If there’s a team that you want to face during a three-game losing streak, it’s probably the San Jose Sharks.
That’s exactly the case for the Utah Hockey Club, which has struggled to score in five of its past six games.
There’s no such thing as an easy win in the NHL, but the Sharks have yet to win a game this season.
Momentum often has a strong effect in hockey. When you’re good, it seems like nothing can stop you. When you’re bad, you feel like you couldn’t beat a team of 10-year-olds.
The momentum has been against Utah HC for the past week or so. Now is the time to change it.
“We get a little too perimeter in the offensive zone and don’t make it hard on the goalies,” said veteran forward Nick Bjugstad after Utah HC’s 3-2 loss to the Los Angeles Kings on Saturday. “We can clean that up.”
Teams sometimes get so caught up in making the perfect play that they never advance the puck to the middle of the ice, which is where the majority of goals are scored in hockey. That’s what Bjugstad means when he says they’re “too perimeter.”
“I think it’s just the mentality — believing it’s going to go in,” Bjugstad said. “There’s a difference between just getting shots on net and shooting to score. We’re going to go through times like this during the season and we’ve got a lot of good players in there, so we’ll figure it out.”
Utah HC scored two goals against the Kings — more than they’d scored in the two previous games combined. That should help their confidence going forward.
Keller BURIED this one 💥 pic.twitter.com/LYT99seqAO
The Sharks finished in last place last season, and this year doesn’t look any better for them.
They won the first-overall pick in the 2024 draft, where they selected generational-talent-to-be, Macklin Celebrini.
Celebrini scored a goal and an assist in his NHL debut, but an injury has kept him sidelined since then. It may be related to the lower-body injury that he suffered against Utah HC in the preseason, though that hasn’t been stated by the team.
NO. 1 PICK MACKLIN CELEBRINI WITH HIS FIRST NHL GOAL 🤩 pic.twitter.com/YEQ7LWQ3ZP
Mikael Granlund and Tyler Toffoli are leading the charge for the Sharks offensively. Granlund has scored four goals and 10 points through nine games, while Toffoli has four goals and seven points in that same span.
Defensively, they’ve relied upon Jake Walman and Cody Ceci, both of whom the Sharks were paid to take from other teams this offseason.
The Sharks have never won the Stanley Cup, though they came close in 2016, when they lost in six games in to Ian Cole and the Pittsburgh Penguins in the Stanley Cup Final.
Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, they were a notoriously hard team to play against, especially in their home arena.
Their run of dominance was longer than that of most teams, but it had to come to an end eventually. They entered full rebuild mode in the early part of this decade and have drafted in the first round seven times in the last five drafts.
The Sharks came into the league as an expansion team in the 1991-92 season. They had one of the most beloved jerseys of all time, and, with one or two exceptions, they have always had some of the nicer tarps in the league.
#WaybackWednesday with #SJSharks forwards Ray Whitney and Pat Falloon posing for a portrait in an undated photo scanned from the Sharks' line-up card insert for the game against OTT at the Shark Tank on Mar. 17, 1994. pic.twitter.com/Z32ffv3oD7
Joe Thornton and Patrick Marleau lead the Sharks’ all-time record books in most statistical categories.
They were drafted first and second overall, respectively, in 1997, though Thornton went to the Boston Bruins at first. The Bruins traded him to the Sharks in 2005 and he went on to play 1,104 games for the team, scoring 1,055 points in that time.
In addition to Celebrini, the Sharks’ prospect pool boasts Will Smith, Sam Dickinson, Yaroslav Askarov and a boatload of others. Another high pick this year will put them another step in the right direction.
If everything goes according to the team’s plan, they will be dominant once again a few years from now.
The game will be available on both Utah HC+ and Utah 16.
Additionally, tickets are available for as low as $26 on Ticketmaster at the time of writing.
