The San Jose Sharks used the No. 2 pick in the 2026 Upper Deck NHL Draft on Friday in Buffalo to select Ivar Stenberg, then kept going with Keaton Verhoeff at No. 9 and Ryan Lin at No. 21. It was the kind of night that signaled one thing plainly: the Sharks are still building, but they are now building around a core that already looks dangerous.
Stenberg was the player San Jose got after moving up from No. 9 in the 2026 NHL Draft Lottery, and the selection came after Toronto Maple Leafs took Gavin McKenna with the No. 1 pick. That left the Sharks with a chance to land a player many believed could have gone first, which is why the No. 2 pick carried so much weight in Buffalo and why the Sharks’ draft haul drew so much attention.
The reason the club can take that swing is the group already in place. Macklin Celebrini finished fourth in the NHL with 115 points in 82 games this season, scoring 45 goals with 70 assists, and he helped Team Canada win silver at the 2026 Winter Olympics in February. San Jose has now selected nine players in the first round over the past four drafts, with Will Smith going No. 4 in 2023, Celebrini No. 1 in 2024 and Michael Misa No. 2 in 2025. The Sharks have been reloading fast enough that the draft no longer feels like a reset; it feels like reinforcement.
That does not erase the problem in front of them. San Jose still finished four points out of the second wild card from the Western Conference and has missed the Stanley Cup Playoffs for seven straight seasons, which means the young talent has not yet become a playoff team. The gap is now less about whether the Sharks have enough skill and more about how quickly that skill turns into wins that matter in the standings.
The players themselves can see what is forming. Stenberg said San Jose has something really good going on. Lin said he has already skated with Celebrini a few times this offseason and noted that they are both from the Vancouver area, while Verhoeff called it pretty cool to imagine passing the puck to Celebrini on a power play someday. For a team that has spent years trying to find its way back, that kind of talk from three first-round picks is as revealing as the picks themselves.
The Sharks have added another layer to the roster now, but the next question is sharper than the draft slot: when does a team that keeps collecting blue-chip talent finally stop talking about the future and start playing into April?
