The PP1 you can actually ice next year, and where it finishes
No free agents, no trades, no wishing. Just the five best men currently in the building, the one chair that decides everything, and an honest guess at where it finishes.
The Sharks have spent the last year running a power play with four lead singers and a guy on drums who kept setting fire to the kit. The singers were terrific. The drummer was John Klingberg, who ran the No. 1 unit for five months while ranking among the worst power-play defensemen in the entire league, which is a sentence that should not be physically possible to write and yet here we are. The unit finished 20.9 percent, 17th. With that personnel up top, 17th was almost an act of vandalism against the talent.
So here is the best five you can build with what is already on the roster, and then the honest part, which is that four of these chairs are easy and the fifth is the whole season.
The unit
| Spot | Player | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Bumper (high slot) | Macklin Celebrini | Put the 115-point engine in the most dangerous square foot of ice. Shoots, tips, distributes, terrifies. 8 PP goals, 25 PP assists last year and that was the floor. |
| Left half-wall | Will Smith | Right-shot one-timer off the catch plus elite vision. The secondary brain. Also had 8 on the power play. |
| Right-side flank | Michael Misa | Scouts grade his power-play sense as already first-unit. Quick-strike off-puck movement, a third passing option that breaks penalty-kill geometry. |
| Net-front | Igor Chernyshov | The one genuine power forward in the top six. Screens, tips, eats rebounds, and is hard to box out. Every other name here is a perimeter artist; he is the guy who stands in the paint and bleeds. |
| Point (QB) | Luca Cagnoni (the bet) | The highest power-play-quarterback skill in the organization. Ran the Barracuda's No. 1 unit, looked legitimately good in his three-game NHL cameo. Lane Hutson is the comp people keep reaching for, which tells you the ceiling and the size risk in one breath. |
Read that group again. The bumper is a franchise center, the half-wall is a 59-point playmaker, the flank is the second overall pick, the net-front is a 20-year-old power forward, and waiting on the SECOND unit, running its own show, is William Eklund, a 53-point top-six winger who led the team in power-play assists among non-Celebrinis. When your PP2 quarterback is a guy that good, you do not have a talent problem. You have a sequencing problem.
The chair that decides the season
Four of those five names are layups. The point is the entire question, because the Sharks do not currently have a proven NHL power-play quarterback on the blue line. They have three bets:
- Cagnoni (highest ceiling, real risk): the skill is there, the resume is three NHL games and a 5-foot-9 frame. If he can hold the blue line and walk the seam, this unit jumps a tier. If he gets hunted, it stalls.
- Sam Dickinson (the untapped option): the staff bizarrely kept him off the power play all of last year despite his skating being his signature tool. There is a non-trivial chance the in-house answer was sitting on the third pairing the whole time, unused.
- Dmitry Orlov (the floor): safe, steady, low ceiling. The "we promise not to embarrass ourselves" choice. If the kids are not ready, this is where it lands, and it is fine, and fine is the word that keeps a power play 14th.
And there is a fifth option that sidesteps the whole problem: go five forwards. Smith or Eklund quarterbacks from the top, you ice Celebrini, Smith, Misa, Eklund, and Chernyshov, and you simply refuse to participate in the part of the sport the Sharks are bad at. It is high-wire (one turnover is a track meet the other way), but with this forward group it is a real lever, and the smart version of this team keeps it in the back pocket for the third period of a one-goal game.
Where it finishes
Here is my honest number. With a functional answer at the point, this unit should run roughly 23 to 25 percent and finish around eighth to tenth in the league. The jump from 17th is not about adding skill. The skill was already elite. It is about subtracting Klingberg, fixing the maddeningly predictable Celebrini-to-Smith entry that penalty kills had memorized by December, and giving Celebrini a full healthy season as the trigger man instead of a guy dragging a dead-weight point man behind him.
The ceiling, if Cagnoni hits or Misa pops the way his draft pedigree says he can, is a genuine top-five power play, 26-plus percent. The floor, if the point stays a science experiment all year and the entries stay stale, is roughly where they already were, 17th to 20th, which would be a damning waste of this much talent and would tell you the problem was never personnel and always deployment.
So: top-ten is the projection, top-five is the dream, middle-of-the-pack is the cautionary tale, and every one of those outcomes is decided by one defenseman and one coaching decision about how brave to be. The forwards already did their part. They have been ready for a while. Somebody just has to hand them the puck at the right blue line and get out of the way.
Built entirely from current personnel. Add a real power-play QB in free agency (a Carlson type) and the floor argument mostly disappears, but you did not ask for the shopping-list version, you asked what they can ice today, and today this is the five.
