Let me tell you the number that actually matters here, and it isn't the height. It's 201. As in 201st overall — the seventh round, the part of the draft where teams are no longer drafting players so much as drafting ideas. By the time you're picking 201st, the safe, rosterable, here-is-a-fourth-line-grinder names are gone. What's left is upside you have to squint at and physical freaks you talk yourself into. So San Jose talked itself into the biggest one available.

Alexander Karmanov is 7-foot-1. Roughly 275 pounds. Eighteen years old, born in Chișinău, Moldova — and as far as anyone can find, the first player ever drafted into the NHL from Moldova. He is also, by a clean four inches, the tallest human being ever selected at an NHL draft. The previous record holder was Zdeno Chara at 6-foot-9, and Chara is a Hall of Famer who won a Norris and a Cup and played until he was 45. Karmanov is taller than that man. In skates he reportedly clears 7-foot-4. You could not invent this prospect; he sounds like a bit a hockey writer would make up at last call.

Now the part where I stop being delighted and start being honest, because that's the deal we have.

He cannot skate. Not "needs work" — scouts had his skating graded at roughly 1.5 to 2 out of 10, which evaluators flagged as the worst foot speed in the entire 2026 class. NHL Central Scouting ranked him 214th among North American skaters, which is scout-speak for we expect this guy to go home undrafted. His numbers are a rumor: 20 OHL games with North Bay, two assists, a +6 that tells you more about the leverage of his stick than his hands. The first pass is shaky. The puck handling is shakier. If you are building a case that Alexander Karmanov is going to play an NHL game, the entire case is leverage and reach — that a man this size can plant his stick at the center of the rink and physically herd the play to the boards without having to move his feet, which, scouts agree, he genuinely can do.

So why am I fine with this? Because of where it happened. This is the seventh round. This is the last pick the Sharks made. The opportunity cost of Alexander Karmanov is nothing — there is no version of San Jose's rebuild that gets derailed by a 201st-overall flyer. I've spent two weeks writing about the real machinery of this thing: the No. 2 pick on Ivar Stenberg, the Eklund trade, the Kesselring deal, Celebrini as the load-bearing wall. None of that gets touched here. The franchise outcome was decided in the rounds that count. By the seventh, the correct strategy is to stop drafting probability and start drafting variance — and there is no higher-variance bet on the board than a 7-foot-1 teenager with two NHL outcomes and nothing in between.

Because that's the truth of him: there's no middle. Karmanov is either Zdeno Chara — a giant who was also skeptically reviewed at the draft, who spent a decade learning to move that frame and turned reach into a twenty-year career — or he's John Scott, a man whose body got him 286 NHL games and eleven career points and an All-Star bit. The Chara path is a Hall of Fame. The Scott path is a curiosity and a development-camp story. There is essentially no scenario where Karmanov is a fine, forgettable third-pair guy, and that bimodal shape is exactly what you want with a free swing. You don't spend pick 201 on a coin that lands on its edge. You spend it on a coin that's either a jackpot or a joke, because the downside is already priced in at zero.

He'll go back to North Bay this year, then to Penn State in 2027, and the only question that matters — can he learn to move his feet fast enough that NHL forwards can't simply skate around the wall — won't have an answer until 2029 at the earliest. Which is the other reason there's no bet here, and I want to be plain about it: there is no line on Alexander Karmanov. No prop, no over/under, no market that resolves before some of you have changed jobs twice. This is analysis, not a wager. Anyone selling you a "value" on a 7th-round defenseman three years from his first pro shift is selling you something.

But the romance is real and I'm not going to pretend it isn't. A kid from a country that has never sent anyone to this league, a body the sport has literally never drafted before, taken with the very last card San Jose had to play. The expected value is probably a nice story and a North Bay highlight reel. The tail outcome is a unicorn. For free, at pick 201, you take the unicorn every single time.

Line not pulled — no market exists on a seventh-round 18-year-old. Analysis only.