The San Jose Sharks have stabilized, but it may already be too late

The San Jose Sharks have won three games in a row, but their turn-around may be too little too late after a rough start to the 2019-20 NHL season.

There’s less blood in the water in San Jose this week than there was a mere seven days ago. Last week, the San Jose Sharks were in the midst of a five-game losing streak, the team’s worst in the 2019-20 hockey season. Head coach Peter DeBoer was squarely on the hot seat as the NHL’s first potential coach to be let go in the early-goings of the season.

Fast forward a week and the Sharks have stabilized somewhat, winning three straight games to stop their tailspin to the league’s basement. San Jose’s winning streak is a positive sign overall that there’s still life in the team, but as mid-November churns on, it may be too late for the Sharks to have a chance.

As of Tuesday, the Sharks sit in second-last place in the Pacific Division, with a 7-10-1 record in 18 games played. Their paltry 15 points gained so far on the season isn’t the league’s worst, but they sit with the Columbus Blue Jackets and New Jersey Devils in the NHL’s bottom third.

Playoff predictions, while still early, also don’t have the best odds in San Jose’s favor as we near American Thanksgiving at the end of the month.

The Sharks, by Micah Blake McCurdy‘s model, don’t have the West’s worst odds to make the postseason — that honor belongs to the Los Angeles Kings — but the numbers aren’t favorable.

This season, the Pacific Division has been the NHL’s most tumultuous since the beginning of October. The division’s top team is the Edmonton Oilers, surprising many across the hockey world, with five points separating first place from fifth. San Jose sits 11 points out of first place in the Pacific and seven points out of a wild card spot, a tall task in a competitive division.

Not many believed the Pacific would be this tough of a division at the start of the season. The Oilers, Coyotes and Canucks are all performing above expectations, and their successes may not be flukes when all is said and done by season’s end. Hockey is a wacky sport, but the Oilers finishing at the top of the Pacific by the end of the year would probably crack the top five weirdest things in the NHL if things stay as they are.

That being said, the Sharks are still in an uphill battle for a playoff spot. The usual threshold to reach a playoff spot is around the 90-point mark, and to hit that the Sharks would have to win about 38 games of their remaining 64 on the season. This three-game win streak is a solid start, but nothing San Jose has shown us this season makes us believe this is a sustainable pace.

The Sharks are still one of the league’s oldest teams and don’t have a player in the league’s top 25 points scorers this season.  San Jose’s goaltending duo of Martin Jones and Aaron Dell have a combined .882 save percentage this season, the fourth-worst in the NHL. The problems the Sharks are facing this season are deeper than the fact that their best players aren’t playing like stars, and that will only change after some roster retooling at a later date.

What the Sharks’ three-game win streak did, however, was save DeBoer’s head coaching job, for the moment at least. Had the Sharks lost most, if not all, of their games over the last week, the NHL’s biggest story would likely be San Jose’s imminent firing of DeBoer as the first head coach ousted this season.

Instead, DeBoer has kept his job for the time being as the Sharks’ bench boss. DeBoer is not a bad head coach by any means, as his record with the Sharks before this season started was 183-113-32 and he has gotten San Jose into the playoffs in each of his four full seasons with the team. Had the Sharks come out of last week continuing their losing streak, however, DeBoer would have likely taken the fall. The onus is on DeBoer to motivate the Sharks on a game-to-game basis, to be fair, but San Jose’s struggles run deeper than a lack of energy.

The Sharks’ three-game winning streak over the last week was a nice jolt for a team without much positivity to go around, but this spark has come too little too late for San Jose to make any sort of meaningful push into playoff contention.