Sharks Searching for Answers After Third Straight Loss: “We’ve Been Punched in the Mouth”
The San Jose Sharks are stumbling into the All-Star break, and the timing couldn’t be worse.
After a red-hot 10-4-1 stretch that had them flirting with playoff relevance, the Sharks have dropped three straight - and not just to contenders. Losses to Calgary and now Chicago, both sitting below San Jose in the standings, have raised eyebrows and questions about this team’s readiness to handle adversity.
Monday night’s 6-3 defeat to the Blackhawks was the latest gut punch. Coming off a 3-2 loss to the Flames and a brutal overtime collapse in Edmonton where they blew a 3-0 lead, the Sharks look like a team that’s lost its edge - and maybe a bit of its identity.
Head coach Ryan Warsofsky didn’t sugarcoat it.
“We’ve been punched in the mouth and in the gut right now,” he said postgame. “We got to move forward. It is what it is.”
It’s not just the losing - it’s how they’re losing. The Sharks have looked disjointed, especially on the power play, where Warsofsky admitted things need a serious overhaul.
“We’re just not making the right plays,” he said. “We’re not moving the puck quick enough.
There’s no pace to it. We’re slow.
We got to really revamp this thing. There’ll be some personnel changes, for sure.”
That lack of pace and execution has bled into 5-on-5 play too, where mental lapses and missed assignments have become more frequent. And while it’s tempting to pin the recent slide on the emotional hangover from that Edmonton loss, the players aren’t buying it - at least not publicly.
“It sort of seems like that, but that’s not the feeling in the locker room,” said alternate captain Tyler Toffoli. “We haven’t talked about it, to be honest. I think we’ve done a good job of moving on.”
Rookie center Macklin Celebrini echoed that sentiment but acknowledged the frustration.
“We all know what these games mean and how we need to play,” he said. “It’s frustrating when we’re in this position, and we don’t do that. But we just got to be better.”
That’s the theme right now: accountability. The Sharks aren’t pointing fingers - not at each other, not at the schedule, and definitely not at their goalie.
“We left him out to dry a bunch of times,” defenseman Vincent Desharnais said of netminder Yaroslav Askarov. “When you start with three kills in the first period, it’s hard for a goalie to get in the game and feel confident. We gotta look at the players.”
Desharnais, like many in the room, is urging calm - but not complacency.
“I don’t think we need to panic,” he said. “Every guy in this locker room has to look at himself in the mirror and ask, ‘How can I just be a little bit better?
How can I help this team?’ We have all the answers in here.
We just got to execute and do it.”
He added, “Every team goes through a little bit of a lull. The biggest thing is just to stick together and get out of it together.
We know we have it. We just got to stick to it.
Get our confidence back. There’s one game left.
You got to empty it out on Wednesday and go from there.”
That one game is against the NHL-best Colorado Avalanche - a tall order for any team, let alone one in the middle of a skid. But maybe that’s exactly the kind of test the Sharks need right now. A chance to reset, refocus, and prove to themselves that the team they were in January wasn’t a fluke.
Warsofsky knows the outside noise is getting louder, but he’s not letting it seep in.
“The people are talking about us, which I get it, but we got to ignore that,” he said. “There’s a lot of hockey to be played.
We’ve got to learn from this. This is probably a new situation for where we are right now.
I think it’s kind of getting to us, in a sense.”
The message is clear: stop the bleeding, rally around each other, and get back to what worked during that 10-4-1 run. Because if the Sharks want to stay in the playoff hunt, they can’t afford to let this slide spiral any further.
Wednesday in Colorado? It’s more than just the end of a road trip. It’s a gut-check.