San Jose Drew Its Rookie Line At One Hundred Games And Then Crossed It Once
The Sharks named 26 players for the Rookie Faceoff on Tuesday, and Curtis Pashelka reports the club's guideline is 100 games of NHL or American Hockey League experience or fewer. Twenty five of the 26 clear it. Fourteen of them have never played a professional game at all.
Luca Cagnoni has played nine games in the National Hockey League. That is enough to make him too experienced for a rookie tournament.
Michael Misa has played 45, and Misa is going to the Rookie Faceoff in ten days. Cagnoni is not, and neither is Nolan Allan, who has played 43. The 26 players San Jose named on Tuesday are 14 forwards, nine defensemen and three goaltenders.
Curtis Pashelka of the Mercury News reported the reason on September 1, and it is a rule rather than a judgment. The club's "general guideline for participating in the rookie faceoffs is that it is for players with 100 games of NHL or AHL experience or less." Pashelka puts Cagnoni at 140.
That number is the whole thing, and the interesting part is which league does the counting.
The league that does the counting#
Cagnoni's 140 is nine NHL games and 131 in the American Hockey League. Hockey Reference has him at six NHL games in 2024-25 and three in 2025-26, and at 64 and 67 games with the San Jose Barracuda across the same two seasons. Elite Prospects returns the same split. Nine and 131.
Misa's 47 is the mirror image. Forty five NHL games and two in the AHL. He has played five times as much hockey at the top level as Cagnoni and he is eligible, because a guideline that counts both leagues equally is a guideline about how long a man has been a professional rather than how good he has been at it.
Sort the group by that one number and the club's own sorting shows up.
One man on San Jose's rookie roster is past the club's own hundred game line
Combined NHL and American Hockey League regular-season games played, career, through 2025-26. The population is every player named to San Jose's 2026 Rookie Faceoff roster who has appeared in a professional regular-season game, twelve of the 26, plus the three young players left off it: Nolan Allan, Luca Cagnoni and Sam Dickinson. The other fourteen named to the roster have played none and are not drawn. Playoff games are excluded. Axis runs from zero to 200 games. Source: Elite Prospects career totals, with the NHL and AHL splits for Cagnoni, Misa, Chernyshov, Bystedt and Dickinson cross-checked at Hockey Reference.
The exception, and it is one man#
Filip Bystedt has played 123 American Hockey League regular-season games and no NHL games. He is 23 games past the line and he is on the roster anyway.
Pashelka's own word for the rule is guideline, and this is what a guideline looks like from the outside. Bystedt led the Barracuda in scoring last season with 60 points in 65 games, and he has still never dressed for the club that drafted him in the first round in 2022. Whatever question San Jose has about him, three years of rookie tournaments have not answered it, and the club has decided a fourth look is worth more than the tidiness of its own cutoff.
The line is a ceiling, not an invitation#
Sam Dickinson played 72 NHL games last season and none in the AHL. He is comfortably under 100 and he is not going to the Rookie Faceoff either.
Pashelka names that case directly. Macklin Celebrini, Will Smith and Dickinson were all under the threshold in their rookie seasons and none of them played in a rookie event, because they spent those years in the NHL and had nothing to gain from two September games against other clubs' prospects.
So the number tells you who is allowed. It does not tell you who is invited. Twenty five men are under the ceiling and one of the best young defensemen in the organization is under it too, and the difference between them is that the club already knows what Dickinson is.
The blue line this will not settle#
Nine defensemen are going. The most experienced professional among them is Mattias Havelid, with 44 AHL games and no NHL games. Seven of the nine have played four professional games or fewer, and four of those seven have played none.
Five of the nine shoot right: Havelid, Eric Pohlkamp, Jake Boltmann, Tristan Sarsland and Mack Oliphant, by Elite Prospects. That is the reverse of the shape upstairs. On the blue line San Jose has established, the right shots are Michael Kesselring and Jacob Trouba, and Darnell Nurse, Dmitry Orlov and Dickinson all shoot left.
Which is the useful thing to hold onto about a tournament that is easy to over-read. The job genuinely open on this blue line is the one on the left point, where a 35-year-old in a contract year and a 21-year-old who has never held it are the two candidates. Neither of them will be at Tech CU Arena on September 12. Pashelka gives three of these defensemen a shot at cracking the Sharks roster, and hedges all three as more likely to open the season with the Barracuda: Leo Sahlin Wallenius, Pohlkamp and Havelid. The first two arrive with zero professional regular-season games between them, which is a fact about how early this is rather than a knock on either.
What to watch on the twelfth#
San Jose plays Los Angeles at 5 p.m. on Saturday September 12 and Utah at 5 p.m. on Sunday September 13, both at Tech CU Arena. Anaheim's own release confirms the tournament runs September 12 to 15 at Tech CU Arena and Sharks Ice.
The tell is availability rather than scoring. Pashelka says it is unclear whether Misa, Chernyshov and Stenberg will play both games or just one, and that is the first real deployment signal of the season. A projected second-line center who plays both games in a rookie tournament ten days before camp is a club filling in reps. One who plays neither is a club that has already moved him past this.
The second thing worth counting is which defensemen play with Havelid. He is the only man in that group with a full professional season behind him, and whoever gets the other side of him is being looked at.
The argument against all of this#
A rookie tournament is two games in September and it has never decided a roster. Nobody is going to win a job at Tech CU Arena, and the men who will decide San Jose's season are almost entirely absent from it.
The Bystedt exception could also be read the other way. If the club will carry a man 23 games past its own line, the line is soft enough that reading Cagnoni's absence as a statement about Cagnoni is doing more work than the evidence supports. He may simply have been left off because he is expected in the main camp and the club saw no reason to add two games to his September.
Both of those are fair. What survives them is the sort itself. Fourteen of the 26 players San Jose named on Tuesday have never played a professional regular-season game, and the club has 29 days between now and its opener against Florida on October 1 to find out which of them is closer than it thought.
Sources: Curtis Pashelka, Mercury News, September 1, 2026, for the club's participation guideline, Cagnoni's 140 games, the venue and time grid and the Sahlin Wallenius and Pohlkamp assessment. The Hockey News, September 1, 2026, for the 26-man roster as published. Elite Prospects for career NHL and AHL games played and shot sides. Hockey Reference for the NHL and AHL season splits on Cagnoni, Misa, Chernyshov, Bystedt and Dickinson. Anaheim Ducks club release at NHL.com for the tournament dates and field.
