Jargon
Registered User
It sucks for Eklund that this happened. I get people empathizing with him and to a degree I get people wondering if this could have some amount of negative impact on him going forward. But I don't get how everyone's first reaction is to leap right to presuming that he's gone as soon as his contract is up or that he's going to hold out and demand a trade now, or not accept his RFA deal or whatever. Going from everything being fine to immediately assuming or projecting the worst possible outcome is nuts. It's just weird that one deadline trade suddenly seems to have shifted everything in that direction.
Eklund is going to bail (even though there's plenty of time for him to get over this and be just fine like 99% of the other cases like this that have happened in the past)
The team is never going to win again and be stuck in a perpetual tank (even though Grier has gone on record saying that the days of purposefully ripping apart the roster for futures ended at the deadline)
The team is going to suck so much and Plattner is gutting the club's expenses so a sale and relocation becomes a possibility (even though that is such a far-off, pie-in-the-sky thing that it's not even worth considering yet and the cost-cutting this was 100% randomly just pulled from thin air groundless speculation.)
You'd think that we were in year 6 of a perpetual rebuild with no hope in sight and not in basically year 2.5/3 of the rebuild proper with the best prospect pool in the league and a cornerstone player who comes closer to embodying the "generational player" status than basically anyone we've ever seen in franchise history besides maybe/probably Jumbo.
What’s funny is that as far as rebuilds go, this one is actually moving forward quite well! Lucking into Celebrini was a huge moment for this franchise. Getting Askarov, Smith’s growth, Dickinson dropping, Chernyshov’s surge, etc. — all of these things have been tremendously good for us so far. We’re also going to get a huge piece this summer — either a potential franchise-altering defenseman or a very high skilled to complement a plethora of high skilled prospects.
Also, if you watch the players, they seem to love each other, love playing, have great friendships (see Toffoli’s video on instagram about why he Mack and Will spent the night in the same hotel room, it’s adorable), etc.
I get being tired of losing, but this team has a lot of great vibes and huge potential. As Sharks fans we need to take a collective breath and enjoy the good things. There will be pain along the way but hopefully it’s in service of building a winning team for the next decade plus.
He's still fuming about the Jr. Sharks situation
Listen dude his dad hates the Sharks, someone I made up is close to the family and told me.