Better luck next year: The San Jose Sharks need time, patience and everything else

The San Jose Sharks are the second team eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention. Let's talk about them.

Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the next team to be officially eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention: The San Jose Sharks

This is some seriously uncharted territory for the San Jose Sharks. For the first 27 years of their existence they were one of the most consistently successful teams in the NHL. It never resulted in a Stanley Cup championship, but they were almost always in contention, almost always a playoff team and made a handful of runs to the Western Conference Final and even one Stanley Cup Final.

They were always close. They could just never quite get over the hump.

During that time they missed the playoffs just six times, and even then four of those instances happened within the first six years of their franchise history when they were still trying to build up. Remember, the expansion draft rules in the early 1990s were pretty much garbage for new teams and there was nobody coming in and becoming an immediate success like the Vegas Golden Knights and (to a much lesser extent) the Seattle Kraken have been.

You had to build from literally nothing with your best players being other team’s fourth-line castoffs for a few years.

But once they built up and landed their own stars (Patrick Marleau, Joe Thornton, Evgeni Nabokov, etc.) they became a constant contender in the Western Conference.

That continued right up through the start of the 2019-20 season when they missed the playoffs and began their current five-year playoff drought. In the early stages of that playoff drought it was simply an aging, declining team that just started to fall off.

Gradually they became worse and worse, some big moves didn’t pan out, the farm system stopped producing talent, they had no goalie and it just became a fading a team in need of a rebuild.

Then just before the start of the 2022-23 season new general manager Mike Grier started treating the roster like he is Amity Island police chief Martin Brody and just starting purging it.

Brent Burns? Gone.

Timo Meier? Gone.

Erik Karlsson? Gone.

Then finally at this year’s trade deadline … Tomas Hertl? Gone.

The result is a bare bones roster and organization that is pretty much starting over from scratch.

This whole thing is going to take a lot of time to get back on track, so settle in Sharks fans and get comfortable. Because you might be here for a while.

So let’s talk about this.

Everything that went wrong