The Sharks have rediscovered something long lost.

They believe that they can win every game. That doesn’t sound like much, but when you’ve missed the Stanley Cup playoffs for six straight seasons and were the worst team in the NHL for the last two years, that’s an essential step toward returning to a championship standard.

“That’s the biggest thing that I’ve taken so far from this year,” Sharks coach Ryan Warsofsky said. “We’ve come a long way from Day 1, where we wanted to just hang in games, and sometimes not get blown out, to the point where the expectation is for us to win the game 1775537053. That’s a big jump, in my opinion, of where we’ve come this year.”

“I’ve been in locker rooms where you go into a game and you’re like, ‘What are we gonna do? How are we gonna do this?’” Alex Nedeljkovic said. “It’s a hard one to get out of.”

Believing you can win every game doesn’t come from any one place. Think of it as a circle feeding on each other, until you’re on top of the mountain with a Stanley Cup.

“When someone believes in something and they believe in each other, that’s when you make moves, that’s when you make strides, and that’s where you see a lot of success come from,” Warsofsky said. “That’s what’s so powerful.”

Three reasons stand out for the Sharks believing, once again.

Team

Simply put, this edition of the Sharks is a team, and not a collection of individuals.

“That group is extremely coachable,” Warsofsky said. “They’re great, great human beings. They’re great guys, a high character, and they care about one another.”

Every locker room, of course, claims to be tight-knit, but the Sharks’ closeness has manifested itself in ways manufactured and organic: Just for example, Ryan Reaves purchasing a shark tooth necklace to be the team’s player of the game award, Reaves and equipment manager Mike Aldrich behind the team-wide black Adidas tracksuits they wear on road trips, the team gatherings that Tyler and Cat Toffoli spearhead, and Nedeljkovic buying nickname caps for the entire team.

There’s also what we don’t see.

“The bond that we have, road trips, dinners with the guys, guys staying close, hanging out, days off, whatever it is,” alternate captain Mario Ferraro said. “You’d think that that would kind of be a standard everywhere, but I’ve been on a lot of teams, and it isn’t always the case. I’ve played with a lot of different players and a lot of different groups of guys, and I think that this is one of the closest groups that we’ve had. It shows in ways that you wouldn’t see, and it’s definitely a big part of winning as a group.”

Macklin Celebrini

It’s also easier to believe you can win every game when you have one of the best players in the world on your side.

The 19-year-old’s emergence as an MVP candidate is the headline story of the Sharks’ season, but lots of other youngsters have also starred.

Collin Graf and Zack Ostapchuk have become reliable NHL’ers. Will Smith, William Eklund, Igor Chernyshov, Michael Misa, Sam Dickinson, and Yaroslav Askarov, all 23-and-under, have shown flashes of brilliance.

Nedeljkovic noted, too, and this is a tribute to the closeness of the team, that the Sharks want to live up to Celebrini’s standard.

“For the rest of us, we’ve gotta step it up for him,” Nedeljkovic said. “You see how hard he works, how bad he wants to win. It should just drive the rest of us to want to do it. Like I just talked about doing it for each other, that’s our leader, that’s our guy.”

Once again, it’s a circular relationship.

“I want to be 10 percent better every single day as much as I can, so that way when we get into a game and he turns over a puck at the blueline, and they come down on a breakaway, he’s got that belief in me that I’m going to bail him out,” Nedeljkovic said. “Vice versa, just like if I give up a bad goal, I’ve got that same belief that he’s going to make up for it in some way. He’s going to set somebody up or he’s going to bury it. That’s how we should all look at it. He’s going to do his thing, but the rest of us got to do ours.”

Wins

And of course, you need results.

It’s hard to believe that you can win when you don’t, which has been a Sharks’ ailment for years.

Their first win after a 0-4-2 start, 6-5 in overtime at the New York Rangers, was obviously important.

Celebrini netted a hat trick and five points in the victory.

Their first win against a Stanley Cup contender, 3-2 in OT over the Colorado Avalanche on Nov. 1, an Askarov masterpiece, stood out to William Eklund.

“That was a big one for us,” Eklund said.

A week later, Mario Ferraro was the first Shark to publicly say “playoffs,” a curse word in San Jose since 2019, after the Sharks beat the defending champion Florida Panthers 3-1 in another Askarov masterpiece.

“There’s no easy game, every team is a good team in this league, but teams that are higher up in the standings—that are maybe favorites and projected to compete for a Stanley Cup—we beat those teams this year,” Ferrari said. “We know that we can compete against anybody.”

In mid-December, the Sharks pulled off the greatest comeback in franchise regular-season history, coming back from down 5-1 in the third period to shock the Pittsburgh Penguins 6-5 in OT.

“It’s just a team that’s come together,” Reaves said afterwards. “We’ve gone on a stretch that gives us confidence. When you build that confidence, you start realizing that you have something special and you can do something with it.”

And the Sharks are still doing it, evidenced recently by becoming the first team in NHL history to win three straight in the last 90 seconds of the game last week. And even in defeat, like Saturday’s 6-3 loss to the Nashville Predators, they’ve been able to hold their heads high.

“We were down 3-0, and we still believe we were going to win the hockey game,” Warsofsky said. “If you don’t have that belief, you probably don’t come back to tie that game up.”

The Sharks also have managed to rally from recent five-game and six-game losing streaks to stay in the playoff race.

“The biggest thing we can probably take is just an understanding that even in those games that we don’t win, we’re there,” Nedeljkovic said. “This year when we’ve lost, we’ve kind of almost beat ourselves in some instances, instead of we just got beat by a better team. Those are all areas where you can look at, say, ‘We are a good team.’ Especially when you look at a lot of the losses and say, ‘We could have been better in areas that were in our control.’”

“The group’s done a really good job of kind of ignoring the outside noise from the start,” Warsofsky said. “From the start to oh my God, they’ve lost five in a row, they’re done. We just keep playing. We’re going to continue to do that to the end.”

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