Sharks Locker Room: Despite 8-Game Skid, San Jose in Good Place, Really

The San Jose Sharks are in a good place right now.

Really.

Rock-bottom for the Sharks was last year, when they were the second-worst team of the salary cap era with a .287 Points %. Their -150 Goal Differential was the worst since the 1993-94 Ottawa Senators’ -196.

The 2024-25 Sharks weren’t going to turn into the Florida Panthers overnight.

A rebuild, after all, is incremental, and San Jose is getting incrementally better, even after a flat 4-0 loss on New Year’s Eve to the Philadelphia Flyers, their eighth-straight loss.

Compare where the Sharks are this year to last season at this time:

Sharks at New Year's Eve

San Jose has gone from being a historically bad team to just a standard bad outfit.

Underscoring that, their -37 Goal Differential is worst in the NHL, but it’s right behind second-to-last Chicago Blackhawks’ -34. Last season, the Sharks’ -75 Goal Differential at New Year’s Eve was -26 behind the second-to-last Blackhawks’ -49.

In the last 365 days, the Sharks have added a No. 1 center of the future in Macklin Celebrini and a No. 1 goalie of the future in Yaroslav Askarov.

Young wingers William Eklund and Fabian Zetterlund, among the few bright spots last year, are continuing to improve and show that they’re legitimate NHL forwards.

Prospects Will Smith, Shakir Mukhamadullin, Nikolai Kovalenko, and Henry Thrun have been more up and down, but they’ve shown flashes of being part of the long-term solution.

This isn’t even mentioning a much-improved San Jose Barracuda squad that’s solidly entrenched in the playoffs, and their cadre of intriguing prospects.

There’s a lot of reason to believe that the Sharks will be better next New Year’s Eve than they are today.

All this is, surely, cold comfort to a San Jose Sharks squad that really needs a win right now.

But you don’t build a Stanley Cup winner in a day.

Now this isn’t to say that tonight’s “no desperation” effort against the Flyers isn’t a concern. This kind of effort hasn’t been the norm for a Sharks squad that’s been pretty competitive all season and even during this losing streak — in five of these eight-straight defeats, San Jose had third period leads.

The Sharks, already hard-pressed to keep games close, will be further challenged to do that as the Trade Deadline approaches, and if pending UFAs and line-up regulars Mikael Granlund, Luke Kunin, Nico Sturm, Cody Ceci, and Jan Rutta are moved.

Granlund has been arguably San Jose’s best player this season, the gritty Kunin is scoring at a 20-goal pace, Ceci is the team’s No. 2 defenseman, while Sturm and Rutta have been consistently hard to play against.

They’re not likely to be replaced, one for one, by any of the prospects in the Sharks’ system right now, at least if we’re talking about attention to detail and the little things that coaches care most about.

Sure, a rebuilding Sharks organization, just like they did in the recent Mackenzie Blackwood trade, needs to keep adding prospects and draft picks. But this isn’t last year’s teardown either — they need to keep a competitive group around Celebrini and Smith and company after the Trade Deadline, and in the coming years.

So there’s a balance between getting what you can for your UFAs — and possibly keeping a couple of them too, to help keep the rebuild on an upward trend.

All this is to say, I like where the Sharks are right now, eight-game losing streak be damned. But there’s still plenty of hockey and trades, for better or for worse, left this season.

Immediately, let’s see how San Jose gets up off the mat from this dismal effort. It certainly doesn’t get easier with consecutive games against the Tampa Bay Lightning on Thursday, New Jersey Devils on Saturday, and then, the Vegas Golden Knights on Jan. 7.

Ryan Warsofsky

Warsofsky, on if he needs more from Georgiev:

No.

Warsofsky, on if there’s anything positive to take from tonight:

No.

Warsofsky, on if it’s discouraging that the Sharks, at least tonight, are getting worse on this losing streak and not better:

It’s very disappointing. No desperation. And now you’re seeing teams find their identity in this league. Earlier on, I think we were probably catching teams by surprise. Now teams, this is full go. We’re into almost January now. It’s every night, it’s going to be a dog fight. Every night, it’s going to be, we’re going to get teams’ best because they’re fighting for playoff spots. They’re fighting for spots in their division standings, wherever it might be. And we have to realize that.

Warsofsky, on if he wants more desperation from the San Jose Sharks:

Oh yeah, big time.

"No desperation," is one way that Warsofsky described #SJSharks' effort tonight.

"We've obviously tried some things throughout the season to keep getting that desperation & understanding the competitiveness that you need to play with…we're in a little bit of a lull right now…

— Sheng Peng (@Sheng_Peng) January 1, 2025

Mario Ferraro

Ferraro’s takeaways from tonight:

I don’t think we brought it from the get-go. We were a little slow. We just looked behind for most of the night, and I think we just kind of took our foot off the gas a little bit, especially when they extended the lead.

Alexandar Georgiev

Georgiev, on the Nick Seeler goal:

Just a tough, tough bounce. I was trying to be in the post and be solid, but somehow the puck just hit me on the hand and managed to get in. Probably need to check the review there, replay. Bad goal, unlucky goal.

Georgiev, on where he thinks his game is at:

I don’t know, I think there are a lot of good things. They had a lot of good opportunities there, and I felt confident. I felt in position, and making a lot of good saves. If you don’t give up those two bad bounces [on the Seeler and Egor Zamula goals], it’s a different game.

You’re just trying to find positivity and go from there.

Georgiev, on if he feels close to getting his game where he wants:

I definitely feel like that.

Mikael Granlund

Granlund, on what the San Jose Sharks need to improve:

We gotta do better job playing with the puck. Break out some pucks, and we need to be able to win some more battles too in the D-zone and get to the offensive zone. But there’s a lot of things we should do better, and we got to work on that.