San Jose Sharks at the halfway point: Losing record, but improved culture
NHL: Bob Boughner feels the San Jose Sharks have found their identity
The Stanley Cup-or-bust era for the San Jose Sharks has been over for a while.
Yes, the Sharks wanted to try and be a playoff team this season. But before they could realistically make a run at the postseason, they needed to fix the culture, find an identity and have their younger players take a step forward in their development.
With the Sharks at the midway point of their season, the results have been mixed.
The Sharks are nowhere near a playoff spot, as they entered the weekend nine points back of fourthplace St. Louis in the West Division after a 2-1 shootout loss to the Blues on Friday night. The Sharks (11-13-4) host the Blues tonight, then face the fifthplace Los Angeles Kings on Monday and Wednesday.
Still, in terms of resetting the culture and finding an identity, the Sharks feel they have made strides.
Their identity is clearer now than it was at the start of the season. They’re a forechecking team, one that wants to create scoring chances off turnovers in the offensive zone. When the opportunity to make a play at the blue line isn’t there, the Sharks have been better at chipping it in and trying to outwork the opposition’s defense to regain control below the dots.
Although the Sharks haven’t been able to finish around the net nearly enough, they are one of the better teams in the NHL at creating chances off their forecheck.
“If you look at our last four or five weeks of work, I think you have to be pretty satisfied from a coaching perspective,” Sharks coach Bob Boughner said Saturday. “We made some changes and made some adjustments after our start to try to play to more to our strengths, and I think we have found that identity.”
The Sharks feel they’ve tightened things up at the defensive end, but their goaltending has taken a bigger step forward of late.
In six games in March, Devan Dubnyk is 2-3-1 with a .918 save percentage, and in five games, Martin Jones is 2-1-1 with a .923 save percentage. Both goalie’s save percentages were below .895 for the first 18 games of the season.
In 10 games this month, the Sharks are 12th in the NHL in goals against per game (2.60). In 10 games in February, the Sharks were 31st and last in the league, allowing 3.90 goals per game.
In terms of culture, the biggest gains have been made in the last few weeks.
More players are buying into what Boughner and the Sharks’ coaching staff have been preaching. They’re standing up for one another more than they were at the start of the season, coming together when they’ve been faced with adversity instead of going their own ways like last season.
This was the foundation the Sharks needed to establish before they could take the next step as a team. Check with the Buffalo Sabres and the Detroit Red Wings, teams whose playoff droughts this year will reach 10 and five seasons, respectively, what it means to not have the right culture or play to an identity. This is what the Sharks are hoping to avoid.
Boughner and his staff talked about these things when the team gathered for training camp in Scottsdale, Arizona almost three months ago.
There were two messages, Boughner said. One was, “what kind of team we want to be off the ice. How we wanted to act with each other, how we wanted to uphold the code that we’ve brought in. The other part of it was: here’s our structure, here’s our tech pack and here’s how we’re going to play, and just working that every day without preseason games.
“It was almost like the first 10 games were our preseason. Things we liked we kept, there’s a couple of things that we tweaked and we identified areas that we needed to be better at analytically, and we brought those into our system. We really worked it out with practice and those next 10 games and we’re sitting here today as a much better team.”
The Sharks appear to have found two rookies that will help them going forward in John Leonard and Nikolai Knyzhov. Both have played significant roles this season, with Leonard in the team’s middle-six forward group and Knyzhov presently on the Sharks’ second defense pair with Erik Karlsson.
It’s fair to wonder, though, who else is coming in terms of the team’s prospect pool.
Ryan Merkley is playing big minutes with the Barracuda right now, but he did not come close to making the Sharks roster out of training camp as Boughner felt he still had a lot of work to do in the defensive end. Noah Gregor is back in the AHL after he started the season with the Sharks. Joachim Blichfeld has played two NHL games this year but wasn’t able to stick. Same with Sasha Chmelevski.
Goalie Alexei Melnichuk could play regularly with the Sharks as soon as this time next month, depending on whether Dubnyk is traded to another team by the April 12 deadline. Melnichuk is part of the Sharks’ plans beyond this season, without question.
But some of the Sharks’ other top prospects — forwards Thomas Bordeleau and Ozzy Wiesblatt and defenseman Artemi Kniazev — are at least two or three years away from making an impact in the NHL.
There is also the issue of salary cap space for next season, and how much flexibility general manager Doug Wilson will have in terms of adding free agents or making trades to upgrade the roster.
There’s no way to know for sure until this summer.