Sharks searching for era-defining veteran, prospect relationship

• Editor's Note: Sheng Peng will be a regular contributor to NBC Sports California’s Sharks coverage. You can read more of his coverage on San Jose Hockey Now, listen to him on the San Jose Hockey Now Podcast, and follow him on Twitter at @Sheng_Peng.

Just two Sharks teammates, among the many who attended Patrick Marleau’s jersey retirement ceremony, also sat with Marleau on stage.

Joe Thornton, of course, was one. Thornton played with Marleau from 2005 to 2017, and once again, from 2019 to 2020.

The other was Kelly Hrudey, who played exactly one year with Marleau, his 1997-98 rookie campaign. It would be the last season of the 37-year-old Hrudey’s career.

That’s how powerful the right mentor can be.

“I was just 17 when I moved to San Jose, I was far away from my support system, my family and friends. I'll forever be thankful to the Hrudey family for taking me in, showing me that a fulfilling hockey career and family life are possible,” Marleau said in his jersey retirement speech. “That rookie season will always stand out because it was the realization of my dream. Kelly and Donna and their daughters treated me like a member of their own family.”

Hrudey told Ryan Cowley of San Jose Hockey Now, “After a home game, we’d come back to the house and [Patrick, my wife, and I] would stay up having sandwiches and just talking about life…We’d sometimes stay up till about 3 in the morning and chat about life and stuff and those were just really phenomenal nights.”

Marleau would go on to play 23 years in the NHL, 21 of them with the Sharks, setting the All-Time Games Played record with 1,779, while scoring 566 goals and 1,179 points. And Hrudey played no small part in a future Hall of Fame career.

Sharks GM Mike Grier can only hope to find another Hrudey-Marleau duo amongst his current crop of older and younger players.

Since taking over last summer, Grier has added a number of veterans like Nico Sturm, Matt Benning, Luke Kunin, Jan Rutta, Kyle Burroughs, Mikael Granlund, Mike Hoffman, and Anthony Duclair to complement top prospects like William Eklund and Thomas Bordeleau.

For long-time Sharks beat reporter Ross McKeon, also co-author of ex-Shark Bernie Nicholls’s autobiography, Grier’s blueprint is familiar.

In the summer of 1996, Sharks GM Dean Lombardi, after missing the playoffs, acquired 30-something veterans like Nicholls, Hrudey, Tony Granato, Todd Ewen, Tim Hunter, Marty McSorley, Al Iafrate, and Todd Gill to complement youngsters like Owen Nolan, Jeff Friesen, Viktor Kozlov, Mike Rathje, and Marcus Ragnarsson. 

Meanwhile, Grier’s Sharks are four years and running out of the postseason.

“The franchise is in a similar position,” McKeon said. “Dean realized he needed to put good examples around these young players to teach them the good habits. I do see the similarities [between Lombardi and Grier’s plans].”

We’ve talked about Hrudey-Marleau. Nicholls told McKeon about his relationship with Nolan in his autobiography. 

“Bernie knew that Owen was gonna be the guy,” McKeon noted of Nicholls, 36, taking Nolan, 24, under his wing. “[Nolan] was a different kind of player. He was moody. He was immature. But he was power forward that was hard to find in the league at that time, who could score and hit and fight.”

Nicholls bought a house close to Nolan’s in Silver Creek, and they often went golfing and hunting together.

“In my first season with the San Jose Sharks, I put up 45 points and I shot a cow,” Nicholls recounted in his book. 

That’s another story, one of the best in the Nicholls autobiography.

But back to the kids, Nicholls also wrote: “Older players need to be good leaders, work hard, and help the kids. I can’t think of any veterans [the Sharks] brought in who didn’t get along with everybody.”

Nicholls himself helped more than Nolan, taking it upon himself to be a mentor for all the youngsters.

“That was the thing for me, with Marco Sturm. [How to] slide and block a shot. Little things like that, that you don't expect,” Nicholls told San Jose Hockey Now recently. “He got good at it.”

“I took the Russian boys, Viktor. I had them over to my house a lot,” he recounted. “Even the goalie [Evgeni Nabokov] came with the boys.”

But back to Nicholls-Nolan. They only played two years together, but Nolan would blossom into one of the league’s best players and Sharks captain, from 1998 to 2003.

“It took a while because Owen had a long way to go. But I'm not sure he would have gotten to the place he got to without that group around them. McSorely, Bernie, [Darryl] Sutter, [Murray] Craven, Ronnie Sutter, they all were patient and worked with Owen,” McKeon said. “To think, when they [acquired Nolan in 1995] and you got to know him a little bit, that he would be a captain of that team in a couple years, it was no way.”

