Sharks current record: 9-27-3 (.269)
Sharks projected record: 20-58-4 (.269)
NHL record for worst season in 82-game history: 14-57-11 (.238)

Our Sharks Sterility Stare has regained relevance again, with the San Jose Sharks currently in a 10-game slide that has dropped their overall winning percentage almost 100 points since December 12. That’s when they were 9-17-3 after a close win over the Winnipeg Jets at home—a game we went to. In fact, the Sharks started with a 0-10-1 record before we went to a game, and now they’re 0-10 since we last went to watch.

[Hmmm. Are we the. magic elixir for the team? It’s possible.]

San Jose lost 3 games since our last check-in column by a combined 10-5 score, so that’s a little better since the rough stretch before then which resembled the worst of the season-opening slide. However, things are about to get rougher for the team with a 5-game road trip coming up from January 9-16. If the Sharks can’t get off the schneid tonight at home against the Toronto Maple Leafs, it might get even uglier and uglier.

The upcoming road trip starts with a tour of Eastern Canada: Toronto, Montréal, and Ottawa. It then returns to the States in Buffalo before winding up in Chicago. Admittedly, the Canadiens, the Sabres, and the Senators are the three worst teams in the 8-team Atlantic Division, while the Blackhawks are the second-worst team in the Western Conference (other than the Sharks, of course). That’s not so scary.

The Leafs are a playoff-bound Eastern Conference squad right now, so beating them on the road may be a tall order. But maybe the other games are winnable: time will tell, of course. In the meantime, the Sharks remain last in goal scoring, last in goals allowed, and last in goal differential (obviously). They played decent hockey (9-7-2) for an 18-game stretch in between the two long losing streaks; time to get back to that.

It just seems very odd to have two different, double-digit losing streaks in the first half of a season. They have two more games, both against Toronto as noted above, before they hit the halfway point of the season, and it would be nice to have double-digit wins at that point, in order to feel confident they’d be well ahead of that Atlanta Thrashers “pace” for the worst record in an 82-game NHL season. So, until next time …