The San Jose Sharks started rookie Will Smith’s season with a plan. Smith would be flanked by veterans like Mikael Granlund, Alexander Wennberg and Tyler Toffoli. There would be no pressure to succeed and certainly no pressure to play center, the more difficult of the forward positions. Smith was never threatened with a trip to the AHL, and he was given planned off days to allow for development. San Jose did its best to protect the then-19-year-old, ensuring that the pressure of development was never too much for him to bear.
What resulted from Smith’s first NHL season was a slow build that will likely become an important building block in his professional hockey career.
Smith’s 2024-25 production
Smith completed the season fourth in the league in rookie scoring.
| Games Played | Goals | Assists | Points | +/- | Shooting % | TOI/Game |
| 74 | 18 | 27 | 45 | -15 | 14.2% | 15:51 |
He scored 45 points in 74 games, good for 0.61 points per game. Smith averaged nearly 16 minutes per game of ice time.
While those stats are a sign of good things to come, Sharks fans should make note of his shooting percentage. Smith finished with a shooting percentage of 14.2%, which was a bit higher than the norm. NHL.com reports that the average shooting percentage of forwards in the league this season was 12.7%.
Sharks fans should not expect Smith to continue shooting at a 14.2% pace for his career, so there will likely be a bit of a comedown next season. That said, Smith has plenty of room to increase his shot count next season, so he should have no problem surpassing the 20-goal threshold.
A tale of two halves
To best understand Smith’s development this year, it’s not so much about his production throughout the 82-game season, but how that production balanced out over the first half and the second half of the season.
The first half was about building confidence for Smith. During that time, he was given off days. These were pre-planned and usually structured around back-to-back games or in a long road trip. These were development days for Smith, where he was supposed to be learning how to better manage his game in the NHL.
When you look at Smith’s stats through Dec. 31, 2024, you find that he needed time to get adapted to the NHL. Smith earned just 13 points (6 G, 7 A) in 32 games played during that time span. Those points were well distributed between even strength and the power play, with a third of them, two goals and two assists, coming on the man advantage.
But Smith was not driving play as well in the first half of the season. His goals for percentage between October and the end of December was 41.30% while his expected goals for percentage was 43.81% (source: Natural Stat Trick). Smith was allowing more goals and more scoring opportunities while he was on the ice.
Turn the page to the second half of the season, starting on Jan. 1, 2025 and there’s a much different story. In the second half, Smith had an expected goals for percentage of 53.75% and an actual goals for percentage of 54.88%. During that 42-game span in 2025, he scored 32 points (12 G, 20 A). While some of this could be credited to moving onto a line with Macklin Celebrini, even away from Celebrini, fans could see that Smith was doing a much better job of driving play.
What’s more, like the beginning of the season, Smith’s surge in points cannot be boiled down to simply finding success on the power play. Exactly one quarter of his points over the 42 games came on the man advantage. He had eight points (3 G, 5 A) on the power play.
Areas of improvement for the summer
While it started slowly, Smith had a successful rookie season, giving Sharks fans a lot to look forward to. That said, there’s plenty of room to grow. Ultimately, the Sharks would like to move Smith to center, giving the team a future brutal one-two punch down the middle. While Smith started this past season out at center, he was quickly moved to the wing. I expect the Sharks will give him a longer look at the center role to start next season.
So this summer, Smith will have to work on his skills in the faceoff circle. Smith won 65 faceoffs this season and lost 113 of them, good enough for 36.52% in the faceoff circle according to Natural Stat Trick.
Offensively, Smith is on track. He was better than league average according to his regularized-adjusted plus-minus chart courtesy of Evolving-Hockey. It’s Smith’s defense that left something to be desired, though it didn’t help that he played on a defensively suspect team.
One other takeaway was his play on the power play. Some of this can be chalked up to a rookie finding his way in the league. This was a season to learn, and Smith made decisions that we’re pretty sure he won’t be making two or three years down the road. He spent a lot of time learning what he can and cannot do in this league against the best players in the world. Those sneaky passes that worked in college don’t work here. There were growing pains for Smith, but credit to the Sharks for having the wherewithal to allow the rookie to test his boundaries and support him with a learning environment to develop his game.
If you’re worried about Smith’s development, don’t be. Evolving-Hockey’s chart of goals above replacement (GAR) percentiles for the NHL puts Smith in some good company.
Looking at the chart, you can see that Smith is just above Brent Burns this season. He’s also on the same page as players like Ridly Greig, Max Domi and Dmitry Kulikov. The point is, while these are not explosive NHL players, they are impactful ones. Smith, in his first season in the NHL season, is doing okay.
Smith’s future with the Sharks
This was Smith’s first season of his three-year entry-level contract. He’s locked up at $950,000 per season through 2027. If he continues to produce at this pace and the Sharks take a step forward in year two, that contract is going to look like a steal.
In this past month, Head Coach Ryan Warsofsky helped Smith out and named him among the players on America’s World Championship team. Smith played alongside some of America’s best players and just won gold with the team. That kind of experience is invaluable to a player like Smith and will help him take another step in his development.
Look for Smith to join the team at training camp energized and ready to help the team jump into the playoff conversation if not this year then next.
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 and 2) played 20 or more games for San Jose this season.
