The Sharks’ return-on-investment with defenseman Erik Karlsson has been, so far, underwhelming at best. After trading away several assets to acquire him from Ottawa just before the start of the 2018-19 season and then making him the highest-paid defenseman in the league last summer with an eight-year, $92 million contract extension, it’s safe to say the organization expected more to this point.
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Complicating the situation from a public-relations standpoint is that Ottawa owns the Sharks’ first-round pick in the 2020 NHL Draft. Going into the June 26 draft lottery, that pick has the third-best odds (11.5 percent) of becoming the first-overall selection, which will almost certainly be Alexis Lafreniere. Meanwhile, Josh Norris, the Sharks’ first-round pick in 2017 draft (19th overall) who was part of the Karlsson trade, was just named the AHL rookie of the year after finishing third in scoring with 61 points.
There’s a chance that the Senators end up with their top two centers for the next decade if they get some ping-pong ball luck in the lottery and Norris, who has been compared with Logan Couture, continues to develop. If that happens, it might be difficult for Sharks general manager Doug Wilson and his front office to overcome those optics.
But what often gets left out of the Karlsson evaluation, at least from the national perspective, is that during a six-week stretch from early December through mid-January in 2018-19, the Sharks were getting exactly what they had hoped from Karlsson. During that brief run, when Karlsson posted 27 points (1g, 26a) and a +20 rating in 19 games, it looked like a third Norris Trophy as the league’s best defenseman could be in his future. More importantly, the Sharks looked like a Stanley Cup contender.
Then he suffered a pair of groin injuries, which resulted in Karlsson missing 27 of the final 33 games. Although the Sharks advanced to the 2019 Western Conference final, Karlsson was never more than 60 or 70 percent healthy on a nightly basis in the postseason. While he was still generally effective, with 16 points in 19 playoff games, he wasn’t quite himself.
And he hasn’t been since.
For the Sharks to have a chance at pulling off a miraculous turnaround in 2020-21, they’ll need to have the Karlsson they saw in that six-week stretch. He never looked right since he underwent offseason surgery last May up until the moment he broke his thumb while blocking a shot on Feb. 14 in Winnipeg, ending his 2019-20 season weeks before the pandemic shut down the NHL and left the Sharks in last place in the conference.
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Are Karlsson’s best years behind him? If so, the Sharks as an organization are probably in for a turbulent few seasons.
But what if those groin injuries and the subsequent surgery really were the primary reason he was subpar, by his standards, this season? Karlsson, of course, is the only one who truly knows how much he was limited in 2019-20.
“Every time you enter the summer (by) starting rehab, it’s never easy,” Karlsson said on a conference call last week. “Unfortunately, I’ve done that, I think, throughout all my injuries so far in my career. It’s always been at the end of the year. You’re in a situation where you’re either playing through it and risk moving forward, or you sit out in the playoffs, and that’s never been an option.
“I think anytime any player of any age or experience, every time you have an opportunity in the summer to take some extra time and spend some extra time on some other things than just playing hockey, it’s always beneficial. I’ve gone through both scenarios and I don’t think that it’s going to be a negative thing in that aspect of getting back to the (physical) form that you can (be) when you have some extra time on your hands.”
The Sharks have plenty of time from now until whenever they play their next game. If the league is able to stage a Stanley Cup playoff beginning in late July or early August, the 2020-21 regular season may not begin until early December at the earliest. That would mean the Sharks would have gone approximately nine months between games — their final game this season was in Chicago on March 11.
Wilson said recently that he expects Karlsson to be better next season, whenever it begins.
“The one benefit he’s going to have is he’s going to have all the time now to get healthy and get that elite-level fitness that great players have and that he’s been able to have in the past. This extra time for him will be very beneficial,” Wilson said on May 26.
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He continued: “To have an Erik Karlsson be 100 percent coming in, in the prime of his career, to play the way that he’s going to be — he’s a driving force for us.”
Karlsson, who is back in Ottawa now with his wife and young daughter, has spent some time biking and working out at home since the pandemic hit.
“It’s not going to be a normal summer since we’re not probably going to start next season at the normal time,” he said. “You’re going to have to find a way to maintain your body and your motivation and everything for a very long time.”
It’s probably still much too early to write Karlsson off, as he just turned 30 on May 31. According to a source, Karlsson’s surgery last summer is very similar to what Brent Burns underwent earlier in his career. Burns suffered a sports hernia and groin injury prior to the lockout-shortened 2013 season, and part of the reason then-coach Todd McLellan moved him to forward midway through that season was because it made Burns less reliant on the top-end mobility needed by an offensive-minded defenseman. At that point, Burns was more effective as a straight-line forechecking forward than he would have been trying to defend as a blueliner.
While Karlsson still was able to make plays with his hands and his vision this season, his ability to shake off defenders or beat them in open ice was often missing. In his case, that’s the difference between being a good player and a great one, which is what the Sharks need. Still, as the now 35-year-old Burns has demonstrated, it’s possible for an offensive defenseman to play at an elite level past the age of 30.
The reasons why the Sharks struggled this season go far beyond Karlsson’s performance, of course.
Karlsson wasn’t able to single out at any specific area.
“It’s hard to say,” he said. “I just think there’s a lot of things that kind of build up over a long period of time and when one thing came crashing down, it all just fell apart.”
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He continued: “We tried so many things to repair it, but at the same time I don’t think that there’s anything we could have done differently that would have changed the short-term results.”
When asked about whether the team was as cohesive as it could have been, Karlsson suggested that the players in the dressing room didn’t quite know how to react to losing, considering how much regular-season success the Sharks have had for the better part of the last decade. (Couture, the captain, recently suggested something similar.)
“You start looking for solutions that might not be there,” Karlsson said. “Overthinking is usually one of the biggest mistakes you can make … especially when you don’t feel like (you are) doing enough and being good enough for your own standards. I think that anything that happened this year is a normal reaction that you’d (get) on any team in any pro sports, whether that be the New England Patriots or Pittsburgh Penguins or any of the teams that are and have been extremely good for a long time.”
In other words, the losing season was something Karlsson expects to learn from, and expects his teammates to learn from, too. The expectation is that it results in a quick turnaround.
“You get to see a lot of different sides from a lot of different people that you haven’t necessarily seen before and you learn a lot about yourself,” Karlsson said. “It’s going to be up to each and every individual to learn from and figure out how they themselves handled the situation and what they could do differently when you start feeling like something like this is creeping up again.”
(Photo: Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)
