Thornton Re-Signs With the Sharks

The San Jose Sharks were not able to keep the entire band together, but they did a fine job keeping a good portion of it together, namely re-signing Joe Thornton to a 1-year deal, reportedly worth $8 million after signing bonuses.

Thornton, now 38 years old, was still a pretty handy player to have around on the hockey pool team, as he still finished in the top half among all forwards with 7 goals and 50 points in 79 games played with the Sharks.

It will be very interesting to see what kind of value on his $8 million cap hit, Thornton will be able to provide the Sharks in the 2018 season, maybe more so, who will he be playing with, as last season, he found himself on the same line as Joe Pavelski and Patrick Marleau for a lot of 5-on-5 action, but with Marleau now off to Toronto, questions will be abound, heading into training camp.

The Sharks have all of their big minute men now signed or spoken for elsewhere, now the work of getting the depth solidified will be next up on the priority list.

Forwards	Cap	Defense	Cap	Goalies	Cap
Joe Thornton	8.000	Brent Burns	8.000	Martin Jones	3.000
Joe Pavelski	6.000	Paul Martin	4.850	Aaron Dell	0.613
Logan Couture	6.000	Marc-Edouard Vlasic	4.250
Mikkel Boedker	4.000	Justin Braun	3.800
Joel Ward	3.275	Brenden Dillon	3.270
Tomas Hertl	3.000	Dylan Demelo	0.650
Jannik Hansen	2.500
Melker Karlsson	2.000
Joonas Donskoi	1.900
Timo Meier	0.894
Danny O'Regan	0.859
Kevin Labanc	0.718
Rourke Chartier	0.703

It was a bit surprising that the Sharks let Thornton's cap number go up around $8 million, especially since they had lost Marleau to free agency and this would have been the time to start spreading some of that wealth around.  I have the Sharks with a smaller 21-man projected roster above, with spots to still fill out and the team only has $6.5 million left to spend.  There are still some free agents out there that might work well for the Sharks, but whether or not they can afford it, is another story altogether.

The Sharks appear to be a team that has a lot of fun together and that's pretty important, but they did get stomped on fairly early in the playoffs this year, losing to the up-and-coming Oilers in six games in the opening round and there hasn't been enough done to their lineup, if they wanted to prevent that from happening again.  Sure, the Sharks will be fairly competitive in the regular season, even be a good team to pick from for the draft, but the playoffs are the end-all and I am just not seeing it there yet.