Better luck next year: The Sharks have their guy, now they need everything else

Macklin Celebrini is the real deal. Now they just need literally everything else around him.

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 start today with the first team to officially be eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention: The San Jose Sharks.

This is starting to become the new normal for the San Jose Sharks.

Not only the fact they are missing the Stanley Cup Playoffs, but that they are consistently one of the first teams to be eliminated with usually still a month to play in the regular season.

This is the Sharks’ sixth consecutive season out of the playoffs playoffs, which is a staggering number for a franchise that prior to that had known nothing but consistent competitiveness. In the 27 seasons before this drought began, the Sharks had missed the playoffs just six total times in their entire existence, and four of those instances happened within their first five years in the league when they were still a struggling expansion franchise.

But as players like Joe Thornton and Patrick Marleau got older and moved on, and as the playoff appearances started to dry up, they made the decision to tear it all down to the ground and start over with a full-scale rebuild that would hopefully begin with some top draft picks.

The good news: That process did one of the things it was intended to do and produced a No. 1 overall pick in 2024, bringing Macklin Celebrini into the organization.

The bad news: When you go through a process like that it takes your franchise down into the cellar of the National League League, leaving you with a giant staircase to try and climb to get back into relevance.

The Sharks are finding that out right now.

They are still at the bottom of the steps.

Winning the Celebrini draft lottery was some important lottery luck and gives them the cornerstone player they need.

Now comes the hard part of trying to build around him.

It will not be easy, or quick.

What went wrong this season

It is really difficult to say anything necessarily went “wrong” here because the Sharks mostly did what was expected of them. Again.

They lost.

And they lost a lot.

Not as much as the 2023-24 season, but certainly more than anybody else in the NHL.

The Sharks were so bad, so uncompetitive, and so borderline embarrassing as an NHL product a season ago that the only real expectation anybody should have had for them coming into this season was to just simply play like an NHL team and hope some young players develop.

Overall, they were still very much in the roster-gutting, asset collecting stage of their rebuild.

Over the course of the season veteran players Mackenzie Blackwood, Mikael Granlund, Cody Ceci, Vitek Vanecek, Nico Sturm, Jake Walman, Fabrian Zetterlund and Luke Kunin were all traded away from an already bad roster.

Of course they are going to lose.

That is not necessarily a criticism of those moves (at least not all of them), because they did extract a lot of good value in a lot of them.

Turning Granlund and Ceci into a first-round pick and a conditional third-round pick is a huge long-term organizational win given the manner in which those guys were acquired, along with the initial expectations for them. Granlund was a salary-dump throw-in to the Erik Karlsson trade, and Ceci has always been “just a guy” in the NHL. Neither player ever had a long-term stay in San Jose as part of their future, and neither player is in a position to be productive in a couple of years when the Sharks might actually be good again. Make the trade.

In Walman’s case, they had already acquired a second-round pick from Detroit just for taking on the remainder of his contract (which was not even that bad), played him for half of a season, and then turned that into a first-round pick. Gaining first-and second-round picks for eating some of Jake Walman’s salary is smart business by Sharks general manager Mike Grier.

I think the one move that kind of loses me a little bit is sending Zetterlund to Ottawa for a second-round pick Noah Gregor and Zack Ostapchuk. That sort of deal when you’ve already landed the prized prospect is where you start to lose me a little bit.

He’s only 25 years old. He is a pretty good player. He could still, in theory, be a part of the next decent Sharks team. They are also unlikely to get as much value from Gregor, Ostapchuk and that second-round pick combined than Zetterlund would have given them. He shouldn’t have been an untouchable player by any means, but at some point you have to start trying to actually put a competitive product on the ice.

What went right this season

Macklin Celebrini went right. In a big way.

Let’s talk more about that….