TIME TO REGROUP
A look at the Sharks at the break: How did it get this bad?
SAN JOSE >> As the Sharks gathered their belongings inside the visitor’s dressing room at Rogers Arena in Vancouver last weekend and got ready to fly back to California, there was a common theme.
“This is probably a great break for everybody,” interim coach Bob Boughner said.
“The break that we’re having right now,”
Kevin Labanc said, “it’ll be good for the team to kind of reboot their minds and take a step back from hockey.”
The Sharks are on their five-day January break, a provision added four years ago to the NHL’s collective bargaining agreement with the Players Association in exchange for the approval of changes to the All-Star Game format.
When the Sharks return for practice Sunday after the All-Star weekend they will have next-to-no hope of making the postseason. It’s a place they haven’t been in at this point in the season in nearly a quarter-century.
The Sharks are in sixth place in the Pacific Division and in 13th place in the Western
Conference. At 21-25-4, the Sharks are 11 points out of a playoff spot, as far out of the race at the break as they’ve been in 24 years when they finished the 1995-96 season with a record of 20-55-7.
Let’s look at a few reasons.
Decisions backfire
There was a hope by the Sharks organization before training camp began that certain players on the 2018-19 Barracuda roster could seriously challenge for NHL roster spots.
That U50 group included Dylan Gambrell, Alexander True, Jayden Halbgewachs, Nick DeSimone and Jacob Middleton.
Gambrell, though, was the only player from the Barracuda to make the Sharks’ opening night roster. The three other rookies to make the team were out of camp were Lean Bergmann, Danil Yurtaykin and Mario Ferraro — they signed contracts with the Sharks in the spring.
The Sharks in the past have been able to fill roster gaps with European free agents, but almost every one of those players needed some time in the minors to adjust to the North American game.
But since only Gambrell was able to crack the NHL roster, Yurtaykin and Bergmann needed to learn a new style of play in the best league in the world on the fly. The Sharks started the year 0-4-0, scoring just five goals along the way.
The lack of NHL-ready talent in the Sharks’ system can be traced back a few years.
Their 2013 and 2014 firstround draft picks, Mirco Mueller and Nikolay Goldobin, respectively, never totally panned out while they were in teal uniforms. In fact, from the 2013, 2014 and 2015 drafts, the only player chosen outside of the first round to make a significant impact with the Sharks has been Kevin Labanc, taken in the sixth round in 2014.
The 2015 draft was deep, too, with 37 players from that class — as of Tuesday morning — having already played at least 100 NHL games, with several more on the way.
The Sharks also traded their 2016 first-round pick to Boston for goalie Martin Jones, and sent 2017 first-rounder Josh Norris to Ottawa in the package that brought Erik Karlsson to San Jose.
It all comes home to roost now, as the Sharks rank 28th in the NHL in overall goals per game at 2.56 and 25th in 5 on 5 scoring per game.
The Sharks may find themselves in the same spot next season in terms of relying young, cheap players to make an impact at the NHL level.
With the salary cap in 2020-21 not expected to climb a whole lot above the present upper limit of $81.5 million, the Sharks will need to either clear out some space to bring in proven help, or hope that once again a few players that make around $1 million outperform their contracts.
Big question remains
The biggest question the Sharks arguably had coming into the season was goaltending, and the team did not do anything in the summer to address the position.
The Sharks’ team save percentage of .889 in 201819 was the worst in the NHL, but the team was able to get beyond that by scoring a franchise record 289 goals.
But with the Sharks on pace to score about 210 goals this season, the overall subpar goaltending, and the team-wide propensity for allowing prime scoring chances — have been exposed.
The Sharks’ team save percentage this season is .891, which as of Tuesday morning, ranked 29th in the NHL.
It was .887 on the morning of Dec. 11, the day the Sharks fired Pete DeBoer named Bob Boughner the interim head coach. A lot of that has to do with Aaron Dell, who, in that time, has gone from .893 to .909 in 11 games.
At the beginning of the season, Martin Jones still had five years left on a contract that had an average annual value of $5.75 million.
That was, and still will be, a difficult deal to move in a trade, unless the Sharks were willing to retain some of that salary, or take on another team’s bad contract.
Dell’s deal, as well, had one year left at $1.9 million.
Neither faced much competition in training camp, as both Antoine Bibeau and Josef Korenar struggled in one preseason game each. With Bibeau now with the Colorado Avalanche organization and Korenar owning a .887 save percentage in 23 AHL games this season, it doesn’t appear — on the surface — that there will be push from underneath next year, either.
The question now is how the Sharks plan to proceed.
Can Jones get his game back to a place to where the Sharks feel comfortable bringing him back to be their number one goalie, or least be someone they can count on to make 30 to 40 starts, next season.
If they do not resign Dell, is there another goalie they can find on a budget to come in and make up the difference?
Learning a new identity too late
One of the reasons Doug Wilson made a coaching change was that the Sharks were giving up far too many high danger scoring chances in the slot area.
For some reason, it took two months for team to realize that they could not play the same style they been playing for four years under former coach DeBoer.
DeBoer talked almost from the start of the year that he wanted to have a four-line attack that could put constant pressure on opposing teams. But he didn’t have the horses to play that type of game. The fourth line was ever-evolving, and the third line had little or no scoring punch. The Sharks lost forwards Joe Pavelski, Joonas Donskoi and Gus Nyquist and did not replace them in a meaningful way.
That put more pressure on Logan Couture, Tomas Hertl, Evander Kane, Brent Burns, Timo Meier, Karlsson and Labanc to produce, and the results have been mixed, at best.
Besides that, the Sharks were playing soft defense and were taking too many penalties. They defended harder on the penalty kill than they did at even strength.
Now at least, the Sharks have had it drilled home by Boughner that they can not try to out-skill teams. They have to outwork them, particularly at the defensive end.
It’s just a matter of committing to that style, a process which should have started in training camp.
“You’re going to go through these spells at some point as a team and as an organization. We’re in the middle of it right now,” Karlsson said after the Sharks’ 4-1 loss to the Canucks. “This is where we’re going to find out who’s going to be here long-term and what we’re going to have to do to move forward and come back to being the team that we’ve been here before.
“We still have a good team even though we’re not showing that right now. Just got to find a way to build on something, find a building block to start on, and go from there.”