How did things get this bad for Sharks?
San Jose should have seen a season like this coming
SAN JOSE >> As the Sharks gathered their belongings inside the visitor’s dressing room at Rogers Arena in Vancouver on the 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 right now 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 AllStar Game format.
When the Sharks return for practice Sunday after NHL AllStar weekend, they will have nextto-no hope of making the postseason, a place they haven’t been in as an organization at this point in the season in close to 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.
Decisions come home to roost
There was a hope by the Sharks organization before training camp began that certain players on the 201819 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 — three players who 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 first round 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.
The biggest 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?