San Jose's preseason is seven days long. Last September's was fourteen.
Four exhibition games inside one week, September 20 to September 26. A year ago San Jose played six across fourteen days, and the two preseasons before that ran twelve days and ten. The labor agreement that took effect Wednesday caps the schedule at four games and limits any player with 100 NHL games to two of them, and five men on this blue line are over that line.
San Jose's exhibition season is seven days long.
It opens Sunday at Anaheim and closes the following Saturday at Vegas, with two more games in between, four in total. The whole block fits inside one week, and three of those seven days carry no game.
A year ago the same block of the calendar ran from September 21 to October 4. Fourteen days, six games, eight days off between them. The year before that was also fourteen days and six games. The two before those were twelve days and ten days, six games each time.
The exhibition window is half of last September's
Days from San Jose's first preseason game to its last, for the five seasons from 2022-23 through 2026-27, from the league's own club schedule feed. The span counts both end dates. Game counts are printed beside each bar; the 2022-23 preseason fit six games into five dates because of a split-squad doubleheader on September 30. The axis runs from zero to 14 days. Teal is the season that starts this month.
The four-game cap and the two-exhibition limit on any player with 100 NHL games come from the collective bargaining agreement that took effect Wednesday and runs to September 15, 2030. It also extends the regular season from 82 games to 84 and holds camp to a maximum of 13 days for a player who appeared in at least 50 games last season. Those terms were published on August 21 and none of them is new. The window they produce is.
The twelve#
Twelve defensemen are on the roster San Jose filed with the league for 2026-27, and three of them have played a regular-season game for this club: Dmitry Orlov, who played all 82 last season, Sam Dickinson, who played 72, and Luca Cagnoni, who has nine across two seasons. Seven of the ten defensemen who dressed here last season are gone, and that turnover was laid out on August 30. The calendar it now has to happen inside is what changed.
Here is the group, sorted by career regular-season games from the league's own player records, with the exhibition cap each man falls under.
| Defenseman | Career NHL games | Games for San Jose | Shoots | Exhibition games available |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dmitry Orlov | 949 | 82 | Left | 2 |
| Jacob Trouba | 906 | 0 | Right | 2 |
| Darnell Nurse | 798 | 0 | Left | 2 |
| Michael Kesselring | 190 | 0 | Right | 2 |
| Libor Hajek | 110 | 0 | Left | 2 |
| Sam Dickinson | 72 | 72 | Left | 4 |
| Nolan Allan | 43 | 0 | Left | 4 |
| Luca Cagnoni | 9 | 9 | Left | 4 |
| Mattias Havelid | 0 | 0 | Right | 4 |
| Eric Pohlkamp | 0 | 0 | Right | 4 |
| Leo Sahlin Wallenius | 0 | 0 | Left | 4 |
| Phillip Sinn | 0 | 0 | Left | 4 |
Read the top of that table against the right-hand column. The five defensemen with the most NHL experience on this roster are Orlov, Trouba, Nurse, Kesselring and Libor Hajek. All five are capped at two of the four games, and four of the five have never played a shift for San Jose.
Two games each#
Work out what the cap allows. A man who plays two of four games can overlap with another man who plays two of four in two games, one, or none at all, depending on which two each of them is given. Two is the ceiling.
So whichever pair the coaching staff wants to see most, that pair can be on the ice together for at most two exhibition games before October 1. If San Jose splits its veterans across the four dates to spread the minutes, which is the ordinary reason to split them, the number for some pairs is one, and for some pairs it is zero.
The seven men who can play all four are Dickinson, Allan, Cagnoni, Havelid, Pohlkamp, Sahlin Wallenius and Sinn. Between them they have 124 NHL games, and 81 of those belong to Dickinson and Cagnoni. The players with the most exhibition ice available are the players with the least NHL evidence behind them, which is the point of an exhibition and is also not the problem San Jose has this month.
The problem San Jose has is a top four that has never existed. Two of its four members shoot right, Trouba and Kesselring, and they are two of only four right shots in the group of twelve. The other two right shots have never played an NHL game.
