Offseason Checklist: San Jose Sharks

The offseason has arrived for half of the league’s teams that aren’t taking part in the playoffs.  Accordingly, it’s now time to examine what they will need to accomplish over the coming months.  First up is a look at San Jose.

Following a summer where the Sharks moved their best player in Erik Karlsson, expectations were quite low heading into the season.  That said, some might argue that they still underachieved as they were run out of the rink a lot of nights while not many of their younger players wound up in prominent roles.  GM Mike Grier won’t be looking to make this group a playoff team for 2024-25 but they will be looking to add some pieces while deciding the future of a franchise fixture as well.  Here’s what should be on their checklist in the coming months.

Hire A Head Coach: When meeting with reporters at locker clean-out day recently, Grier expressed an intention to evaluate his head coach David Quinn.  That evaluation came to a head earlier today with the decision to fire the bench boss, adding themselves to the list of teams looking for someone else to lead the team.

While some teams have some appeal in terms of where they are from a competitive standpoint, that will quite likely be a tougher sell for Grier.  Quinn led the Sharks to a 41-98-25 record over two years and it could be argued that they didn’t underachieve all that much.  With San Jose embracing a full-scale long-term rebuild, the team has been stripped of the majority of its veteran core in recent years and no immediate impact replacements are on the horizon as the focus is on player development.  In other words, things aren’t exactly looking up from a short-term competitive standpoint.

Accordingly, it wouldn’t be surprising if a first-time NHL bench boss is brought in, one with a history of working with younger players and having some success.  Several teams have tried that in recent years with Anaheim’s Greg Cronin, Chicago’s Luke Richardson, and Montreal’s Martin St. Louis among them.  Someone along those lines who can help key youngsters continue to develop while also developing as a coach would make a lot of sense for the Sharks at the moment.

Determine Vlasic’s Future: It’s a moment that has been coming for a couple of years now but the Sharks might now be at the proverbial crossroads with long-time blueliner Marc-Edouard Vlasic.  When he signed his current eight-year, $56MM extension back in 2017, there was an expectation that the final couple of seasons could be rough but if San Jose was a contender for the first half of the deal or longer, it might still work out somewhat well in the end.  Instead, the Sharks have struggled for most of this contract, missing the playoffs in five straight years.  Meanwhile, Vlasic’s usefulness dropped sharply only a couple of years into the contract and has been a highly-paid sixth defender the last few seasons.

This past season, the Sharks made Vlasic a healthy scratch on numerous occasions and while they could simply opt to do so for two more years, that’s not necessarily the way they want to treat someone who was a pillar on their back end for so long.  But that is one option that Grier can consider.

The other is a buyout.  Such a move wouldn’t necessarily save them much cap space or money but would open up a roster spot and a contract slot while giving Vlasic a chance to try to catch on elsewhere if he wants to.  Instead of a $7MM cap charge for the next two years, a buyout would cost $3.833MM next season, $4.833MM in 2025-26, and $1.333MM in 2026-27 and 2027-28.

In theory, there’s always the possibility of a trade but unless they’re taking another high-priced underachieving contract back, that seems quite unlikely to happen.  The same can be said about waiving him and sending him to AHL San Jose; that doesn’t seem like something they’d want to do to Vlasic.

Can the Sharks keep doing what they’ve been doing with Vlasic for the last couple of years, using him in a very limited role?  Or do they give him a chance to move on?  Grier will have a couple of months to decide as the first buyout window doesn’t close until close to the start of the new league year which starts July 1st.

Cash In On Granlund: As part of the Karlsson trade, the Sharks had to take back Mikael Granlund to help make the money work.  At the time, the center’s value was at arguably an all-time low; a late-season trade to Pittsburgh at the deadline in 2023 was ill-fated as Granlund managed just one goal and four assists in 21 games.  That type of production for $5MM for two more seasons wasn’t of particular value to any team last summer.

But a strange thing happened this season.  At a time when pretty much every Sharks player had a rough year offensively, Granlund somehow had one of his best.  He led the team in scoring, notching 12 goals and 48 assists (a career-high) in 69 games.  He had a hand in 33% of San Jose’s goals on the season.  That’s solid production for anyone let alone someone who was thrown into a trade as a salary cap dump.

This summer, teams will take a run at signing some impact free agents but those who come up short will have to look for a fallback option.  Now on an expiring contract and coming off a 60-point year, Granlund should have some positive value for a team looking for a short-term upgrade up front.  That should give Grier a chance to get some extra future value, a scenario that didn’t seem likely back in the fall.

Granted, one challenge Grier will face is that he can’t pay down any of Granlund’s deal as his three retention slots are already all used up for next season.  However, if he’s willing to take another pricey contract back, they should be able to make something happen.  Speaking of which…

Leverage Cap Space: One thing that the Sharks have an abundance of is cap space, a by-product of selling off most of their core and having four of their five highest-paid forwards on expiring contracts.  Three of those four are UFAs and the fourth – Luke Kunin – could be as he’s owed a $3MM qualifying offer and is coming off an 18-point campaign so he’s not a guarantee to be tendered in June.  Suffice it to say, San Jose will have to add to their roster one way or the other.

They could elect to be aggressive in free agency but from a longer-term standpoint, they might be better off being one of the clearinghouses for unwanted contracts this summer.  Utilizing some of that cap space to take on a pricey deal or two would also net the Sharks some extra draft picks or prospects for their troubles.  That’s not an option when they sign free agents, unless it’s a one-year agreement with the possibility of flipping him in-season.

They’re at the point where a good chunk of their roster is either untradeable due to being part of the rebuild plans or not having enough value to bring back a return of significance.  They have a few exceptions – Granlund among them as noted earlier – but there aren’t a lot of true trade chips remaining.  As a result, there may not be many opportunities to add those future assets in-season or at the trade deadline.  With that in mind, taking on those bad deals now could be their best bet to add pieces.  Considering how many teams will be looking to open up flexibility this summer, Grier and the Sharks could be quite popular in the weeks to come.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.