It’s Halloween Night, and the San Jose Sharks were pretty scary today: in all our years of going to games, we’re not sure if we ever have seen a worse performance than the one we saw today against the Ottawa Senators. So, for this NHL Saturday entry, we want to break down three major issues that continue to plague the Sharks as they dropped to 7-7-1 this season after losing at home, 5-1, in a game that honestly wasn’t even as close as the score suggests. Not since the 2014 playoffs, really, has this team looked so bad.

[And that’s saying a lot considering the Sharks Sterility Stare era of 2023-2024 and 2024-2025, when the team was pretty rotten.]

The Goaltending

It’s still an issue. San Jose ranks 27th out of 32 teams in the league for goals allowed, and while not all of that is directly on the goaltenders—Ottawa scored an empty netter in today’s loss—it’s mostly on them. Both goalies now have a goals-against average over 3.00, and while the league itself has changed a lot, that’s still not good. They have seven quality starts overall in 15 games, and the Sharks definitely need that collective total to be well over 50 percent of the games played in order truly be successful.

Yaroslav Askarov and Alex Nedeljkovic just aren’t good enough on their own, and they’re not good enough to overcome the defensive issues (see below). It’s been years now since the San Jose franchise has had a decent goalie: Martin Jones during the 2017-2018 season, really. That seems like a long time ago, because it was. Jones backed the team to the Western Conference Finals in 2019, but at age 29 that year, his numbers were already in clear decline. Without a legit goalie, the Sharks will go nowhere fast.

The Defense

It still sucks. San Jose upgraded the roster in this area, but the result so far do not seem to show much improvement. Of course, the team was dead last (32nd) in goals allowed for the 2024-2025 season, and it still was 30th in 2025-2026. So maybe 27th is a slight improvement, but the additions of veterans Darnell Nurse (from Edmonton) and Jacob Trouba (from Anaheim) to the blue line was supposed to immediately make this a much better unit. That hasn’t happened (yet?), and neither has been an All Star before.

Sadly, these two newcomers do lead the roster in Defensive Point Shares so far, at 0.7 DPS each. Also, no one on the roster has posted negative DPS this year, but … six players are right at 0.0 DPS—including defenseman Dmitry Orlov, journeyman forward Mason Marchment, and highly touted rookie Ivar Stenberg. Generally, the entire roster should be playing better on defense, and that was the focus of many offseason moves by the front office. Maybe we’re impatient, but the results have not been promising.

The Coach

Which leads us to our assessment of Head Coach Ryan Warsofsky: he’s worthless, period. In today’s game, the Sharks were down, 3-1, in the second period, and they went on a power play with a chance to get back in the game. Alas, the defense collapsed, left Nedeljkovic hanging out to dry, and gave up a short-handed goal to all but end the game. The effort on the ice was minimal to stop it from happening, and Warsofsky didn’t even bother to call a timeout in order to get his roster re-focused on the task at hand.

So, of course, the team continued to play listless hockey and lost badly. If there was ever a moment to use the timeout, that was it, and Warsofsky just sat on his hands. There was no comeback to be had, with or without his intervention, and when we look at this team’s issues over the last few seasons under his leadership, it’s all the same: honestly, it may be time for him to go. The team has enough talent to make a playoff push this spring, and if he’s not even going to call timeout to get the players focused? Screw him.