San Jose Sharks

By sharksfan ⋅ November 18, 2009 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Remember last summer Doug Wilson proclaimed that “big changes” were coming after the San Jose Sharks left the playoff dance early? Remember player after player left the team with very few signings in return? Remember everyone asking ‘where are these big changes?’ Sure Dany Heatley showed up, but that was just after they opened training camp. By the time the season started, despite the acquisition of Heatley, the exodus of talent leaving the team seemed to exceed the talent joining the team. That outward flow prompted some worry on my part that perhaps Wilson had done too much housekeeping. After the Heatley acquisition I also feared that the Sharks may be jammed up in salary cap hell next year when the cap is expected to go down.

Here we are 24 games into the season - sitting atop the NHL once again. I wanted to see just how well the Sharks have made out after all the player shuffling and I came up with the following results:

Sharks Acquisitions/Call-Ups

Sharks Losses

There were other players who have left the team but for the purposes of this experiment, we’ll consider only the most active, ‘relevant’ players. We will also consider ‘Call-Ups’ as the players from Worcester who were designated as starters at the beginning of the season (Demers - 23 games played; Ferriero - 18 games played).

All of our acquisitions:
26 goals, 36 assists, 64 points costing us $12.9M.

All of our losses:
20 goals, 18 assists, 38 points saving us $15.5M.

A completely unscientific analysis would indicate that the Sharks cut approximately $2.6M from their payroll (a 16% savings) yet acquired a 30% increase in goal production and an almost 70% increase in overall points production. I’m no accountant but that seems to me like a great ROI*. If this trend continues Doug Wilson will look like an absolute genius - not just for acquiring highly productive, lesser-known talent, but also for positioning the team with 14 players up for free agency next year allowing for some salary cap maneuvering.

I’m starting to think keeping Doug Wilson should be the Sharks top priority over keeping any one player.

*Return On Investment (Thanks Son of OT)

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