The San Jose Sharks went into the 2025-26 season with one of the deeper center pools in the league. With Macklin Celebrini, Alex Wennberg, Michael Misa and Ty Dellandrea down the middle, along with players like Will Smith and Adam Gaudette able to play the center role, the team already had NHL-level centers to spare. Dellandrea was finally slotted into a role that seemed to fit where he needed to play in the NHL, a fourth-line center with the ability to move up the lineup if injuries required it.
Dellandrea’s 2025-26 production
And at the start of the season, it seemed to serve Dellandrea well. He started things off with a bang, registering points in his first two games. Unfortunately, the forward’s offensive impact fizzled as the season wore on and his consistency waned. He went from 16-plus minutes of ice time in each of the first two games to just 9 minutes of playing time by game eight.
His ice time was up and down through November and December. Sometimes he was very impactful in games and sometimes he simply disappeared. Then, in January, an injury knocked Dellandrea out for nearly the rest of the season.
| Games Played | Goals | Assists | Points | +/- | Shooting % | TOI/Game |
| 46 | 2 | 9 | 11 | -18 | 4.0% | 14:11 |
Though Dellandrea returned in April to play four more games, he did not register a point and was a minus-3. He finished the season with 11 points and 14:11 of ice time per game.
Keep your expectations low for Dellandrea
When Dellandrea was drafted in 2018, he was the 13th overall pick by the Dallas Stars. At the time, he was projected to become a physical two-way, middle-six center (Mile High Hockey). Of course, he was 18 then; now he’s 25. While the forward may make a step or two more in his development, we have likely reached the what you see is what you get point in his career. Dellandrea is a physical bottom-six center who chips in with a goal every now and then.
The trouble is that his regularized-adjusted plus-minus (RAPM) chart from Evolving-Hockey shows that Dellandrea may be even less than that. Dellandrea was not good in any of the metrics last season.
While you might be able to dismiss some of his stats by understanding that his even-strength linemates included more than 100 minutes skating with Jeff Skinner and 36:30 on a line with Barclay Goodrow and Ryan Reaves, Dellandrea still didn’t do the one thing that was required of the fourth line, hold his own defensively.
And, history has been pretty clear that this season from Dellandrea wasn’t an outlier. Looking at his Evolving-Hockey RAPM chart for the 2022-25 seasons, you can see that Dellandrea has had a similar offensive impact during his time with San Jose (where the team lost a lot) and with Dallas (where the team won a lot).
One stat that’s particularly telling of Dellandrea’s impact is his shots per season. In the past four seasons, he’s averaged around one shot per game.
| Season | Games Played | Shots |
| 25-26 | 46 | 50 |
| 24-25 | 68 | 50 |
| 23-24 | 42 | 53 |
| 22-23 | 82 | 92 |
A player who’s creating offensive opportunities for himself is getting shots on goal, especially when they’re getting 14-15 minutes per game. Yes, Dellandrea spends time killing penalties, and he has a lot of starts in the defensive zone, but if he’s driving play, he’s getting out of the defensive zone. His inability to generate more than an average one-shot per game is something we’d like to see next season, but we’re not holding our breath.
The silver lining in it all
Dellandrea is the fourth-line center, so his scoring will not be relied upon to make or break the Sharks during the season. The positive is that he’s good at what the team relies on him to do, which is take faceoffs. He was best on the team among players who took 100 or more faceoffs, finishing the season with a 51.9%.
If you’re looking for another stat to make yourself feel better about Dellandrea, he’s also a net positive when it comes to penalties. In 46 games, he took 11 penalties and drew 18, which is a good deal for a player who was one of the team’s top penalty killers last season behind Collin Graf, Wennberg and Goodrow.
Finally, he was physical. He was fifth on the team in hits, despite playing fewer games than all four players ahead of him on the list.
| Player | Games Played | Hits |
| Ryan Reaves | 50 | 160 |
| Zack Ostapchuk | 59 | 140 |
| Barclay Goodrow | 82 | 140 |
| Mario Ferraro | 82 | 138 |
| Ty Dellandrea | 46 | 130 |
As an energy line, next season could go a lot worse than Dellandrea with Ostapchuk and Goodrow/Gaudette. The trio could create some scoring chances while throwing the body around.
Dellandrea’s future with the Sharks
In March, the team announced that it signed Dellandrea to a two-year contract with a yearly cap hit of $1.625 million. It’s a great deal for a depth center, and it can be moved at any time. That means if the team decides that Zack Ostapchuk is ready to take over the role, then no problem. If the Sharks want to move Dellandrea at the trade deadline for help in another spot, it’s an easy move. Signing a depth center at that price is never going to be a problem, especially if there are no restrictions on the contract.
In the near future, it means that the Sharks are pretty sure that Dellandrea will serve on the third/fourth line next season. Odds are that he’ll be the fourth-line center, but he might share that time with Ostapchuk if the Sharks re-sign the 22-year-old RFA. At the moment, the biggest question for Sharks fans appears to be which of the Sharks’ assets will General Manager Mike Grier move to help the team acquire the defenseman it needs. Dellandrea will most certainly be one of those trade chips that Grier can dangle in front of other teams as he tries to acquire the piece the Sharks need to take the next step.
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.