So is there a Hrudey-Marleau or a Nicholls-Nolan among the Sharks right now? Obviously, it’s too early to tell – Marleau had a truly special career and Nolan was one of the great power forwards of his generation.

But already in training camp, we’ve heard about Anthony Duclair taking Thomas Bordeleau under his wing, and Tomas Hertl mentoring Filip Zadina.

Duclair, just 28, has seen a lot in his decade in this league. 

He made his NHL debut as a teenager with the New York Rangers in 2014-15, then scored 20 goals the next season with the Arizona Coyotes. But slumping, he was sent to the minors in 2016-17, bounced around to the Chicago Blackhawks, Columbus Blue Jackets, and Ottawa Senators, where he wasn’t qualified even after a 23-goal campaign in 2019-20, before finding a home with the Florida Panthers, highlighted by a 31-goal campaign in 2021-22.

Grier alluded to all these hard knocks when discussing Duclair, who he acquired for Steven Lorentz in July: “Even for some of our skilled younger players to have Duke here will be good. He’s someone who has gone through the ups and downs of being a 19-year-old and making the team out of camp in New York and then having to go back down and then getting traded and bouncing around and waivers and all these things. Now he’s found his game, so he’s a good example for perseverance and what it takes in this league.”

The talented Bordeleau, selected in the second round of the 2020 Draft by the Sharks, has hit perhaps his first significant roadblock after a ballyhooed college career, not making the Sharks out of camp last year and being admonished, at times, for his defensive play and willingness to go to the hard scoring areas in the AHL.

“There's no sense of getting frustrated because you're not up,” Duclair reflected, of his own chaotic experience. “Just stop pointing fingers and just look yourself in the mirror. That's what I did early on in my career. 

“I knew that I had the ability to be a top-six guy. I began my career, I would be up and down. When I finally told myself, 'Just worry about what I can control,' things started going my way."

A few stalls down in the locker room, Tomas Hertl is a Sharks lifer, and now 29, has gone from cherubic teenager dropping four goals on Martin Biron to one of the deans of Czech hockey, taking the torch from the likes of Jaromir Jagr and David Krejci.

Meanwhile, countryman Zadina has struggled to live up to his advanced billing as the Detroit Red Wings’ sixth pick of the 2018 Draft. The 23-year-old, after renouncing the remainder of his Detroit contract ($4.56 million) and signing a one-year, $1.1 million agreement with the Sharks, has spoken openly about losing confidence in the Motor City.

“We actually talked about it,” Hertl shared. “I think it's one of the hardest things on the ice is [to keep] the confidence, especially when it doesn't go your way. I think it's really important, and for sure with him, because he can be hard, really hard on himself.”

Of course, Bordeleau and Zadina aren’t the only youngsters in need of guidance on a rebuilding Sharks squad. There’s the aforementioned Eklund, defensemen Henry Thrun and Nikita Okhotiuk and Ty Emberson, among others.

Blending veterans with prospects, of course, is a tale as old as time in team sports. But Nicholls, who came up with the Los Angeles Kings in the 1980s, has seen it go the wrong way.

“When we broke in, it was a lot tougher,” he said. “When I went to the LA Kings camp, other than Marcel Dionne [and Mike Murphy and Charlie Simmer], everybody else there knew that this kid's coming for their job.”

That can certainly lead the youth astray.

“It makes them selfish,” Nicholls said. “They're all looking out for themselves instead of the team because they've never been taught any different.”

Nicholls believes that Grier, like Lombardi, is on the right path with his choice of veterans.

“That's very important. And that's why I think, what Mike's doing there and what Dean tried to do, when you got a good, young team, you need to go out and find guys that have been successful. To kind of build that camaraderie for the guys, to really show the guys the ropes,” he said. “When you get older players in with a good group of young kids, they teach them the family part, right? What it is to be a team, like everybody from top to bottom.”

Lombardi and Nicholls and company helped usher in two decades of success for the Sharks. From 1998 to 2019, led by the likes of once-prospects Marleau, Sturm, Nabokov, and more, the Sharks missed the playoffs just twice, and made five Western Conference Finals and one Stanley Cup Final.

Grier is hoping to build a perennial contender with the same blueprint as Lombardi.

“He was able to get the guys he wanted, that he knew were proven winners, and were unselfish, that would give of themselves,” McKeon said of Lombardi. “That worked. It did work. They drafted enough guys, Friesen, Marleau, Kozlov, Rathje, that turned into players, that the veterans were able to hand the mantle off to that younger corps.”