Good luck making sense of half of Hasso Plattner’s rambling open letter to the fanbase released earlier today, but one thing the Sharks owner’s statement apparently signifies is that Doug Wilson will return for his 12th season as the team’s general manager.
“The management, John and Doug, did a good job” is certainly one of the more debatable sentences of Plattner’s letter (not quite as debatable: “some of the sophomores will enter their third year”) but, according to a CSN Bay Area source, it’s an endorsement of Wilson as the club’s GM going forward.
After publicly declaring last summer that the Sharks would enter a rebuilding phase despite a 111-point regular season and a playoff series in which they lost in seven games to the eventual champions, Wilson failed to convince the team’s pair of 35-year-old stars to waive their no-movement clauses and rushed top prospects like Mirco Mueller to the NHL. The result was a club that was neither good enough to make the playoffs nor bad enough to net a top five draft pick, with the development of young players like Tomas Hertl, Matt Nieto and Mueller around whom the rebuild is presumably based either stagnating or compromised.
San Jose missing the playoffs for the first time in over a decade wasn’t Todd McLellan’s fault, wasn’t Joe Thornton’s fault and wasn’t Antti Niemi’s fault even though all three have been or will be scapegoated for the disappointing season. It was Wilson’s fault and it’s now up to him to prove a seemingly lost year of mediocrity somehow represents a stepping stone towards a brighter future.
As many of you know, Fear the Fin is an independent site run by Sharks fans for Sharks fans. Help keep Fear the Fin independent by contributing to our