Misa vs his draft class: the box score quietly refutes the premise (and defends him)
The charge we set out to test, the one Professor Hockey keeps making and you flagged, is that the Sharks throttled Misa while his classmates Frondell and Martone walked into NHL top-six minutes. It is a good charge, the kind worth checking rather than repeating. So I pulled the verified 2025-26 record for the entire 2025 top six. And the box score does something useful: it splits the charge cleanly into the half that is true and the half that simply is not, and in doing so it defends Misa more than it indicts the team.
Where the class actually played, year one
| Pick | Player | NHL games | Where they spent the year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Matthew Schaefer (D), NYI | 82 GP, 23-36-59 | A full NHL season. Runaway Calder. |
| 2 | Michael Misa (C), SJS | 45 GP, 9-12-21 | The NHL, all year |
| 3 | Anton Frondell (C), CHI | 12 GP, 3-6-9 | The SHL in Sweden (43 GP). A cameo, not a season. |
| 4 | Caleb Desnoyers (C), UTA | 0 GP | Junior (QMJHL, 78 pts in 45) |
| 5 | Brady Martin (C), NSH | 3 GP | Junior (OHL) and the AHL |
| 6 | Porter Martone (RW), PHI | a single-digit cameo | College (Michigan State, 50 pts in 35) |
The half that is wrong: opportunity
Misa played 45 NHL games. Frondell played 12, Martone a single-digit cameo, Martin three, Desnoyers none. Misa got more NHL hockey than the rest of the forward class combined. The players taken around him spent the year in the SHL, the QMJHL, the OHL, and the NCAA, by design and by development curve. So the specific framing, that Frondell and Martone were handed sustained NHL top-six minutes while Misa sat, is not what happened. Neither of them played a meaningful NHL season. On the question of who got the most NHL runway, the Sharks gave their forward the most in his entire class, not the least.
The half that is right: deployment
The legitimate critique survives, and we keep it: inside those 45 games, Misa averaged 12:49 and never saw PP1, which is light for a second overall pick, and his early-season games were artificially throttled by the contract-slot mismanagement (nine NHL games by mid-January, the conditioning stints). That is a real failure relative to what the Sharks themselves could have done. It is just not a failure relative to his draft peers, who were not playing NHL seasons to be out-deployed against in the first place. Both things are true at once: the team mishandled his minutes against its own best option, and still gave him more NHL seasoning than any forward in his class. The minutes critique points at Warsofsky and the contract sheet. The peer-comparison critique points at nothing, because the comparison does not exist.
Where he actually ranks now
Schaefer is the runaway No. 1, a different tier entirely. Misa is the clear No. 2 of the class and the No. 1 forward, exactly where he was drafted.
Schaefer put up 59 points and a plus-13 as a rookie defenseman and is the Calder winner; that is a superstar trajectory and not a debate. Behind him, Misa is the only forward in the class with a real NHL foothold, and the underlying numbers (0.73 individual expected goals per 60 at five-on-five, a top-six rate; an even 50% on-ice expected-goals share; a 1.87 points-per-60 road rate) are the foundation of a future top-six center. Martone, Desnoyers, Frondell, and Martin all had strong development-league years, but their NHL verdicts are seasons away. A year in, Misa's class standing is unchanged from draft night: second overall, first forward, and the most NHL-ready of the group.
One honesty note, because it matters to how we file these. This finding gently corrects Professor Hockey, who is our anchor on what the Sharks should do but not a substitute for the box score on what happened. His deployment point is sound and we are keeping it. His specific claim that Frondell and Martone out-played Misa on NHL minutes does not survive the schedule. The lesson is the same one that has paid off twice this month already: check the premise before inheriting it. The premise here was half right, and the half that was wrong happened to be the half that made the Sharks look worst. Misa is fine. He is, after Schaefer, the best player to come out of his draft, and the deployment that frustrated us cost him polish, not position.
Filed as a living tracker at docs/players/Misa_2025-draft-class_tracker.md. All 2025-26 lines verified from the NHL official API (player landing endpoints, June 14, 2026); Misa's NHL line cross-confirmed against the repo's McKeen's table, Frondell's SHL line against the Fear the Fin clipping. Misa's underlying numbers per the Misa verdict (Line_Toffoli-Misa-Graf_2025-26_Review_Brisbee.md); the deployment critique per the Warsofsky tracker and the contract-slot entry in the Grier report card.
