San Jose Called Up Its Forwards In A Different Order Than The Barracuda Scored Them

Take the nine forwards San Jose has under contract for next season who dressed for the San Jose Barracuda last season. Rank them by points per game. Then cover the names and read only the column showing how many NHL games each of them played.

The order falls apart immediately. The man at the top played zero. The two at the bottom played 62 of the group's 142 NHL games between them.

The top of the list#

Filip Bystedt is 22. San Jose drafted him 27th overall in 2022, and last season, his second full year in North America, he scored 22 goals and added 38 assists in 65 games, led the Barracuda in points, and finished 18th in scoring in the American Hockey League. He has never played an NHL game. Not one, in three professional seasons, per the league's own player record and per Hockey Reference, which lists no NHL row for him at all.

Quentin Musty is 21, drafted 26th overall in 2023, and last season was his first as a professional. He put up 21 goals and 24 assists in 61 games, which was eighth in points among every rookie in the AHL. He also took 168 shots, second on the Barracuda behind Egor Afanasyev's 174, and he finished minus 14, the lowest figure in the nine and matched only by Patrick Giles. He has never played an NHL game either.

Both of them said the obvious thing about wanting to play in one. Speaking at the NHLPA Rookie Showcase on July 29, in remarks reported by Tracey Myers of NHL.com, Bystedt said he had been waiting for camp all summer and that it would be "fun to see the guys as well and compete for a roster spot." Nobody from here was in Chicago. Barracuda coach John McCarthy, in the same story, said both played in the top six and logged important minutes, and then described what each still has to learn, and in both cases it was the defensive half of the rink.

What the roster looks like from underneath#

Fifteen forwards carry a cap hit on San Jose's 2026-27 sheet, totalling $51,298,334, which is 49.3 percent of a $104 million ceiling. One of them is Logan Couture at $8 million, on injured reserve, and he did not play a game last season. PuckPedia projects the active roster full at 23 and the cap space at $3,335,695.

Twelve more forwards are under contract and projected off that roster, Bystedt and Musty among them.

The bar is higher than the depth chart makes it look, because the bottom of San Jose's forward group is not a scoring job. Last season Zack Ostapchuk played 8:54 of even-strength ice a night across 59 games, Barclay Goodrow 9:22 across 82, Adam Gaudette 10:28 across 66, and Ty Dellandrea 11:25 across 46. All four are signed for next season, at $2.35 million, $3.64 million, $2 million and $1.63 million. Above them the minutes jump to Tyler Toffoli at 12:01 and Collin Graf at 13:29, and those men are signed too, Graf through 2028-29 and Mason Marchment for five years at $6.75 million.

So a 60-point AHL season is being cashed in against one of two things. Either a ten-minute checking assignment that four veterans were paid this summer to keep, or a top-nine job that is not vacant.

What AHL scoring is actually worth here#

There is a price for AHL production and this club paid it six weeks ago.

Alex Barré-Boulet scored 70 points in 70 games for the Colorado Eagles last season, second in the entire American Hockey League and ten clear of Bystedt. He played two NHL games all year and finished with one point. On July 1 San Jose signed him for two years at $875,000 and projects him as a non-roster forward, which is to say the AHL's second-leading scorer was bought to play in the AHL.

Jimmy Huntington is the same lesson in longer form. He is 27, he put up 48 points in 71 games on the same Barracuda team, he sits fourth on the chart above, and the NHL games column reads zero because it has read zero his whole career.

What the club can undo for free#

There is one more fact here and it is the quietest of the lot. Bystedt, Musty, Chernyshov, Misa, Lund and Ivar Stenberg are all exempt from waivers. Cardwell, Giles, Huntington, Ostapchuk, Barré-Boulet and Graf are not.

Exemption is not protection. It is the absence of a cost. San Jose can send Bystedt down to the Barracuda on any day it likes, the morning before the opener or the morning after, and pay nothing at all for the decision. To do the same thing with Ostapchuk or Cardwell it has to expose them to 31 other clubs first. When two players are close, the tiebreak is whichever answer is reversible, and for Bystedt the answer is always reversible.

It cuts the other way too, and honestly: the same exemption makes a call-up in December cheap. What it argues against is opening night, not the season.

Three arguments against me, and the first one is real#

One. Igor Chernyshov. He scored at 0.80 a game in the AHL, twelve hundredths behind Bystedt, and San Jose gave him 28 NHL games at 15:03 a night, which is not a look, it is a job. He was a second-round pick two years younger. The wall has a door in it and somebody went through last season.

Two. Points per game is a counting rate and nothing more. It does not know about defensive detail, and defensive detail is exactly what the Barracuda's coach named for both of these players. The chart is a record of what the organization did, not a claim about what it should have done.

Three. Camp is a real mechanism. San Jose opens the preseason at Anaheim on September 20 and the regular season at home against Florida on October 1, which leaves eleven days in which a job can be won on the ice rather than on a cap sheet. Injuries do the rest. The $8 million forward on this roster played zero games last season, and a spot that exists on a spreadsheet is not the same as a spot that exists on a bench.

The call#

Neither of them is on the roster for the opener. Bystedt is the better bet of the two to play NHL games at some point this season, because he is in the third and final year of his entry-level contract and becomes a restricted free agent in 2027, and a club deciding whether to pay him again has a reason to find out what it has. But 20 games is a lot for a forward who has yet to play one, and I do not think he gets there.

Sixty points led an American Hockey League team. Zero is still what it bought.

Sources: the American Hockey League's official skater statistics for the 2025-26 regular season; Hockey-Reference's 2025-26 San Jose Sharks team pages; the NHL's own player records and the club's 2026-27 schedule; PuckPedia's San Jose cap sheet, contract pages and waiver eligibility fields; and Tracey Myers, NHL.com, August 10, for the Bystedt, Musty and McCarthy quotes.