue line isn't a solution; he's a foundation with nothing built on top of it yet. Until Mintyukov proves he can carry real minutes without being overloaded, and until this organization adds proven depth behind those two, the elite ranking is a ceiling preview, not a floor guarantee. The collapse last April told you everything about what happens when LaCombe can't do it alone.