Sharks 2019 Draft Recap

Another EHE Entry Draft has come and gone, and for the second time in three years the San Jose Sharks spent the bulk of the event watching from the sidelines.

Of course, General Manager Kyle Phillips had no one to blame but himself for his long wait until the 110th overall selection. That's what happens when you spend a calendar year making trades that sprinkle your own team's picks all across the league.

Nevertheless, it's often said that the most successful organizations do their best work during the later stages of draft weekend, rather than in the early rounds. And Phillips is certainly putting that theory to the test, stockpiling fourth and fifth-round picks in an attempt to offset the fact that the Sharks have made only one first round selection during his tenure. 

It's debatable whether that strategy will pay off in the long run, but as always, the Sharks GM seemed full of confidence during his traditional post-draft interview. Here are some of his thoughts about the weekend that was, and what could be coming next in San Jose.

On another long wait before his first pick:

“Yep, it sucked. It sucks watching names fly off the board, names you wish you could be adding to your own group. It sucks watching other GMs have all the fun.

"But having said that, I'm comfortable that we've done a good thing over the last year by trading picks for players who are under team control for a while, and who still have some upside. That was the biggest issue I saw when I took over the team: the huge amount of pending free agents.

"To a certain degree you can address that by acquiring as many draft picks as you can and flooding your system with kids. But I think it was important for us to add some guys who are established professional players.

"Picks are great and I love having lots of them, but at some point they are basically magic beans."

On the team's overall draft strategy in 2019:

"Well, the same old boring thing mostly, just 'Best Player Available' and all that.

"But I guess you could say we were extra focused on upside this time around. We passed on a few highly-ranked guys who projected to be good professionals, but who we thought would top out as replacement-level players.

"It's definitely helpful to have guys like that in the system, and we've made those kind of picks in the past. But yeah, this year in particular we were instead looking for kids with at least one special quality, something we hope will seperate them from the pack at the highest level."

On yet again using a late pick to take a goalie:

"You can never have too many good goalies, and they don't grow on trees.

"Am I allowed to use two clichés in one answer?"

On the Sharks' inactivity on the trade front:

"As always our lines were open, and there were some talks about potentially swapping picks. But nothing was ever all that close to happening. Obviously it can be a bit tough to wheel and deal when you've only got mid-level fourth and fifth-round picks."

On the team's summer outlook:

"I don't expect we'll be all that active, but you never know what can happen. Our roster is fairly set for next season, at least in the sense that we're just kinda waiting on our kids to take a step forward.

"The last couple of years we've had some bad contracts to get off the books, and lots of pending free agents where we just wanted to recoup some value. Things are more stable on that front for us now, so there's no pressing need for a bunch of moves.

"It also looks like the free agent class will be pretty thin this fall, so it's unlikely we'll make a big splash there. Which is actually alright, since we're not a team that's one big move away from being a Cup contender.

"So yeah, looks like it could be a quiet summer, which suits me just fine."

- with files from the San Jose Mercury News