The Sharks’ early-season spark has given way to a mess, and a players-only meeting hasn’t changed that.
San Jose opened with overtime wins over the Florida Panthers and Los Angeles Kings, and that start fed the buzz around a fanbase hoping the seven-year playoff drought was finally about to end. Instead, the Sharks have stumbled badly since then, going 5-11-1.
They’ve dropped five straight in regulation, and the only thing keeping them from an eight-game skid is the Vancouver Canucks’ third-period collapse on Oct. 29.
That slide had already pushed the team into a players-only meeting after the blowout loss to the Kings, and the results since then have done little to suggest it worked.
The frustration around the team came into sharper focus after San Jose’s 4-3 loss to the Dallas Stars on Nov. 7.
San Jose Hockey Now’s Sheng Peng asked head coach Ryan Warsofsky how he weighs young players’ mistakes against what they provide, pointing to goals from Ivar Stenberg and Will Smith. Warsofsky said, “It’s part of developing these young men to play in the league for a long time, and they’re going to make mistakes.
This is a game of mistakes. I thought Stenny was really good tonight, Smitty had some opportunities.
They’re trying to do the right things, and the intention is right, but the execution wasn’t great, so we have to learn from it just like everyone else on our team. We gotta continue to learn individually and collectively.”
The problem is that the Sharks’ mistakes are not limited to the young players. Ty Dellandrea has one point in 11 games and a minus-5 rating.
Dmitry Orlov has appeared in all 19 games, but he has been a defensive liability and sits at minus-12. Even with the power play struggling, Orlov keeps getting minutes there while Sam Dickinson waits in the background despite looking like one of the team’s best defensemen right now.
Dickinson’s 91 points in 55 games in the Ontario Hockey League helped make him the 11th overall pick in the 2024 NHL Draft. Eric Pohlkamp, who has played only three games this season, has more power play minutes than Dickinson.
Warsofsky’s usage decisions have become part of the issue, too. He has let veterans pile up mistakes without pulling back their ice time, and he has also leaned hard on Macklin Celebrini.
Against Dallas, the captain was double-shifted all game as the Sharks tried to stop the slide. San Jose did look better with that approach while Alex Wennberg and Igor Chernyshov were injured, but it is not a long-term answer.
Celebrini led all skaters with 28:05 of ice time, nearly four minutes more than the next Shark, Smith, who logged 23:44. That was the most Smith has played in a regulation game this season.
The meeting itself came after a brutal night against the Kings on Nov. 4, when Adrian Kempe scored a hat trick in a five-goal loss. Celebrini and Stenberg each scored on the power play, but the damage was already done. After that game, the players got together without the coaches.
That kind of meeting usually signals a team that is searching for answers, and the Sharks have already shown signs of that disconnect. After the loss to the Ottawa Senators on Halloween, Warsofsky was asked whether some players lacked buy-in.
He answered, “Absolutely, we got to work on that.” Before the next game against the Calgary Flames, Celebrini pushed back on that idea.
“I don’t think there’s a lack of buy-in,” Celebrini said. “We just don’t have as much energy and we’re not really as connected as we should be.
It all goes hand in hand.”
After the Kings loss, Kiefer Sherwood sounded just as blunt. “It’s unacceptable.
It’s not good enough,” he said. “To a man, to a team.
It’s not the coaches right now. We’re not winning battles, we’re not being hard to play against, we’re not making plays.
It’s not good enough. We have to turn it here.
We have to stick together.”
The Sharks’ issues clearly go beyond the bench, but the team’s early-season identity has vanished. The energetic rush attack that made them look like a fun team in 2025-26 is gone, replaced by a grind-heavy approach that does not fit the modern game. San Jose has leaned into dump-and-chase hockey, and the offense has looked flat, unimaginative, and slow to create.
At this point, the pressure is squarely on Warsofsky. The Sharks needed to avoid a bad start and long losing streaks to have any chance of ending their playoff drought, and they already failed that test. If this skid keeps dragging on, the heat around the head coach is only going to rise.
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