Sharks fall short in bid for Tavares

Free agent winds up with the Toronto Maple Leafs on seven-year, $77 million deal

SAN JOSE >> Toronto Maple Leafs 2, Sharks 0.

A year after losing Patrick Marleau to the Maple Leafs, the Sharks fell short in their effort to bring the biggest unrestricted free agent to hit the open market in the NHL’s salary cap era to Silicon Valley, coming out on the wrong end of another bidding war with Toronto.

The Maple Leafs won the John Tavares sweepstakes Sunday, signing the 27-yearold free agent to a seven-year, $77 million contract. In doing so, Tavares ended his nine-year tenure with the New York Islanders while breaking the hearts of Sharks fans who had envisioned him as a longterm replacement for Joe Thornton, who turns 39 today.

The Sharks were among the final teams on the list of squads that Tavares was considering after meeting with six organizations in Los Angeles during the NHL’s “listening period” for pending free agents last

week. Although Tavares said the choice eventually came down to the Maple Leafs and the Islanders, Sharks general manager Doug Wilson indicated that the Sharks were in the mix right until the end.

“I actually heard from John himself this morning, tremendously professional,” Wilson said. “We let them know that we were committed to whatever it would take to be able to have John come here.”

According to a report out of Canada, the Sharks offered Tavares a contract with an average annual salary north of $13 million a year, a deal that would have made him among the league’s top-five highestpaid players.

But at the end of the day, the lure of playing for the team that he grew up rooting for as a Torontoarea native helped tip the scale in the Maple Leafs’ direction. Tavares called playing for his hometown team a “once in a lifetime opportunity.”

The 2009 first-overall pick also expects the Maple Leafs to compete for the Stanley Cup throughout the course of his seven-year contract, another variable that factored heavily into his decision. The Maple Leafs’ roster is loaded with talented young players, such as Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and William Nylander, and their minor-league franchise, the Toronto Marlies, won the AHL’s Calder Cup last month.

“I’m thrilled to be starting a new chapter of my career and life in Toronto with the @MapleLeafs,” Tavares wrote on Twitter. “I feel very fortunate to come join a team with a great young core and play where I grew up learning and loving the game. I can’t wait to get started!”

The Sharks made a complete full-court press in their attempt to land Tavares. Owner Hasso Plattner personally attended Wilson’s meeting with him,

Evander Kane wrote a glowing article about the culture of the Sharks’ dressing room in the Players’ Tribune on Friday, and Logan Couture offered his two cents with a text message.

“I just reached out to him and said, ‘You’ve probably heard, San Jose is a good place to play. We’d love to have you,’ ” Couture said. “Basically that was it. I didn’t want to put any added pressure on him.

“We obviously respect the decision he made.”

Wilson insisted that the pursuit didn’t inhibit his ability to go after other unrestricted free agents, such as Ilya Kovalchuk, Paul Stastny and James Van Riemsdyk, who signed contracts before the Tavares deal was announced Sunday morning. In truth, the Sharks probably weren’t that interested in any of the other free agents available, especially at the prices they eventually signed for.

“When we came into this year’s UFA market, there was probably three top UFAs: John Tavares, Evander Kane and John Carlson,” Wilson said. “We signed one of them and we took a swing at another one.”

With Tavares off the board, the Sharks will now turn their attention to resigning Thornton, an unrestricted free agent, and hashing out new deals for restricted free agents Tomas Hertl and Chris Tierney. Wilson said the team is also negotiating with defenseman Dylan DeMelo, an unrestricted free agent.

Although they whiffed on Tavares, the Sharks did take care of some important business Sunday, signing Couture, 29, to an eight-year contract extension reportedly worth $64 million. The deal makes Couture, who’s coming off a career season in which he scored 34 goals, the highest-paid player on the team, matching the contract signed by Brent Burns in November 2016.

“I’ve made up my mind that San Jose is the place I want to play hockey. We have a great chance to win, and obviously,

that’s my No. 1 goal, is to win a Stanley Cup,” Couture said. “It was an easy decision for me.” Similar to last summer, when the Sharks locked down Marc-Edouard Vlasic and Martin Jones as soon as they were eligible for extensions, Wilson made it a priority to get a long-term commitment from Couture this offseason to avoid a Tavares-like bidding war for his services next summer.

“If you wait too long, and you get into a situation where they have the potential to walk, or explore the UFA market, those can be challenging times,” the Sharks general manager said.

With more than $19 million available in cap space, the Sharks aren’t giving up on their search for a “difference maker” at forward. But it’s quite possible that Wilson will need to show patience in acquiring that piece, as the cost of doing business through the trade market is usually higher in the offseason. If the Sharks are dissatisfied with how the marketplace shakes out this summer, they can wait and pursue an in-season trade as they did last winter when they held out until Feb. 26 to replace Marleau, acquiring Kane in a deal with the Buffalo Sabres at the deadline.

Among the players that the Sharks could pursue via trade at some point are Columbus Blue Jackets winger Artemi Panarin and Carolina Hurricanes winger Jeff Skinner, who are both slated to become unrestricted free agents next summer, and Montreal Canadiens forward Max Pacioretty.

But Wilson insists that he isn’t going to make a move just because he has cap space available. He intends to hold out until the right situation presents itself.

“You can’t chase players,” Wilson said. “But trust me, we will explore everything to make (our team) better. If it’s now, next week, early in the season or any time around the trade deadline, we have the cap space to be able to do that.”