Why it matters here more than elsewhere#
Every club is under the same cap, so this is not a competitive disadvantage against the other 31. It is a change against San Jose's own recent Septembers, and it lands in the year this club rebuilt the position that needs the reps most.
San Jose allowed 3.54 goals a game last season. Only Vancouver at 3.83 and Toronto at 3.60 allowed more, and nobody was tied with the Sharks. The league average across the 32 clubs was 3.08. The shot volume underneath that was 29.65 shots on goal against a game, sixth-most of the 32 clubs by shots against per game, where the league average was 27.83.
The response was to replace most of the people responsible. That response is now a group of men who have to learn where each other will be, on a week of exhibition hockey in which all five of its most experienced members may appear twice.
The club put its own camp release out on Wednesday afternoon. Camp opens Thursday at Sharks Ice at San Jose, which is the date San Jose Hockey Now had reported on September 7, and the same release carries all four exhibition dates: at Anaheim on Sunday at 1 p.m., Vegas at SAP Center on Tuesday, Anaheim at SAP Center on Thursday, and at Vegas a week on Saturday, the last three at 7 p.m.
The case against this#
Three arguments cut the other way, and the first one is real.
- Practice is not games, and camp is mostly practice. The 13-day cap limits camp length, not what happens inside it. Pairings get drilled every day in a way an exhibition game cannot replicate, with the coaching staff stopping play to fix what it sees. If defensive chemistry is built in systems work rather than in live minutes, the exhibition cap costs less than the calendar suggests.
- Men with 2,843 career games between them may not need six exhibitions. Orlov, Trouba, Nurse and Kesselring have played a combined 2,843 regular-season games. The argument that four veterans require a long preseason to learn a structure is an assumption, not a measurement, and the counter-assumption is at least as plausible.
- The season is two games longer than it has been since 1995-96. There are 84 games to sort this out in, and 15 of them fall in October. A slow first month costs less of a season than it used to.
What the club's best case looks like#
Worth naming whose case is whose, because they are not the same. San Jose's best case is that experience substitutes for repetition, the top four is functional by the middle of October, and the compressed September goes down as a footnote.
Sam Dickinson's best case runs the other way. He is one of the seven who may play all four games, and the four men most likely to be ahead of him may play two. A 20-year-old with twice the exhibition games of the veterans above him, in a camp too short for anybody to be certain of anything, is being handed an opening rather than a wait.
The call#
San Jose allows 29.0 or more shots on goal per game across its 15 regular-season games in October 2026. Priced at -140. It resolves November 1.
Shots rather than goals, because shots are the part of this a blue line controls and a goaltender does not. The Sharks allowed 29.65 a game last season against a league average of 27.83, and the case for the call is that a group with this little time together does not cut shot volume in its first month.
The argument against it is real and it is the reason the price is not shorter. Trouba, Nurse, Kesselring and Orlov are, on paper, better defensive players than the four they replaced, and a coaching staff in its third season has a structure already installed for them to step into. Fifteen games is a large enough sample that a genuine improvement would show up inside it. If shot suppression is mostly system and personnel rather than familiarity, this call loses.
San Jose opens against Florida on October 1. The blue line in front of Yaroslav Askarov that night will have been assembled, in full, exactly never.
Sources: the NHL's club schedule feed for San Jose for the 2022-23 through 2026-27 seasons, for preseason and regular-season dates and opponents; the league's 2026-27 San Jose roster and individual player records, for career regular-season games, games by club and season, and handedness; the league's team summary for 2025-26, for goals against per game, shots against per game and the 32-club averages; NHL.com's summary of the collective bargaining agreement, for the September 16, 2026 effective date, the four-game preseason cap and the 84-game regular season; Ryan S. Clark, Kristen Shilton and Greg Wyshynski at ESPN, July 14, 2025, for the 13-day camp maximum and the two-game exhibition limit on players with 100 career games; the club's own training camp release, published September 16, 2026, for the camp date, the venue and the four exhibition dates and start times; San Jose Hockey Now, September 7, 2026, which had the camp date first.
