In recent Sharks terms, it was a relatively quiet draft day. During the General Manager Mike Grier era of the draft, there were trades to move up to grab the players that the Sharks had on the team’s board. However, this year, the Sharks seemed content to stand pat with the picks the team had. The Sharks didn’t make many moves, untempted, even though teams like the Pittsburgh Penguins and Chicago Blackhawks were taking swings. Instead, the Sharks stood pat with the nine picks the team had and let the chips fall as they might.
First round intrigue
While the Sharks tried to offer some intrigue with the second overall pick, ultimately, the team went with what most pundits expected and chose Michael Misa, offering the Sharks a formidable one-two punch down the middle for many years to come. With Macklin Celebrini, Michael Misa and Will Smith, the Sharks are now stacked in the forward group and look scary for years to come.
Analysis: I guess this is what it would feel like if we were to get Joe Thornton, Patrick Marleau and Joe Pavelski all at the same time. We’re talking about three impact players likely playing for the Sharks next season and while there are bound to be some speed bumps along the way, this is an exciting time to be a Sharks fan. It feels like at any moment, a switch could flip and the team could suddenly be unstoppable. That’s a heady feeling.
It was presumed that with the 30th overall pick, the Sharks would use the pick to select a defenseman to help beef up the talent pool on the backend. However, when the time came to make the selection, instead of taking some of the larger options on the board, GMMG and company surprised the crowd and selected a goaltender in Joshua Ravensbergen.
It’s not that Ravensbergen was a stretch at 30th. He was very much supposed to be selected in the first round, but the Sharks weren’t expected to choose a goaltender, considering the team already has Yaroslav Askarov in the fold.
Analysis: I don’t hate the pick. There’s no guarantee that Askarov will be everything that we hoped for or that he’ll be healthy for the next ten years. Life happens and insurance isn’t the worst thing in the world to have. Having a top end goaltending prospect as a backup isn’t the worst thing in the world and if Ravensbergen forces the Sharks’ hand down the road, the team can get a top end talent to put San Jose over the top right when it needs it.
Sharks finally get the defenseman in round two, sort of
While Sharks fans believe, rightfully so, that the team needs a right-shot defenseman, that’s not the direction the Sharks went in round two. Instead, with the first pick in the second round, the Sharks selected Simon “Haoxi” Wang. While Wang is a defenseman, he’s not a right-side defenseman, which had fans concerned since a right-shot player like Blake Fiddler was also avaliable at the time. In the Sharks’ post-draft media availability, the team made it clear that Wang’s raw talent was too hard to pass up. Wang is a large player — he had the largest wingspan of any of the players at the draft combine — and he can skate.
There is a lot of raw potential in Wang and the Sharks are hoping that they can unlock it in development. It helps that the young man is headed to Boston University in the fall. The Sharks clearly trust the staff at BU and so feel that will only help grow Wang’s potential.
Analysis: You can’t teach size. A big guy means reach and that can drive players insane in the offensive zone. A defenseman of that size who can skate is an asset and the fact that he’s raw is okay. He’s still young enough to learn and he appears to be athletic enough to adjust his game. He won’t be a breakout superstar scoring machine, but he could shutdown a top line and I’ll take that in a playoff game any day.
As for the second pick in the second round, the Sharks took Cole McKinney, a kid one analyst described as a “rat.” McKinney is the kind of player that will grind it out in the corners for a puck, but he can also score. He was a point per game player in the USNTDP. His consolidated ranking was 30 according to Elite Prospects, so getting him at 53rd was a nice piece of business by Grier and company.
Analysis: I know some Sharks fans felt this was a bit of a reach and others felt we would have been better served drafting defense, but the Sharks have the team’s first and second line centers drafted, now it’s time to fill out the rest of the roster. Teams need scoring depth that can be difficult to play against, if McKinney can ultimately fill that role on the third line, then well done Grier. As a point per game player at 18, the trajectory so far is looking good.
