Only Macklin Celebrini Scored Faster Than Adam Gaudette Last Season

Here is one instruction, and it does most of the work.

Take the twelve forwards San Jose returns who dressed at least twenty games last season. Sort them by goals per sixty minutes of ice time, all situations, most first. Read the first two names.

Macklin Celebrini at 1.54. Then Adam Gaudette at 1.35.

Now sort the same twelve by ice time per game, fewest first, and read the first three. Zack Ostapchuk at 10:06. Barclay Goodrow at 11:21. Adam Gaudette at 11:28.

That is the whole player. Every figure above comes off the club's final 2025-26 table: 17 goals in 66 games, 96 shots, 17.7 percent.

The contract#

Two years and $4,000,000, signed as a free agent in July 2025. This is the second year, at a $2,000,000 cap hit, with no trade protection and unrestricted free agency in July 2027.

The clause that matters is one that is not there. Gaudette is not exempt from waivers. San Jose cannot move him to the Barracuda for a fortnight and bring him back; it has to offer him to 31 clubs first. A thirteenth forward here does not shuttle. He sits in the press box at $2,000,000, or he plays.

The squeeze, counted#

Five sources published projected San Jose forward lines this summer, and between them they produced seven different top twelves. DailyFaceoff on July 4. Sharks Hockey Digest on July 6, which ran three separate versions. Professor Hockey on July 7. Eric Stephens at The Athletic on July 15. Sheng Peng at NBC Sports Bay Area on July 24.

Gaudette dresses in two of the seven. Peng puts him on the right side of a fourth line with Kiefer Sherwood and Ostapchuk; one of the three Sharks Hockey Digest lineups has him there with Tyler Toffoli and Ostapchuk. The other five leave him out. Professor Hockey calls him the thirteenth forward outright, Stephens lists him a healthy scratch, and DailyFaceoff does not reach him.

All seven were drawn before Collin Graf re-signed on July 31, and all seven already had Graf in the top twelve. The one transaction that could have opened a forward spot closed instead.

Best case#

The best case is that the door opens and he is next to it.

Professor Hockey made the mechanism explicit on his August 12 board. He reads Gaudette as the thirteenth forward who is at times the twelfth, so any injury in the lineup is a Gaudette game, sometimes one higher up the sheet than a fourth line. He put him at 20 points across the new 84-game schedule. That number is his, not this desk's.

The shot rate underneath it is what makes that a scenario rather than a hope. Gaudette put 1.45 shots on goal per game on eleven and a half minutes a night, which is 7.61 per sixty, fifth among those same twelve and ahead of Graf, Michael Misa and Igor Chernyshov. Shot volume per minute is the repeatable half of a scoring line. So the best case is sixty-odd games, a shooting percentage that falls and a shot count that does not, and the cheapest goals on the roster coming from the last forward on the sheet.

Worst case#

The worst case is a healthy season for everybody else.

If San Jose's top twelve stays upright through November, Gaudette watches. He cannot be sent down without being offered to the league, nobody is waiting on his development, and nothing about his deal makes him hard to move: expiring, two million, no clauses, exactly the shape a contender buys in February for a fourth-round pick. The worst case is thirty games, six goals and a trade nobody writes a second paragraph about.

The three arguments against me, and the second one is the real one#

1. Goals per sixty on 11:28 a night is measured against the softest opposition the club had. Fourth-line minutes come with fourth-line matchups, and a rate posted there does not survive a promotion unchanged.
2. 17.7 percent on 96 shots is a regression candidate. It was the fifth-highest conversion rate among the seventeen San Jose forwards with a real sample. Erika Towne at Fear the Fin argued on August 14 that the gap between Gaudette's percentage and Ty Dellandrea's 4.0 is the reason to prefer Gaudette for the fourth-line job. The gap is real, at 13.7 points, and it is a statement about one season of 96 shots rather than a forecast.
3. The evaluators split on him, and they split on defense. Jack Han, author of Hockey Tactics 2026, told Peng in July that he likes Dellandrea as a depth player because "he's better defensively and reads the game better than Gaudette." Towne went the other way, on finishing. Same job, two analysts, opposite conclusions.

What to watch in October#

Games played, first, and the only number that matters until it stops being scarce. If Gaudette is in the lineup for eight of the first ten, the depth chart on paper is not the one Ryan Warsofsky is using.

Then shots on goal per game, straight off the box score. He was at 1.45 last season. That figure surviving on similar minutes is the evidence that the skill is volume rather than percentage, and it shows up before the goals do.

Last, the power play. Three of his 17 goals came there, and Professor Hockey's structural argument for the season is that San Jose's power play cannot fit all ten of its top-nine-caliber forwards. If a right shot who scored 17 goals is drawing a second-unit shift in October, somebody ahead of him lost one.

The stakes#

San Jose has not made the playoffs in seven seasons, since 2018-19, and this is the first year the roster makes the question honest. A team on that line does not miss because its thirteenth forward was mediocre. It misses because it lost three forwards in a week in December and the man who replaced them could not score. That week comes for everybody, which is the point of carrying a finisher at the bottom of the sheet.

Previously in this series: The Sharks 25, No. 25, Ty Dellandrea.

Sources: San Jose Sharks 2025-26 final skater statistics; PuckPedia and CapWages contract pages; DailyFaceoff projected lines, July 4, 2026; Sharks Hockey Digest, Max Miller, July 6, 2026; Professor Hockey's forward-line projection, July 7, 2026, and his 21-player point-total board, August 12, 2026; The Athletic, Eric Stephens, July 15, 2026; NBC Sports Bay Area, Sheng Peng, July 24, 2026; Fear the Fin, Erika Towne, August 14, 2026.