SAN JOSE – When Darryl Sutter became the San Jose Sharks head coach in 1997, then-owner George Gund III and former general manager Dean Lombardi knew it wasn’t going to be easy to turn around the fortunes of a franchise that had sunk to near the bottom of the NHL standings.
“At that time, Dean Lombardi and Mr. Gund were both adamant about the building part,” Sutter told Bay Area News Group on Monday. “They thought it would be five to six years before we’d be a contender.”
Twenty-five years after Sutter first came to San Jose, the Sharks are in a similarly downtrodden state, with general manager Mike Grier and coach David Quinn possibly facing an even stiffer challenge in bringing the team back to prominence than Sutter and Lombardi had a quarter-century ago.
Barring an unforeseen turnaround, the Sharks will miss the postseason for a fourth straight year, as they enter Tuesday’s game with Sutter’s Calgary Flames with a 10-17-6 record and in seventh place in the Pacific Division.
The Sharks have salary cap issues with a handful of expensive long-term contracts on the books, and a pending decision to be made on whether to sign or trade leading goal scorer Timo Meier, who is due another pricey deal.
Although it’s tough to compare the two eras given the cap, which was introduced in 2005 after a year-long work stoppage, Sutter feels Grier and Quinn are capable of leading the same kind of resurgence that he and Lombardi engineered.
It just takes patience.
“The bottom line is in the salary cap world now with 32 teams, the draft is essential,” Sutter said. “You have to hit on a percentage of your draft picks and then you have to wait for them. Kids who are turning pro or coming out of junior when they’re 20 or 21, how many are playing in the NHL? Maybe one or two per team, so it’s going to take time.
“It’s not just turning a light on, it’s putting together blocks. A block here and a block there and eventually it comes together.”
Sutter, now 64, took over a Sharks team in 1997 that had finished the season before with a 27-47-8 record – second-worst in the NHL.
The Sharks had quality players in place, such as Owen Nolan, Jeff Friesen, Todd Gill, Bernie Nicholls, and Viktor Kozlov, and were able to draft foundational pieces like Patrick Marleau, Scott Hannan, Brad Stuart, and Jonathan Cheechoo in 1997 and 1998.
“Those were the guys, you just had to wait for them, and then you knew you were going to become a good club,” Sutter said. “Then along the way, we added really quality veterans with real good resumes to support those guys, to show them how to become good pros.”
As those young players developed, the Sharks added Vincent Damphousse, Gary Suter, Mike Ricci, Bryan Marchment, and Murray Craven, among others. The Sharks went from 62 points in 1996-97 to 78 points the next year when they made the playoffs as the No. 8 seed.
By year five under Sutter in 2002, after four straight playoff appearances, the Sharks were a 99-point team that came within a whisker of knocking off the Colorado Avalanche in the second round.
“It was an exciting time,” Sutter said. “The only issue we had when we came into that fifth and sixth year was Colorado was so good. We knew we had to get through Colorado and you couldn’t get through them.”
Like in 1997, the Sharks have a core they can potentially build around with Erik Karlsson, Tomas Hertl, Logan Couture, and possibly Meier, although Karlsson’s long-term future in San Jose might also be in question.
Still, those kinds of players are vital from a leadership standpoint for any team that wants to improve.
“(The coach) has to have a really strong voice in it all when you’re starting, but at some point, the leadership in the room has to become part of that,” Sutter said. “That’s when you know you’re on the right track. If it was just the head coach nailing guys to the cross all the time, that doesn’t last too long.
“You have to have that long-term vision and then you have to have that really good support in the room as your leadership group. That’s how you build it and that’s probably how you look at (the Sharks’) four or five guys that you have here. Those are the guys that are going to be there when they take that next big step.”
The Sharks’ prospect pipeline is also in better shape than at any point in the last four or five years.
Instead of Marleau, Hannan, Stuart, and Cheechoo, the Sharks now are hoping recent draft picks William Eklund, Thomas Bordeleau, Tristen Robins, Ryan Merkley, and Filip Bystedt can turn into productive NHL players.
“Mike Grier is looked on as a really respected guy in the league,” Sutter said. “From talking to some of the guys, the training staff, and people like that who are still here from when I was here, how much they think of him. That’s really important in building that framework of being a top team again.”
Sutter has won as a coach wherever he’s been, including Los Angeles, where he helped the Kings capture Stanley Cups in 2012 and 2014, much to the chagrin of the Sharks and their fans. Still, he remains the fourth-winningest coach in Sharks history with a 192-167-75 record, and partly because of the work he did, local fans have held the organization to a high standard for a generation.
But, just as Lombardi and Gund predicted, it took time to build the Sharks into a true contender, something that Grier and Quinn know all too well right now.
“It was fun because it wasn’t like you had to do it this year,” Sutter said of the Sharks’ rebuild from 25 years ago. “But you had to see progress, and not take steps back.”