Klim Kostin believes he has a lot to offer an NHL team, but it’s clear that he’s not giving the Sharks’ management what it’s looking for. Like a few other players on the Sharks roster this season, Kostin was in the position to assert himself and claim a spot on the roster night in and night out. However, the forward lacked the consistency to get into and stay in the lineup. What resulted was a season where Kostin spent half of his time on the ice and the other half watching games from the press box.
Kostin’s 2024-25 production
Whether you think it’s fair or not, Kostin received limited ice time this season, even when he managed to get into a game.
| Games Played | Goals | Assists | Points | +/- | Shooting % | TOI/Game |
| 35 | 1 | 6 | 7 | -6 | 3.6% | 10:41 |
He played 35 games and averaged 10:41 total ice time per game in 2024-25. That’s more than four minutes less ice time than he averaged with the Sharks in the 2023-24 season.
Kostin’s defensive play at even-strength was bad
In the limited minutes that he played, Kostin was not an offensively impactful player and was detrimental to the Sharks on defense. In fact, when you look at Evolving-Hockey’s chart comparing all Sharks’ forwards with 100 minutes of ice time or more, you see that at even-strength, Kostin was defensively (represented in orange) the second most detrimental forward on the team.
According to the chart, the only player who had a worse time of it at even-strength defense was Will Smith, and as we talked about in a previous post, Smith’s season needs to be taken in two parts to truly understand how the forward developed in his first year as a professional.
But back to Kostin, who played his first professional game of hockey in the 2019-2020 season and now has 190 career NHL games under his belt. At this point, fans would expect that Kostin would be further along in his development.
Looking at his individual regularized-adjusted plus-minus chart (RAPM), you can see that Kostin’s expected goals against per 60 minutes were, well, bad.
Fitting into a system
The sad part for the 26-year-old is that he is not too far removed from a successful season on a competitive team.
Evolving-Hockey has his goals above replacement (GAR) percentile for this season at 8.4%. But it wasn’t long ago that he was running at a 69.9% GAR. In the 2022-23 season, Kostin played 57 games with the Edmonton Oilers, had 21 points (11 G, 10 A), and still averaged less ice time per game (10:04) than he did this season.
Looking at his GAR for that season, Kostin was ranked almost in the 70th percentile of the league.
What’s more, Kostin was used with more of Edmonton’s role players that season, playing alongside guys like Mattias Janmark, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Derek Ryan and Devin Shore. He didn’t get that time with Connor McDavid or Leon Draisaitl and still managed to perform better with the Oilers than he did with the Sharks this season.
Given this most recent history, it’s pretty clear that Kostin’s style of play, for whatever reason, isn’t meshing with the system that the Sharks want to play.
Kostin’s future with the Sharks
Kostin has never complained about his role in the Sharks organization and if he’s frustrated, he’s been pretty good about keeping it to himself. He’s willing to talk to the media about his role and his season in San Jose and he does so openly.
Kostin is a restricted free agent this summer and will need an offer of at least $2.2 million if he’s going to stay with the Sharks for another season. Given the additions of Patrick Giles, Zach Ostapchuk and the recent signing of Egor Afanasyev, it’s pretty clear that the Sharks are leaning toward not re-signing Kostin, especially given the role that he’s played with the team recently.
Odds are, Kostin will be wearing another team’s jersey this fall.
Editor’s Note: Over the next few weeks, we will be rolling out the player reviews for the San Jose Sharks. We realize there were a lot of guys rotating into and out of the lineup and some of the key depth players were traded. As a result, Fear the Fin plans to focus on the players who are 1) still with the Sharks even if they are not under contract at the moment and 2) played 20 or more games for San Jose this season.
