It was tough to see Ottawa’s logo on the card instead of San Jose's. After a terrible year, the Sharks don’t get the reward that most weak teams can usually look at as a glimmer of hope in an otherwise bleak season.
The San Jose Sharks would have been picking third overall this year in a very deep draft and likely would have selected Quinton Byfield or Tim Stutzle. Instead, Ottawa has two of the top five picks.
The Erik Karlsson trade, which seemed like a lopsided win for the Sharks at the time, is now looking completely different. While I don’t like Pierre Dorion as a general manager, you do have to give him some credit for the conditions on that deal. As long as the Sharks made the playoffs in 2019, which they were always going to, the Senators would get San Jose’s 2020 pick. It was clear the Sharks were going to lose players in the 2019 offseason while trying to make room to sign Karlsson and Timo Meier and as a result, were likely going to be quite a bit weaker for the 2019-20 season. Nobody expected the Sharks to be as bad as they were this year, but nevertheless, if Dorion did foresee this potentially happening and didn’t just luck into it, that’s very clever.
The Sharks still have Tampa Bay’s first-round pick and based on how deep of a draft this is, they’re still going to get a great prospect while likely picking late in the first round. I’ll do some individual articles in the future looking at who they may select, but I'm confident that they’ll be able to select a quality player.
Regardless though, the draft lottery hurts for the Sharks.
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Here’s today’s poll question (results and discussion will be posted in a future article):
Do you think the Sharks will try to make any trades to get another first-round pick in this year's draft?
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