When the San Jose Sharks traded for defenseman Calen Addison in November, the idea was that he would help an atrocious power play that couldn’t seem to get out of its own way. San Jose sent prospect Adam Raska and a 2026 fifth-round pick to the Minnesota Wild for Addison. The Sharks hoped the addition of a puck-moving defenseman would inject a much-needed scoring touch from the blueline while still offering defensive stability that the team was not getting from running a five-forward power play unit.
It didn’t work.
Addison’s 2023-24 production
Addison split his time between the Minnesota Wild and the Sharks last season.
| Games Played | G | A | Pts | +/- | TOI/G |
| 72 | 1 | 16 | 17 | -38 | 17:21 |
He had five points in 12 games with the Wild and was a minus-three. The other 12 points, including a single goal, came while playing 60 games with the Sharks.
The points-per-game difference between playing on the Sharks and playing on the Wild is large. Addison was on a .42 point-per-game pace with the Wild. That dropped down to a .2 point-per-game with the Sharks.
Addison’s impact on scoring
The points per game stat isn’t good for a player who was brought in to make the power play better and help the Sharks create offensive scoring chances. On a team where the defense was expected to be bad offensively, Addison was among the lowest in individual point percentage (IPP), a stat that measures the percentage of goals a player’s team scores while the player is on the ice and that player earned a point on.
Addison’s IPP was 32.43 this season. It was slightly better than only two other defensemen: Henry Thrun (32.35 IPP) and Kyle Burroughs (19.05 IPP). Addison trailed players that the Sharks traded away, like Nikita Okhotiuk (42.11 IPP). He also trailed players not known for their offense, like Marc-Edouard Vlasic (46.15 IPP) and Mario Ferraro (33.33 IPP).
Evolving-Hockey’s regularized-adjusted plus-minus (RAPM) chart shows exactly how bad it was. Even on a team that finished with a minus-150 in goal differential, this chart isn’t great.
Addison’s impact offensively, where he was supposed to add the most help to the Sharks’ lineup, was well below league average. His defense was even worse.
Did Addison make the power play worse?
All of this might be fine if we were seeing Brent Burns level production from Addison. It was often easy to overlook the defensive faults of Burns as he was putting the puck into the net at a far higher pace than he was getting scored on.
However, when you look closely at Addison’s IPP above, you realize that he actually received a boost in that number because of the power play. Among Sharks defensemen, Addison was the only one with 100 minutes or more on the power play. His 123:16 minutes on the man advantage was ahead of forwards like Anthony Duclair, Mike Hoffman and Thomas Bordeleau.
Yet, even with that boost, Addison’s IPP was among the worst on the team. Plus, it could be argued that he made the power play worse rather than better. Look what happens when you compare Addison’s Evolving-Hockey RAPM chart on the power play to Thrun’s.
You can see that while Thrun played fewer minutes on the power play (about one-fourth of what Addison played), he was a more impactful player on the man advantage than Addison.
In all three categories, Thrun had a positive impact on the power play compared to Addison’s negative one.
Shooting percentage was among the worst in the league
On a team that had trouble generating shots and goals, especially from the defense, no one was worse than Addison. In fact, when you look at his shooting percentage this season compared to the rest of the players in the league, there is only one player with a worse shooting percentage – Nick Seeler of the Philadelphia Flyers.
Addison took 93 shots this season, according to ESPN, and only 1.1% of those shots went in. This isn’t a matter of what team he was playing on, either. His shooting percentage on the Wild, before he arrived in San Jose, was 1.3%, and last season with Minnesota, his shooting percentage was 3.9%.
For comparison’s sake, according to NHL Edge, the league average number of shots by a defenseman this season was 67, while the league average in shooting percentage by defensemen was 4.3%. While Addison had more shots than the average defenseman, he was well below the league average in shooting percentage.
In only one season did Addison have a shooting percentage that was above the league average. In 2021-22 with Minnesota, he played 15 games, had 17 shots and had an 11.76% shooting percentage. Every other season, since 2020-21, his shooting percentage has been below 4%.
Addison’s future with the Sharks
Addison is a restricted free agent this season, coming off a one-year deal that paid him $825,000. He is 24 years old and arbitration-eligible.
The question the Sharks face is whether or not Addison is worth a qualifying offer. He has already played 152 games in the NHL, more than half of them with the Minnesota Wild. It feels as though that’s enough of a sample size for the Sharks to make a decision on the young defenseman.
At this point, Addison’s peak looks like he would fill a sixth- or seventh-defenseman role. San Jose is filled with those and so, without some other intangible like an offensive upside, it makes more sense to allow Addison to test free agency early rather than create more lower level blueline competition that could stifle any young prospects looking to move up.
Editor’s Note: Over the next few weeks, we will be rolling out the player reviews for the San Jose Sharks. We realize there were a lot of guys rotating into and out of the lineup and some of the key depth players were traded. As a result, Fear the Fin plans to focus on the players who are 1) still with the Sharks and 2) played 20 or more games for San Jose this season.
