SAN JOSE – Despite seeing his team finish well out of a playoff position for the second straight season, general manager Doug Wilson doesn’t feel the Sharks will need to be overhauled this summer to be in a better position to compete for a postseason spot in 2022.
A year after they ended an abbreviated season with the worst record in the Western Conference, the Sharks (21-27-7) are once again on the outside looking in, as they’ll finish in sixth or seventh place in the temporary West Division.
The Sharks enter their game with the Vegas Golden Knights 23rd out of 31 teams in the NHL in goals scored per game at 2.66, and 29th in goals allowed per game at 3.46.
“We’re not as far away as people think,” Wilson said Wednesday. “We’re not.”
Wilson will have been the Sharks’ GM for exactly 18 years on Thursday, and this season marks the first time in his tenure that the team will have missed the playoffs in consecutive seasons.
Wilson said Sharks majority owner Hasso Plattner was fully aware of the direction the team was taking this season. Wilson wanted to use this year as a “reset” to improve team culture, get certain veteran players back on track, and replenish their system through the draft.
Unlike in past seasons when the Sharks have had disappointing results, Plattner so far has not publicly endorsed Wilson as his guy going forward, although Wilson said the two talk frequently.
“My job is to do what’s right for the organization,” Wilson said. “(Plattner) has always been aware of the plan right from the start, we have complete clarity, and we talked about what we’re going to do.”
Wilson said by using his 2021 first-round draft pick and prospects, he could have acquired players — namely a goalie and a centerman — before last month’s NHL trade deadline that he felt would have propelled the Sharks into the playoffs.
“But would that have been the right thing to do in the middle of a reset/replenish? We don’t think so,” Wilson said. “And in hindsight sitting where we are right now, we feel comfortable that we committed and stayed to that plan.”
Wilson pointed to two areas of the Sharks’ roster that are priorities for improvement in the offseason: goaltending and center depth.
For the third straight year, the Sharks’ goaltending statistics will be among the worst in the NHL.
Entering Wednesday, the combined save percentage for Martin Jones, Devan Dubnyk, Josef Korenar and Alexei Melnichuk was .891, tied for 30th in the NHL with New Jersey and only ahead of Philadelphia (.880). Fourteen of the 16 teams that have qualified for the playoffs had team save percentages above .900 before Wednesday’s games.
This will be the third straight season than Jones has finished with an .896 save percentage, one of the worst marks in the NHL among goalies who play on a regular basis.
Wilson would not rule out a buyout of Jones’s deal, which has three years remaining and carries a $5.75 million average annual value.
“We will explore all avenues to address goaltending,” Wilson said.
Wilson feels that with the expansion draft being held this summer for the Seattle Kraken, there will be a pool of goalies available. NHL teams can only protect one goalie on their rosters from the draft, and there could be teams willing to trade a netminder to get something in return instead of potentially losing that player for nothing.
Wilson said the Sharks will have the necessary cap space “to be in conversations with teams that could make people available, whether it be Seattle or other teams that may be in a different expansion position than we are. We’ve thought this through.”
The Sharks will also be looking to add a third-line center this offseason.
Dylan Gambrell played that role for most of this season and would appear to still have a future with the organization should he not be exposed and taken by Seattle in the expansion draft. Gambrell, though, had just five goals and 12 points in 48 games this season before Wednesday.
Wilson said the addition of another experienced centerman would ease the burden on the Sharks’ top two centers in Logan Couture and Tomas Hertl, who had combined for 36 goals and 74 points. Couture will miss his third straight game Wednesday with a lower-body injury.
During an 0-7-1 stretch from April 10 to April 24, Hertl had five points, but Couture had just one as the Sharks fell out of the playoff picture, as Wilson felt they were “running on empty.”
“What we really need is to give up half a goal less every game and score half a goal more,” Wilson said. “That’s why addressing the goaltending, addressing the 3C, having people in proper roles. I think it allows your best players to be your best players not run out of gas.
“We’ve got to build a really good third line, you’ve got to have a good fourth line. We think we have some young players certainly that can evolve into those roles, but we’ll add things that we need between now and September and October to put the pieces of the puzzle together.”
While Hertl and Evander Kane led the Sharks’ offense this season with a combined 92 points before, other players’ statistics have been well below what they’ve averaged in the past.
Erik Karlsson, the NHL’s highest-paid defenseman whose contract carries an $11.5 million cap hit for the next six seasons, had just 22 points in 51 games before Wednesday. Karlsson, 30, had 45 points in 53 games two seasons ago.
Burns, whose contract carries a cap hit of $8 million for the next four seasons, was asked to play a more defensive role this season, and still leads all Sharks defensemen with 29 points in 55 games. Just two years ago, though, Burns now 36, had 83 points in 82 games. Forwards Timo Meier and Kevin Labanc also struggled at times.
Wilson pointed to the Minnesota Wild as a team that has been able to reset on the fly and get back into the playoffs despite having some onerous contracts on the payroll.
“I think they did an excellent job of going from a place where they had some players that maybe are older and on contracts they don’t like, and we all have contracts we don’t like,” Wilson said. “But look what they’ve done. They’ve gone back into being a very good hockey team. We think we can do the same thing. We do.”
