The Sharks Roster and Depth Chart for 2026-27, Line by Line

A 115-point centre, two reclamation projects on the blue line, three first-round picks, and a save percentage that has to come up. Where this roster actually stands going into October.

This is the first Sharks roster in about six years that's worth reading closely, because for the first time since the rebuild started there's a top line you wouldn't swap for anybody's and a reason to care about the standings before March. The rebuild finally has a pulse is the column about what that feels like. This is the depth chart.

The top line is the team. Macklin Celebrini put up 115 points last season, which is more than double what the second-highest scorer on this roster managed, and the Celebrini records and contract page has the full accounting of what that means. Will Smith on his right is the other genuine piece. Everything else on this forward group is either a supporting part or a bet.

The second line is the actual question. Michael Misa is being asked to centre a scoring line at twenty. Mason Marchment was signed for five years to be the proven goal-scorer this group didn't have, and Tyler Toffoli is the veteran who has to keep producing at an age where that stops being guaranteed. If that line works, San Jose has two units that can score and the whole season changes. If it doesn't, opponents put their best defenders on Celebrini and the rest of the lineup goes quiet, which is exactly what happened in stretches last year.

Ivar Stenberg isn't a normal rookie. The second overall pick had 33 points in 43 games in the Swedish Hockey League as an eighteen-year-old and won rookie of the year doing it. He was widely considered the player in this draft class most likely to step straight into an NHL lineup, and he's currently projected on the third line rather than in junior. That's a real thing to watch in October.

The blue line got rebuilt in a single day. On 1 July the Sharks traded for Darnell Nurse and signed Jacob Trouba, which is two names that used to mean top-pairing defenceman and now mean something more complicated. Both are on the wrong side of thirty and both have been criticised for years in bigger markets. San Jose is betting that a lower-pressure room and a smaller defensive workload gets useful seasons out of them while the actual future arrives.

The future on defence is the second pair. Sam Dickinson is twenty and Michael Kesselring is twenty-six, and if those two settle into a real middle pairing this season it matters more to 2029 than anything Nurse or Trouba does. Behind them, Keaton Verhoeff went ninth overall and Ryan Lin went 21st, the Sharks traded up for Lin, so the organisation now has three first-round defencemen in the system at once.

And then there's the goaltending, which is the whole season.

Read that table again. A .884 save percentage from the goaltender the franchise traded for as its answer in net isn't a rebuilding number, it's a losing number, and Yaroslav Askarov played 47 games behind it. Alex Nedeljkovic was the better of the two in every category while playing seven fewer games. Eric Comrie was signed on a two-year deal because the club clearly knows this. A team that scored enough to finish 39-35-8 with that goaltending is a team that makes the playoffs with league-average goaltending. That's the entire margin.

What the offence looked like last year. Including the man who's no longer here, William Eklund was fourth in scoring and was traded to Ottawa as the cost of moving up for Verhoeff, which tells you how this front office is thinking.

Where this roster runs out. Behind the top six forwards and the top four defencemen, it's prospects and depth signings. That's normal for a team at this stage and it's why an injury to Celebrini would end the season inside two weeks. The bottom six is functional rather than dangerous, and the fourth line exists to not lose minutes rather than to win them.

The honest projection. This is a bubble team. Better than last year on paper, in a Pacific Division that isn't the Atlantic, with an elite centre and a goaltending situation that could swing fifteen points in either direction. The games are on the season hub, the offseason ledger is below, and thirty-five years without a Cup is why nobody around here's getting ahead of themselves.

The rest of our coverage is on the Sharks hub.

More coverage: Bay Area Sports section · Bay Area Sports · Bay Area Sports Blog home