Our Sunday Surmising piece doesn’t always make a weekly appearance, but when it does, you can be assured it will be interesting. Today, we check in again on the San Jose Sharks after they lost two straight home games in overtime on Friday and Saturday nights that were moral victories if not actual ones. And right now, the team is 30-25-6 with 21 games left in the regular season. Coming into Sunday play, the Sharks are ninth in the Western Conference, although they have games in hand on the teams above.

We will come back to that in a few minutes, but first let’s look at these two winnable games for San Jose that didn’t end up so.

First, Friday night against the St. Louis Blues—a team well below San Jose in the standings—was a hard one to lose. The Sharks had won 10 overtime games this season, while the Blues were 0-6 in the extra session, but multiple turnovers in the first minute of overtime basically gifted St. Louis the winning goal, and that was that. How often have we see San Jose lose quickly in overtime during the course of the last few seasons? Way too many times, including the home opener this year, of which this was resonant.

What makes this loss so vile is that the Blues only had 14 shots on goal the entire game, and yet somehow Sharks goaltender Alex Nedeljkovic still let three of them in the net to lose the game. That’s a .786 save percentage for the night, if you’re not doing the math in your mind right now. It’s absolutely disgraceful. San Jose never even got a shot off in OT, despite winning the initial face off and controlling the puck first. Blown opportunities like this one come back to haunt a lot of teams when the season dust settles.

Second, Saturday night against the New York Islanders—a team sixth in the Eastern Conference standings—was a disappointing one to not win. The Sharks played solidly enough, and with 88 seconds left in a tie game, they went on a power play to end regulation. San Jose was unable to convert, and even when the power play extended into OT, there was no goal to be had, unfortunately. And then in overtime, well, it did seem like the refs fell asleep on several penalty-worthy acts by the Islanders.

In the end, though, with just 40 seconds left before going to a shootout, Sharks goalie Yaroslav Askarov let in a bad goal through his legs, and the Isles escaped with a win that the home team really could have had themselves at several points prior. These are the worst types of games to lose, really, when the players second guess everything they did that could have made a difference in possibly winning the game before it got to overtime … or even winning it earlier in the extra session. So, it was a rough weekend.

Next up? A five-game roadtrip, and we don’t see the team again in person until March 21 against the Philadelphia Flyers. Who knows where San Jose will be in the standings by then? Based on practicality, this is where we see these five road matchups:

  • Buffalo (38-19-6)
  • Boston (35-22-5)
  • Montréal (34-18-10)
  • Ottawa (31-22-9)
  • Edmonton (30-25-8)

If past precedent holds with the math in check, the Sharks won’t win any of these games, and it might end up sealing the deal on their playoff chances, even if they have 21 games left on the schedule—with their main competition for a wild-card berth having only 20 games remaining. Yet this is a brutal road trip, and we see how the extra two points the team did not get in these two home overtime losses might come back to bit the Sharks in a month when the season winds down in early April. Then again, maybe not.

The San Jose organization is lucky, perhaps, to even be in this situation considering how bad the goaltending is (3.46 GAA with an .886 save percentage) and how badly it seems the team whiffed on No. 2 overall pick Michael Misa last spring. He has just 13 points in 24 games, in contrast to the Islanders’ No. 1 overall selection last spring—defenseman Matthew Schaefer—who has 46 points in 64 games. Sabermetrically, Misa (1.4 Point Shares) pales in comparison to Schaefer (9.6). That’s a brutal dropoff there.

How could the No. 1 pick be so good when the No. 2 pick is so mediocre? Maybe Misa will pay off in the long run, but premium draft picks should have immediate impact, and Misa has not done that—not even close. The Sharks’ No. 1 overall pick from 2024—Macklin Celebrini—put up 5.5 PS on a crappy team that year, and this year he has contributed 10.1 PS to the cause. That’s a home-run draft pick. Schaefer is a home-run draft pick. Even if he is just in his age-18 season, Misa is not a home-run draft pick.

There shouldn’t be that much dropoff from Schaefer to Misa, and if the San Jose front office whiffed on that pick, it will cost them for a decade, really. Alas, this is all conjecture and projection, so we will see what happens in the final 21 games of this regular season, on top of what happens on the next Sharks road trip. But shame if the team has let opportunities slip past them too often. It’s all part of the growth process, but with no playoff spots since 2019, the Sharks fans have to be getting impatient for some love.

The team claims “the future is teal” … but we’re still waiting on that future to arrive, especially when it comes to goaltending.