One San Francisco Bay Area city will not be losing its only major sports franchise any time soon: the San Jose Sharks are staying in Silicon Valley until 2051, at least. That’s the big hockey news in our neck of the woods this week, and today on NHL Saturday, we’re going to explore the state of the Sharks going into the upcoming 2025-2026 season. Alas, the team has not made the postseason since the 2018-2019 campaign.

Before that, however, San Jose was a model NHL franchise, born in the 1991 Expansion before joining the Stanley Cup playoff field 19 times from 1998 to 2019, missing out only in 2003 and 2015. Of course, the team has never won the NHL championship, playing just once in the Cup Finals (2016) despite four other trips to the Western Conference Finals (2004, 2010, 2011, 2019). Alright, enough with the past here; let’s look up!

Led by young Head Coach Ryan Warsofsky in his second season, San Jose needs to get better soon. Winners of just 39 combined contests in the last two campaigns, the Sharks have loads of young talent, and if it doesn’t produce soon, there’s going to be a lot of clamoring in the South Bay, as this franchise posted the most regular-season victories in that aforementioned 22-year span. The locals demand some serious results.

San Jose had four picks in the first two rounds of the 2025 Entry Draft, including No. 2 overall selection Michael Misa, a forward from Ontario, Canada. Overall, the front office selected nine players in the draft, and combined with the nine picks from the 2024 draft, the Sharks have tons of young talent to develop and deploy at the the NHL level soon, if not sooner: last year’s No. 1 overall Macklin Celebrini already is here.

He posted 5.5 Point Shares in an uneven rookie campaign which saw him miss 12 games to injury while posting 63 points (25 goals, 38 assists) in 70 matchups. He finished third in the Calder vote, which was disappointing since the voters gave the award to an underperforming No. 1 overall pick on a losing team in 2024. But we digress: we would not have given Celebrini the Calder, either, but the lack of respect was ugly.

And that’s where the Sharks are these days: off the radar. Can they get back on it? Sure, and the only way you do that is winning more games. Can San Jose do that this upcoming season? Well, it depends on the coaching, the progress of young talent, and more than anything, the goaltending. The team finished dead last among 32 teams last for both goal scoring and goal prevention, so there’s lots of work to be done here.

Oddly, though, they did improve on both sides of the sheet: the team scored 28 more goals than the year prior, while giving up 16 fewer goals than the year before. If that 44-goal differential improvement could be replicated this upcoming year, the Sharks would be much more competitive and closer to a postseason spot. However, it would take close to a 100-goal improvement to make the playoffs next spring. Tall task, for sure.

No matter what, though, the Sharks will continue to improve, hopefully, and we will have more games to report on in person this season. Without baseball in Oakland, we have focused on women’s basketball in San Francisco more, clearly, and we will add hockey in San Jose to our Bay Area beat commentary. The puck drops on October 9 for the Sharks’ home opener, and we will be there to write about it for those interested.