Kiefer Sherwood Drove Play Better Than Any Shark And Finished Minus Eight
The Sharks 25, No. 17. Of the 26 San Jose skaters who dressed twenty or more games last season, Sherwood posted the best relative shot share and the worst PDO, and he did both in 28 games. He is starting a five-year contract at $5,750,000 on a club that gave him 1:08 a night on the power play.
Take the 26 San Jose skaters who dressed twenty or more games last season. Sort them by relative shot-attempt share at even strength, which prices a player against his own teammates. Kiefer Sherwood is first, at plus 7.8, and nobody is tied with him.
Now sort the same 26 by PDO, which adds the shooting percentage his team got while he was out there to the save percentage his goaltender gave him. Sherwood is last, at 95.0, and again nobody is tied with him.
Both of those came out of the same 28 games.
The two lists, in one number#
San Jose attempted 447 shots and allowed 355 with Sherwood on the ice at even strength. That is 55.7 percent, also the highest raw share of the 26. Behind him the club shot 8.8 percent and stopped 86.2 percent of what came back.
Hockey Reference keeps a column called expected plus/minus, which takes the location of every chance for and against and says what the goal differential should have been. Sherwood's was minus 0.3. His actual plus/minus was minus 8. He was on the ice for 22 goals and 30 against, against 19.5 expected goals for and 19.8 against.
A player can be the best possession driver on a roster and its worst-luck skater at the same time. That is the file on his half-season here.
What five years bought#
Mike Grier traded two second-round picks for him on January 19 and then signed him for five years at $5,750,000 on March 4, two days before the deadline he might have flipped him at. Year one of five starts now. PuckPedia carries a full no-trade clause this season and a shrinking no-trade list after it, out to unrestricted free agency in 2031, when he will be 36.
Among the forwards San Jose expects to dress, three carry a bigger 2026-27 cap hit: Mason Marchment at $6,750,000, and Tyler Toffoli and Alexander Wennberg tied at $6,000,000. Logan Couture's $8,000,000 sits on injured reserve.
Sherwood went undrafted, and PuckPedia puts his career earnings across eight NHL seasons at $5.45M. This contract clears that in its first year.
The hitting, with both denominators#
Sherwood registered 129 hits in 28 games for San Jose. Six Sharks finished with more hits than that, and every one of them needed at least eighteen more games to get there. By rate he is on his own.
Nobody in San Jose hit anything like as often
Hits per game, 2025-26, from Hockey Reference's San Jose scoring table. The population is the eight highest rates among the 26 skaters who dressed twenty or more games for the Sharks, with the raw hit total and games played beside each name. Hits are counted by the scorer in each building, so treat small gaps as noise and this one as not. Axis runs from zero to five.
Zoom out and the number is a league one. Writing in NHL.com's own season-preview package on August 22, Van Diest and Meaney put Sherwood at the top of the league in hits over four seasons, at 1,138, and the four seasons on his player page add to exactly that: 103, 234, 462, 339.
The trend inside those four is worth carrying into October. His 462 in 2024-25 came in 14:53 a night, which is 23.9 hits per sixty minutes. Last season's 339 came in 17:16 a night, which is 16.4 per sixty, and his San Jose stretch alone lands on the same 16.4. More ice time, a third less contact per minute of it.
The best case#
His own baseline is 36 points in 72 games last season, split 23 goals and 13 assists across two clubs, and 40 points in 78 games the year before that. The 23 goals are a career high. Working through the roster on August 12, Professor Hockey projected him for 40 across the new 84-game schedule.
The best version is the one where the second power-play unit is real. Two published projections put him on it: Peng at San Jose Hockey Now on August 7 and Professor Hockey on August 28, both with Kesselring quarterbacking. San Jose ran five forwards at 2:54 a night or more on the power play last season, and Sherwood at 1:08. A 23-goal shooter who took 63 shots in 28 games getting a real second-unit share is a scoring winger who never had one here.
The worst case, and two arguments against me#
The chance quality is the problem the possession numbers hide. His expected goals for and against were 19.5 and 19.8, which is a coin flip, produced from a 55.7 percent share of the attempts. Volume from outside the slot. If the PDO comes home and nothing else moves, his goal differential climbs to roughly even and stops there, and San Jose has paid $5,750,000 a year until 2031 for a winger who breaks even at even strength.
The rest of it is calendar. He is 31, the body is the asset, and the no-trade clause means San Jose cannot undo a mistake here for at least a year.
Two arguments against all of that, and the first one is real.
- Twenty-eight games. Every relative number above is graded against Sharks teammates over roughly a third of a season. Both of his extremes, the shot share and the PDO, are the kind that shrink toward the middle on a full year.
- He is not a broken shooter. He converted 9.5 percent here against 11.3 percent for his career, on 63 shots. The finishing did not collapse; the ice in front of it was ordinary.
What to watch, and it is two cells in a box score#
Power-play time on ice per game. San Jose gave him 1:08 last season. Two projections give him a second-unit seat this one. If he is at two minutes a night through October, the seat exists. If he is still near a minute, the ten-forward squeeze resolved against him and the 40-point projections go with it.
Shorthanded time on ice per game. He killed 1:27 a night across both clubs last season and San Jose used him for 34 seconds of it. The two skaters the Sharks leaned on hardest down a man, Ferraro at 3:22 a night over 82 games and Desharnais at 3:13 over 53, are both gone. There is a job open that he already does somewhere else. A minute and a half in October says Warsofsky noticed.
The stakes#
San Jose has missed the playoffs seven years running, the last berth coming in 2018-19. The blue line got this summer's money and attention. The forward group's arithmetic is the one nobody has solved: ten men who think they are top-nine players, nine slots, and eight forward seats across two power-play units.
Sherwood is signed longer than any veteran forward in that pile. Seventeenth is where a countdown puts a middle-six winger whose best number last season was the one the scoreboard ignored.
Previous in the series: No. 18, Alex Nedeljkovic.
Sources: Hockey Reference (the 2025-26 San Jose team page, its scoring, advanced and time-on-ice tables, and Sherwood's player page, all read September 1, 2026); PuckPedia (Sherwood's contract page and the San Jose cap sheet, read September 1, 2026); NHL.com's 32 in 32 San Jose package, Derek Van Diest and Chris Meaney, August 22, 2026; San Jose Hockey Now, Peng, August 7, 2026; Professor Hockey, August 12 and August 28, 2026.
