How finishing (or lack thereof) denied the Sharks a Stanley Cup

What happens when the hockey gods aren't on your side

You could write a book about the 2004-2019 San Jose Sharks, their regular season success and their playoff shortcomings.

In that span, nobody accrued more points in the regular season than San Jose, nor did anyone play in more playoff games. All of that amounted to five trips to the Western Conference and a loss in the Stanley Cup Finals in 2016. But a stacked and beloved core of Joe Thornton, Patrick Marleau, Joe Pavelski, Logan Couture, Brent Burn and Marc-Edouard Vlasic never brought the Cup back to San Jose.

Meanwhile, almost every other team that was annually competitive in those years managed to bring home at least one championship. Both of San Jose’s rivals in southern California combined for three Stanley Cups, and the Sharks’ other rival, the Vegas Golden Knights, captured one after San Jose’s window had closed. Even Alexander Ovechkin’s Capitals and the St. Louis Blues, long the poster boys of playoff failure, managed to get over the hump.

But not the Sharks.

There were, of course, narratives crafted about the Sharks. That a team led by a player with an affable, fun-loving personality like Joe Thornton wasn’t built for playoff success. That when the going got tough, the Sharks quit going. It certainly didn’t help that the Bruins, Thornton’s former team, won a Stanley Cup five seasons after trading him. Doubly so for the Kings coming back from a 3-0 series deficit against San Jose en route to a Stanley Cup in 2014.

The Sharks tried everything to get over the hump. They stripped Marleau of the captaincy, they went out and signed a proven winner in Rob Blake to be captain, they made Thornton captain later and stripped him of the captaincy, they tried changing things up in the crease, they made big moves seemingly every summer. Never mattered.

Which begs the question: How did all of this happen? How could a team that could consistently win games over the course of an 82-game season suddenly fall apart every spring?

There are a lot of factors at play, but let’s push forward one suggestion: they couldn’t finish. They were simply smited by the hockey gods at every turn. No team has endured such brutal finishing luck in the playoffs as those San Jose Sharks.

The Sharks underperformed their expected goals in the playoffs at all strengths by a whopping 56.6 goals. The New York Rangers are the only other team to dip into the 50s.

It should be noted that Evolving-Hockey’s database only dates back to the 2007-08 season, so we don’t have the numbers from, say, when the Sharks lost to the Flames in the 2004 Western Conference Finals. But the data we do have tells a pretty telling story.

This was an annual tradition for the Sharks. Of the 11 trips to the playoffs that we have data for, the Sharks scored fewer goals than expected at all situations 10 times. And none of them were particularly close to breakeven.

The first and best case in the analytics era of the Sharks getting goalie’d in the playoffs came in 2009 in the first round against the Ducks. San Jose came into the postseason as the Presidents’ Trophy winner after going 53-18-11 in the regular season for 117 points, which is still a franchise record. This Sharks squad had nine players with at least 40 points (led by Thornton with 86) and was stingy defensively. In other words, it wasn’t hard to see why San Jose paced the rest of the league.

But then Jonas Hiller happened. According to Natural Stat Trick, the Sharks generated 15.5 expected goals at five-on-five in the series, and they scored just five. At all situations, they scored 10 goals on 23.8 expected. San Jose were dominant at five-on-five, owning over 57 percent of the expected goals.

Didn’t matter. The Sharks’ dream season came to an end on a fitting end when they mustered just one goal on 3.73 at all strengths in a 4-1 loss in Game 6. Thornton did what he could, picking up five points in six games while winning his minutes in terms of chances. But Marleau and Dan Boyle were the only players with more than one goal with just two each.

There have been 13 instances of a team underperforming its expected goals by double digits in the playoffs. Of those 13, this was the only time a team did it in single-digit games. The Sharks nearly pulled it off a second time four years later.

After sweeping the Canucks in a series where their finishing was more or less right in line with their expected goals, the Sharks couldn’t buy a goal in the second round against Jonathan Quick and the Los Angeles Kings.

They scored only five goals at five-on-five in the seven-game series, and it wasn’t for a lack of good chances. San Jose had the lion’s share of the expected goals in the series, both at five-on-five and at all strengths. But none of that matters when you shoot 3.1 percent at five-on-five and sub-five percent overall.

This was a Los Angeles Kings team that won the Stanley Cup Final the year prior and would do so again the following year, so they were at the height of their powers. Yet the Sharks controlled play and had the upper hand in everything but actual goals. It was absolutely there for the taking, but Quick wouldn’t let them.

In total, the Sharks scored 10 goals on 20.1 expected at all situations, per Natural Stat Trick. In Game 7, the Sharks more than held their own on the road, but one goal on roughly three expected at all situations wasn’t enough to cut it in a 2-1 loss to end their season once again.

What made these playoff failures even more painful is that it’s not like the bulk of these finishing issues were from the bottom of the lineup. No, it was their big names like Thornton and Pavelski that suddenly lost the ability to find the back of the net despite generally being pretty good shooters in the regular season. Outside of Logan Couture, who was basically Sam Bennett before Sam Bennett if he played on the West Coast and didn’t have a Cup to his name, nobody in teal could get hot come spring.

It takes a lot for a championship run to come together, and sometimes you just need things to break your way. It’s not lost on me that the one year that the Sharks actually scored more goals than expected was in 2016, when they went to the Stanley Cup Finals.

That year, the Sharks were not only steamrolling their opponents analytically, but they were white-hot in terms of scoring. Through the first three rounds, they shot over 12 percent and scored 63 goals on 56 expected at all situations, per Natural Stat Trick. It was the kind of spring hot streak they had been looking for for a decade. It wasn’t a happy ending for San Jose in the end, but that’s what it took for the Sharks to finally make it to the Stanley Cup Finals in the first place.

But everything seemed to come together for everyone else. The Golden Knights looked like they would become the new Sharks after annually running cold in the playoffs after their inaugural year — having former Sharks head coach Peter DeBoer behind the bench certainly didn’t help — before getting blisteringly hot in their Stanley Cup run in 2023. The Kings in 2014, the quintessential “high expected goals, low actual goals” team, found their finishing touch in the playoffs, including lighting up Sharks goaltender Antti Niemi during the infamous reverse sweep in the first round. Same goes for when Ovechkin and his Capitals exorcised their demons in 2018.

But the hockey gods never smiled upon the Sharks in the same way. If San Jose ever makes it back to the postseason, maybe Macklin Celebrini and Will Smith should burn incense in and around SAP Center.