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The San Jose Sharks finally won their first game of 2024-25 on Monday night, stunning the Utah Hockey Club with three unanswered goals late in the third before Alex Wennberg sealed the deal in overtime. The victory marked the first NHL triumph for Sharks head coach Ryan Warsofsky.
“The players, credit to them, they stuck with it,” Warsofsky said about his first National Hockey League W, per NHL.com's Matt Komma. “There were times we did some really, really good things and just didn't get rewarded for it. But we stuck with it, we just kept playing, and that's going to be our mindset. We're never going to give up.”
The first-year bench boss continued: “We just kept playing, and that's what this game is all about. We're just never going to give up. We'll never give up. No matter what the scoreboard says, we've just got to keep playing. … We'll take this in tonight and then we'll get ready for tomorrow.”
The Sharks trailed 4-1 with less than five minutes left in the third period, and looked poised to lose 10 straight games to start a season for the second straight time.
But Fabian Zetterlund, Mikael Granlund and Tyler Toffoli each scored late in the frame, knotting the score at 4-4. And Wennberg finished the job 1:26 into overtime after Utah defenseman Michael Kesselring took a hooking minor.
“It's just a really great effort,” Wennberg said of the victory, per Komma. “At the end of the day, you don't say how you win, you just got to win the game.”
With that, the Sharks improve to 1-7-2 on the 2024-25 campaign. It's still a brutal record, but San Jose at least took less time than last year to win game No. 1.
Sharks finally in the win column in 2024-25
Granlund ended the game with a goal and two assists as his early-season surge continues, while Zetterlund scored twice and Jake Walman added three third period assists. Mackenzie Blackwood made 19 saves, while the Sharks peppered Connor Ingram with 45 shots.
San Jose became the first team in NHL history to begin consecutive seasons with at least nine straight losses after falling 7-3 to the Vegas Golden Knights on Saturday. But it wasn't double-digits this time around, and that's something for the roster to build on moving forward.
Meanwhile, it was the fourth straight defeat for Utah HC, and head coach Andre Tourigny was not happy with his team's effort.
“That’s not who we are and that’s not who we want to be,” the bench boss said afterwards, per KSL.com's Ryan Miller. “You have that kind of a lead, that’s not the way we want to play. That’s not who we want to be. We need to own it, and the leadership needs to own it as well. What happened there, it's unacceptable – it's embarrassing.”
Both the Sharks and Utah Hockey Club are having a tough go of things right now, and badly need to turn things around to keep already fading playoff hopes alive.
San Jose will look to make it two straight wins for the first time this year when the Los Angeles Kings visit SAP Center on Tuesday.
