The San Jose Sharks remain caught in a weird spot, with an aging roster that can’t compete but too much money tied to those aging players do anything about it.
I put out a similar article last year, where I took a look at the Sharks’ cap situation heading into the offseason, but I felt it could be interesting to see where we are now and what the Sharks’ cap situation looks like this time around.
The Sharks already have over $63.5 million tied up in nine players, between five forwards (Tomas Hertl, Evander Kane, Timo Meier, Logan Couture, Kevin Labanc), three defensemen (Brent Burns, Erik Karlsson, Marc-Edouard Vlasic) and a goalie (Martin Jones). This doesn't leave a lot of room to work with.
So how much cap space do the Sharks have?
To figure that out, I’ll use the following 23-man roster for next year when looking at the cap situation:
Forwards (14): Tomas Hertl, Evander Kane, Timo Meier, Logan Couture, Kevin Labanc, Rudolfs Balcers, Alexander Barabanov, John Leonard, Ryan Donato, Dylan Gambrell, Noah Gregor, Matt Nieto, Jonathan Dahlen, Joachim Blichfeld
Defense (7): Brent Burns, Mario Ferraro, Erik Karlsson, Marc-Edouard Vlasic, Nikolai Knyzhov, Radim Simek, Christian Jaros
Goalies (2): Josef Korenar, Martin Jones
This likely won’t be the actual roster but some of the spares can be swapped in for other players, with their cap hits generally being fairly similar. Someone here could also be selected by Seattle but for the purpose of this article, I won’t factor in the expansion draft.
There are five somewhat notable restricted free agents for the Sharks in Rudolfs Balcers, Ryan Donato, Dylan Gambrell, Noah Gregor and Josef Korenar, and the rest being Joachim Blichfeld, Alex True and Christian Jaros, with Kurtis Gabriel, Maxim Letunov, Patrick Marleau, Greg Pateryn and Marcus Sorensen as the unrestricted free agents. I didn’t include any of the UFAs when considering the cap situation for this article.
Realistically, Balcers and Donato are the only forwards likely to get anywhere over $1 million on their next deal. I’ll take a guess and say the Sharks would spend about $4 million on the forwards combined if each player was re-signed to a short-term deal. As for the other RFAs, I’ll say each gets $850,000, just to balance out those who will get league minimum deals and those who could get closer to the $1 million mark.
In this situation, the Sharks would have spent just over $79 million and would have roughly $2 million in cap space remaining to be able to spend this offseason. This doesn't factor in the extra cap space that would come from a player being taken off the roster in favour of whoever is added, but regardless, the Sharks don’t have a whole lot of money to spend. They could probably make one somewhat notable upgrade or potentially two smaller moves.
Either way, the Sharks don’t have a lot of room to make moves this offseason and it’s likely we see a very similar roster heading into next season.
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Do you expect the Sharks to make any major offseason moves?
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