Kurtenbach: You should be excited about the Sharks. Just don’t expect them to win much this season

If you look at the NHL standings six months from now, you’ll be forgiven for thinking that things didn’t improve much for the Sharks in the 2024-25 season.

After all, this is still, in all likelihood, the worst team in hockey. That long, unbecoming, playoff drought will reach six seasons come April. Another high draft pick beckons in the summer.

And yet, there is real, justified excitement around this squad.

Such are the perks of progress.

This team is going somewhere — perhaps somewhere special — in the not-too-distant future. General manager Mike Grier is betting on it. I am, too.

But it’s not going to happen this year. No, sir. Making the playoffs would be a miracle for this team this season, which starts Thursday in Chicago (5:30 p.m., ESPN+).

Since the Sharks played in the 2019 Western Conference Finals, they have explored every possible way to lose hockey games. Big, veteran talent with poor performance? Done it. Low-level talent going hard on a nightly basis? Check. Everything in-between? We’ve seen it.

And after a half-decade of messing around and, eventually, tearing everything down, the Sharks are building back up.

That gives the Sharks roster and fans something that has been sorely missing for years: Hope.

The ingredients for a quality, contending hockey team are in place with these Sharks. The talent base is the envy of the league. It’s just going to take a while for it to all come together — these are just kids, after all.

“The last four, five years have been very, very difficult for the players that have been here,” new coach Ryan Warsofsky told the Daily Faceoff. “We need some positive energy to come in. We have some hope now with some prospects that are going to be coming.”

So call them “growing pains” if you must—the result will be similar to the awful seasons of the recent past.

But even as the losses pile up, it’ll be clear that this season is so much different for the Sharks.

Every win will take this team a bit closer to making that bright, imagined future of annual success and Stanley Cup contention a reality.

The difference is not simply the addition of No. 1 overall pick and potential franchise-changing talent Macklin Celebrini, on whose now-18-year-old shoulders the Sharks’ dreams are carried. My goodness, what a player he already is. What a player he can become.

But no, it’s also the addition of former No. 2 overall pick, 19-year-old center Will Smith, a trajectory-changing talent in his own right.

It’s the acquisition of the game’s No. 1 goalie prospect, 22-year-old Yaroslav Askarov.

It’s the breakout potential of the original Baby Shark, 21-year-old winger William Eklund, or the continued success of 25-year-old winger Fabian Zetterlund, who scored 24 goals last year. (The Sharks’ last 40-goal scorer was Joe Pavelski, back in 2013-14. It’s a lofty number, but with Smith and Celebrini in the fold, I think Zetterlund can end that streak this season.)

It’s a new head coach who understands the challenge of the job ahead and is equipped to handle it. Success for 36-year-old Ryan Warsofsky (the NHL’s youngest head coach) won’t be determined by the standings but rather by how much better the Sharks are at the end of the season compared to the beginning. Can he establish a level of competency with these kids in Year One?

“There’s been a lot of new coaches and not one coach has got up [here] and said ‘We want to play slow and we want to be passive’,” Warsofsky said at his introductory press conference. “We want to be fast. We want to get on teams. There will be a very distinct look [with this team]. It will be clean; there will be good structure. It’ll be effort-based.”

“It’s about being competitive. We need to be more competitive. The bar is at the ground right now.”

At its very best, the Sharks’ 2024-25 season will be wild. And, if you’re going to lose a lot, at least be entertaining.

I won’t call the Sharks’ defense the worst in the NHL just yet (give me a few weeks), but I am comfortable saying today that it will be the most chaotic. Askarov is in San Jose because he wants to be a No. 1 NHL goalie—something that wouldn’t happen in Nashville with Juuse Saros blocking his path. Be careful what you ask for, young man. When Askarov does get his chance, he might see 40 shots a night, with far too many coming from point-blank range.

Yes, the Sharks will give up a ton of goals, even if Askarov or current No. 1 Mackenzie Blackwood channel the spirit of prime Evgeni Nabokov.

The hope is that the Sharks’ young offensive talent — of which there is even more in the pipeline — can put up goals, too. And there’s plenty of reason to think they will. The Sharks will take their lumps, but at least they’ll bulge the net.

And if the Sharks’ defense isn’t a league-worst sieve, then we’ll know that this team is ahead of schedule.

This is the right tact. You can sure up a blue line fast in this league. It’s much, much more difficult (and expensive) to add goals.

In those goals (or incredible saves), you will see flashes of the future — of a team in the mix come the spring. In a squad with as much potential as any team in the league, this season represents the first step forward in actualizing it all.

These Sharks are going somewhere special. I believe in this future core to my core.

It’s just going to take a while to get there.