We went to the San Jose Sharks game on Saturday against the Colorado Avalanche, and the team surprised us by winning; this, we have a new Sunday Surmising piece today. Believe it or not, the Sharks have won three of their last four games and four of their last six! Now, the team sits at 4-6-2 and out of the Western Conference cellar for once. Once difference between the prior two games we saw and this one? The goalie.

Yaroslav Askarov (2-4-1, 4.29 GAA, .862 s%) may not be a star yet, but the San Jose franchise should just let him be the top goaltender on the team for the reason of the season—giving him two thirds of the starts and resting him on back-end games of consecutive days. He is in his age-23 season with a lot of upside, and the time to develop him is now, so when the rest of the roster “arrives” as legitimate contenders, he will be ready.

In this win versus the Avs, Askarov made 36 saves as his teammates only managed to get 23 shots on net against former teammate Mackenzie Blackwood. Heck, in the first half of the first period, Colorado already had 16 shots on goal. The Sharks defense got a little better from there on out, but it looked bad when the Avs scored just 30 seconds into the game. However, Askarov showed up time and time again this game.

He held Colorado scoreless for the final 32:38 of the game, culminating in overtime when Philipp Kurashev, a Chicago Black Hawks castoff, scored the game winner. Oddly, it was his second goal of the game in a contest where he committed countless turnovers in all the wrong spaces. He has just four takeaways this year to go with 11 giveaways, so his puck-possession stats stink. But he can shoot it, yo.

But the real star of this team remains forward Macklin Celebrini, who has twice basically the Point Shares (2.0) as the next-best player on the team (1.1). He scored the first goal in this 3-2 victory, and he also has 18 points in just 12 games to pace the team there. The problem is there just aren’t enough guys supporting Celebrini with consistent and quality play yet. But maybe this recent stretch signals a changing of the tide.

The Sharks are now ahead of both St. Louis and Calgary in the Western Conference, and their current .417 point percentage projects out to 68 points on the season—a big improvement from the 52 points San Jose registered last season. We know the team has not made the playoffs since reaching the Western Conference Finals in 2019, and it hasn’t finished better than sixth in the Pacific Division since then, either: small steps.

But we will take whatever we can get here on the road back to respectability.