San Jose Allowed 290 Goals. The Answer Was To Replace Seven Defensemen.
Ten defensemen dressed for the Sharks last season and seven of them are gone. The three who stayed played 157 of the 494 games the position covered, and three of the men replacing them have never dressed for this club in their lives.
San Jose allowed 290 goals last season. Sort all thirty-two teams by goals against and only Vancouver at 314 and Toronto at 295 allowed more, so 290 is third-most in the league, with nobody tied. Those are Hockey Reference's figures, which leave out the bookkeeping goal charged for losing a shootout; the league's own standings carry the shootout deciders and read 292 for San Jose, 316 for Vancouver and 299 for Toronto. The order is the same in both books, and the version used here is the one that counts only the goals somebody allowed on the ice.
The club's answer was not a signing. It was a demolition.
Ten defensemen dressed for the Sharks in 2025-26. Seven of them will not dress for the Sharks again. Mario Ferraro is in Winnipeg, Vincent Desharnais in Washington, Shakir Mukhamadullin in Edmonton, and John Klingberg and Nick Leddy walked as free agents; Timothy Liljegren and Vincent Iorio were traded during the season itself. What is left is Dmitry Orlov, Sam Dickinson and Luca Cagnoni.
What is left#
Those ten men played 494 games on the blue line and 9,473 minutes of ice time. The three who are still here played 157 of the games and 2,998 of the minutes.
That is 31.8 percent of the games and 31.7 percent of the minutes. And it flatters the number, because Cagnoni's share of it is three games and 54 minutes. Take him out and two men, Orlov and Dickinson, account for 2,944 of the 9,473 minutes San Jose's defense played last season.
Seven of these ten will not play another game for San Jose
Total ice time in the 2025-26 regular season, in all situations, for each of the ten defensemen who dressed for the Sharks, from Hockey Reference's San Jose skater table. Population is every player listed at D with at least one game played, which is ten men across 494 games and 9,473 minutes. Teal marks the three under contract for 2026-27. Bars run from zero to 1,800 minutes. Liljegren and Iorio were traded in-season, so their bars are San Jose minutes only.
The four who arrive#
PuckPedia's projected roster, read Sunday morning, carries six defensemen: Darnell Nurse, Jacob Trouba, Orlov, Michael Kesselring, Dickinson and Cagnoni. Nolan Allan is on the same page in the non-roster group.
Here is what the four newcomers did last season, from Hockey Reference.
| Player | 2025-26 club | Games | Ice time a night | Even strength |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jacob Trouba | Anaheim | 81 | 22:50 | 19:03 |
| Darnell Nurse | Edmonton | 82 | 20:58 | 19:14 |
| Michael Kesselring | Buffalo | 34 | 13:24 | 12:34 |
| Nolan Allan | none | 0 | none | none |
Nurse has played 798 NHL games and every one of them was for Edmonton. Trouba has played for Winnipeg, the Rangers and Anaheim. Kesselring has played for Arizona, Utah and Buffalo. Allan has played 43 NHL games, all for Chicago, all in 2024-25, and none last season at any level of the league. None of the four has ever put on a San Jose sweater in a game that counted.
The Kesselring row is the one to sit with. He played 82 games and averaged 17:41 for Utah in 2024-25 and scored 29 points. In Buffalo last season he played 34 games at 13:24 and scored two. He is signed here through 2028-29 at a $4.5 million cap hit, which is the fourth-largest on the blue line, and he is one of only two right-shot defensemen the club has on its projected roster.
Four left shots and two right#
Hockey Reference lists Nurse, Orlov, Dickinson, Cagnoni and Allan as left shots and Trouba and Kesselring as right shots. That is four left and two right among the six projected to open the season, with the seventh man, Allan, a left shot in the minor-league group.
The club is not blind to it. Orlov is the only one of the six PuckPedia lists at two positions, LD and RD, which is that site's way of saying he has played both. But the arithmetic is what it is: if either right shot misses a night, somebody is playing a side he does not shoot for, and the cover behind them has not been established at this level.
The money follows the same shape. By PuckPedia's per-player rows, the six defensemen carry cap hits of $9.25 million for Nurse, $8.25 million for Trouba, $6.5 million for Orlov, $4.5 million for Kesselring, and $954,000 and $920,000 for Dickinson and Cagnoni. Add the first, second and fourth of those and $22 million of a $30.37 million blue line is committed to three men who have never dressed for the franchise.
The kill lost its top three#
Rank last season's ten San Jose defensemen by shorthanded ice time per game and the order is Ferraro at 3:22, Desharnais at 3:13 and Liljegren at 2:19. There are no ties anywhere in the column. All three are gone.
The three who stayed rank seventh, eighth and tenth. Dickinson killed 54 seconds a night, Orlov 46, and Cagnoni none at all. San Jose's penalty kill finished at 76.42 percent, 26th of 32, against a league average of 78.89.
The replacement is one man and he is a real one. Trouba killed 3:04 a night across 81 games in Anaheim, which is within eighteen seconds of what Ferraro did here. Nurse killed 1:29 a night in Edmonton and Kesselring 49 seconds in Buffalo. So the top of the kill is covered by a single arrival, and the second unit is a question camp has to answer from a group that has not answered it before.
The three arguments against me, and the first one is real#
One. Some of the 290 was not the defense. San Jose's team save percentage was .881 against a league average of .889, and a blue line does not choose its goaltending. Yaroslav Askarov and Alex Nedeljkovic are both back, so if the shooting percentage against regresses toward the league, the goals-against total falls without a single defenseman playing better.
Two. Turnover is the plan, not an accident. A group that allowed the third-most goals in hockey is not a group whose continuity is worth protecting, and "these men have never played together" is only a complaint if the thing being interrupted was working. It was not.
Three, and it cuts against the man I just praised. Trouba spent last season on an Anaheim defense that allowed 288 goals, fourth-most in the league, two behind San Jose. A defense corps is not one player and that number is not his alone. But the club's biggest right-shot answer arrives from the one blue line in hockey that was barely better than the one he is joining.
What to watch in October#
The pairs on the opening-night lineup card, October 1 against Florida, and then whether they survive November. A defense assembled this fast usually announces itself by how often it is re-sorted.
Two specific things are readable from a box score. The first is Trouba's shorthanded minutes, which are the club's whole bet on the kill holding. The second is whether San Jose dresses a seventh defenseman at all, because the projected roster does not carry one, and the first time a right shot is unavailable the club has to choose in public between a left shot on his off side and a call-up from a group nobody has seen here.
The Sharks did not tune this blue line. They replaced two-thirds of its minutes in a single summer and kept the two men, Orlov and Dickinson, who played almost all of the third that stayed. That is a defensible response to 290 goals against, and it means camp is not deciding a sixth job. It is deciding six of them, with three weeks to do it and two right-handed shots to work with.
Sources: Hockey Reference, San Jose Sharks 2025-26 team, skater, time-on-ice and advanced tables; the 2025-26 league team and skater tables; and the player pages for Darnell Nurse, Jacob Trouba, Michael Kesselring and Nolan Allan. PuckPedia's San Jose roster and contract page, read 2026-08-30. The club's own news feed at NHL.com, read 2026-08-30.
