San Jose Can Lose Nolan Allan For Nothing, Which Is Exactly Why He Will Make The Team

Nolan Allan's entire National Hockey League career is 43 games. All of them were played for Chicago, all of them in 2024-25, and he has not added one since.

Last season he played 64 games in the American Hockey League. Twenty-nine were for Rockford, before the January trade that sent him and Laurent Brossoit to San Jose. The other 35 were for the Barracuda, after it. The Sharks acquired him on January 8 and never once put him in an NHL lineup.

In June they signed him for two more years.

That sequence reads like an organization paying for nothing. It is not. The reason Allan has a contract, and the reason he is the favorite for the seventh job, has little to do with those 43 games and a great deal to do with what happens if San Jose tries to send him down.

The rule#

PuckPedia lists Allan's waivers eligibility as "Eligible." It lists Luca Cagnoni's as "Exempt."

Those two words decide the bottom of this blue line. An exempt player travels between San Jose and the Barracuda as often as the club wants, at no cost. A player who is not exempt has to be offered to the other 31 teams first, and any of them can have him for nothing.

Sheng Peng of NBC Sports Bay Area reached the conclusion that follows from it in his July 24 lineup projection: because Allan is not waiver-exempt, he "appears to be a good option for No. 7 defenseman," while Eric Pohlkamp goes to the Barracuda for seasoning. That is not a compliment. It is a roster manager noticing which of his young defensemen he can put in a drawer and which one he would have to give away.

So the least-used defenseman of the group is the one the roster has to make room for. He is on the team because leaving him off is expensive.

The job he is actually competing for#

Four public projections of this lineup have been filed since the start of July, and not one of them has Allan in the top six.

Professor Hockey, on July 12, left the sixth defenseman's spot open and put Allan seventh. Sharks Hockey Digest's Max Miller, on July 6, called the sixth job an open competition and gave Cagnoni the edge over Pohlkamp and Allan on the strength of his power play. Eric Stephens of The Athletic, on July 15, listed the extra defenseman as Pohlkamp or Allan. Peng, on July 24, put Allan seventh outright.

Four sources, one point of agreement. The seed of this whole series called him a third-pair survivor of a crowded left side, and the projections say something narrower: he is not competing for the third pair at all. Nurse, Orlov, Dickinson and Cagnoni are four left shots for three left-side jobs before Allan is counted, and he is a fifth.

What 43 games said#

Chicago used him 15:08 a night at 21 years old, and the ice was not soft. He started 42.0 percent of his even-strength shifts in the offensive zone. On-ice shot attempts ran 465 for and 656 against, a 41.5 percent share, and the goals ran 20 for and 34 against, which is 2.0 scored and 3.4 allowed per sixty minutes. Hockey Reference's expected plus-minus had him at minus 10.7, so the model watched the same shifts and saw roughly what the scoreboard saw. His PDO of 98.4 does not offer him much of an excuse either.

That was a bad Chicago team and some of this is the team. The number that is his own is smaller and stranger. Of his 64 shot attempts, 17 reached the goaltender, a rate of 26.6 percent, and that is the lowest of the thirteen defensemen Chicago dressed that season, with nobody tied. He blocked 48 and threw 61 hits in those 43 games. The defending has always been the part scouts liked.

The best case#

He wins the seventh job in camp, and the top four ages into him. Nurse is 31, Trouba 32 and Orlov 35, and a blue line built on three defensemen over 30 does not get through a full season intact. Forty-plus appearances is a realistic season for a seventh defenseman on this roster, which would be the most NHL hockey Allan has ever played. The encouraging line in his own record is the second half of last season: 14 points in 35 games for the Barracuda, against six in 29 for Rockford, which is a scoring rate that nearly doubled after the trade.

The worst case#

Camp goes to Pohlkamp, or to Mattias Havelid, or San Jose adds the veteran depth defenseman the market still has. The Sharks then have to put Allan on waivers to move him, and a club with a thinner blue line takes a 23-year-old former first-round pick at an $875,000 cap hit, with a $300,000 minor-league salary attached, for the price of a claim. That is not a strawman, and the sharpest version of it is on the same page the waiver rule came from: PuckPedia's projected roster carries six defensemen and Allan is not one of them. It lists him in the non-roster group. The rule that makes him the favorite for the job is the same rule that makes him the one they can lose, and it works in both directions on the same afternoon.

The tell#

Watch the penalty kill, not the power play.

Across 43 NHL games Allan played exactly no power-play time. Two of Chicago's thirteen defensemen finished that season at 0:00 on the man advantage, and the other one dressed three times. Nothing in his record suggests that changes here, on a team where the point jobs are already an argument between Cagnoni and Orlov.

The kill is the open door. San Jose finished 26th of 32 at 76.42 percent last season, and the three defensemen who led the club in shorthanded ice time are all gone. Allan killed 0:59 a night in Chicago. Check the shorthanded column of a San Jose box score in October: north of two minutes a game and Warsofsky trusts him with real work, under a minute and he is dressed because somebody is hurt.

The stakes#

Seventh defensemen decide seasons in the least dramatic way available. San Jose has missed the playoffs seven years running and spent this summer betting a rebuilt blue line closes the gap. The difference between a good version of that bet and a bad one shows up on the nights the top four is short a man. Allan is the answer to a question the club will be asked in November whether it wants to be or not.

Previous in the series: No. 20, Zack Ostapchuk.

Sources: Hockey Reference (San Jose and Chicago team pages, Allan's player page, 2025-26 league table); TheAHL.com official statistics, 2025-26 regular season; PuckPedia (contract, waivers eligibility); Sheng Peng, NBC Sports Bay Area, July 24, 2026; Eric Stephens, The Athletic, July 15, 2026; Max Miller, Sharks Hockey Digest, July 6, 2026; Professor Hockey, July 12, 2026.