Adding depth in the later rounds
In round three, the Sharks drafted forward Teddy Mutryn at 95th overall. He was all over the board for scouts. Some scouts, like McKeen’s Hockey, had him 149th, while Elite Prospects had him 85th. Obviously, the Sharks like what they saw in Mutryn. Sharks Director of Amateur Scouting Chris Morehouse believes that Mutryn brings a “high level of compete” to his game and called him a “highly competitive kid.”
Analysis: A lot of analysis that I read had people scratching their heads on this one. Mutryn projects to be a power forward and Grier continues to search the later rounds of the draft for those third and fourth liners who will grind it out and play the heavy minutes to clear the way for the top six. That said, scouts weren’t sure why we picked so high on Mutryn. Having not heard of the kid until yesterday, I can’t say anything bad or good about him.
I will say, sometimes you take a swing and you miss, sometimes you get a hit. Mutryn feels like a lottery ticket, you buy it and hope that one day it hits.
In round four, the Sharks finally went defense again, picking Ilyas Magomedsultanov at 115th. Magomedsultanov is a defenseman who played in the MHL last season and was ranked 96th by FC Scouting.
Analysis: The deeper you go in the draft, the less information you’re going to get about a player. The fact that Magomedsultanov plays in Russia means that analysts in North America are going to have even less information about the player specifically because the Russians have not been allowed in international play for several seasons now. As a result, we don’t know much about Magomedsultanov, but what we have heard has been pretty interesting. Most analysts have liked this pick at 115 for the Sharks and think that San Jose might have found a sneaky good, potential NHL player in this spot. There are, of course, a lot of development hurdles to overcome en route to the NHL, but that could be said for a majority of these prospects. It sounds like Grier and company found good value with pick 115.
We’re going to group picks 124 and 150 together because the analysis is going to be similar. With the 124th overall pick, the Sharks selected another defenseman, Zachary Sharp, a 20-year-old defenseman who won a National Championship with Western Michigan.
The team also selected Max Heise with the 150th pick overall. Heise is a 19-year-old forward who played in the BCHL last season and will play in the WHL this upcoming season.
Analysis: Since taking over as General Manager, Grier has shown a proclivity for using these later-round picks to take overage players. He does so with picks 124 and 150 this year. It’s not a horrible strategy. You get to see one more year, or in the case of Sharp, two more years of development, and thus you get to see the development trajectory of a player. In some ways, it’s like peeking at some of the cards at the top of the deck before deciding how many you’re going to draw. It’s a crap shoot as it is down in the lower rounds of the draft so take those overagers who have had one more year to work, advance in development and show how much they want it.
Finally, the Sharks used the team’s last pick of the draft to select Richard Gallant with the 210th overall selection. Gallant also came out of the USNTDP and was a “value add” if you want to call it that, considering that the pundits that had him ranked, such as McKeen’s Hockey, FCHockey and Recruit Scouting, all had him in the 180s.
Analysis: The only thing Gallant seemed to have going against him in the later rounds of this draft was his size. He’s an energy forward with a two-way game, but at 5-foot-8, 166 pounds, he’s not big by NHL standards. It’s pretty clear that in the draft, bigger was better. Look at the way Victor Eklund dropped in the first round. General managers, stupidly in my opinion, have prioritized size over skill and compete. However, the Sharks have benefited in this case and found a young player in the seventh round who has a good chance as anyone coming out of the seventh round to make it to the NHL.
Every San Jose Sharks pick in the 2025 NHL Entry Draft
So this is how it all shook out:
2 – Michael Misa, F
30 – Joshua Ravensbergen, G
33 – Simon “Haoxi” Wang, D
53 – Cole McKinney, C
95 – Teddy Mutryn, C
115 – Ilyas Magomedsultanov, D
124 – Zachary Sharp, D
150 – Max Heise, C
210 – Richard Gallant, F
