After playoff miss, Sharks have 2015-16 season as a model

With the NHL’s announcement last week that the 2019-20 regular season is over — when and if the league resumes, it will go straight to an expanded playoffs — the Sharks knew their season was over officially.

They will have plenty of time to stew over the franchise’s worst season in 17 years. San Jose is one of seven teams left out of the NHL’s scheduling plans until next season starts in late fall or early winter.

One year after making it to the Western Conference Finals, the Sharks finished with the worst record in the conference and missed the playoffs for just the second time since general manager Doug Wilson took over in 2003.

“We’re not used to losing or having a losing season here so it wasn’t fun,” captain Logan Couture said Thursday. “As a group, we know that every single person needs to be better next year. I think with this long break it adds time for guys to get prepared. Motivation should be at an all-time high for everyone. When you have a year like this, you want to come back and prove to people that it was just a fluke.”

This is rare territory for the Sharks, who have been one of the most consistent franchises in the league. The last time they missed the playoffs was in 2014-15, then they bounced back the following season to earn the team’s first trip to the Stanley Cup Finals before losing to Pittsburgh in six games.

Couture believes a team that has a talented defensive group led by Erik Karlsson, Brent Burns and Marc-Edouard Vlasic, as well as forwards like himself, Tomas Hertl, Evander Kane and Timo Meier, has the ingredients in place to repeat that turnaround.

“I believe that summer a lot of people wrote us off, said the window’s closed, this team’s done, stick a fork in them,” Couture said. “I think that lit a fire in a lot of us. It’s going to be the same...