The Barracuda are coming! The Barracuda are coming!
There were moments during the 2023-24 NHL season where William Eklund, then a rookie, felt helpless to stem the tide of the Sharks’ losing. The Sharks won just 19 games that season and sported an NHL-worst -150 Goal Differential. There was help coming for Eklund, but it wasn’t clearly on the horizon yet.
What a difference that two years make.
Eklund is better, but now, the Sharks have got Macklin Celebrini and Will Smith as regular contributors. And Saturday night, though they lost 4-2 to the Seattle Kraken, San Jose also appears to be armed with Barracuda alumni Collin Graf and Igor Chernyshov. The Sharks outplayed Seattle for most of the night.
I’ll talk more about Chernyshov, just three games into his NHL career, in another article.
On Graf, this is the most confident NHL game that I’ve seen the 23-year-old winger play, especially offensively.
Sharks head coach Ryan Warsofsky corrected me: “In all three zones.”
And indeed, the 6-foot-1 winger scored a goal off a turnover that he forced, set up Chernyshov for multiple chances, and out-battled the Kraken all over the ice.
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