The San Jose Sharks May Be the Worst Team in Hockey History
San Jose is by far the NHL’s worst team in 2023-24. But could it also be the worst ever? Let's compare them with other candidates from throughout history.
Seldom has a hockey team celebrated the 12th game of its season quite like the San Jose Sharks did when they beat the Philadelphia Flyers on Tuesday night.
“I give these guys so much credit,” San Jose coach David Quinn said after the game. “They’ve been such a great group to coach. They’ve never stopped working. ... I give a ton of credit to our leaders and our older players. I thought they really stepped up tonight."
It wasn’t so much a milestone victory as a relief not to lose. With the W, the Sharks avoided surpassing the 1943-44 New York Rangers for the longest losing streak to start a season in league history (11 games). Even after that win, though, the Sharks, at 1-11, are still on a historically bad pace. Their current goal differential of minus-42 is the worst by any NHL team ever through 12 games, “beating” the 1924-25 Boston Bruins’ previous record of minus-40:
This team has a shocking propensity to get blown out. On two separate occasions in the past week alone, San Jose gave up 10 goals in a loss, the first team to be on the receiving end of multiple such beatings in the first 12 contests of a season since the 1984-85 Vancouver Canucks. If things keep going the way they have been, the Sharks are going to provide a whole season’s worth of little statistical nuggets like that for us connoisseurs of historic hockey oddities.
(They’re also going to have an inside line at the No. 1 pick in the draft — Tankathon already gives them a 26% chance, though there is no Connor Bedard-style sure thing waiting in the wings as franchise savior.)
But does this San Jose team truly have the potential to become the WOAT — the Worst Of All-Time? The competition is surprisingly stiff among all the teams that have laced up skates in NHL history. Here are a few of the squads (in no particular order) in the mix for that title:
Record: 8-67-5
Winning %: .131
Goals/Game Diff: -3.31
SRS rating: -3.09
Lowest Elo rating: 1260
Traditionally the gold standard among the worst the game has had to offer, the ‘75 Caps were an expansion team back when the league mercilessly let those clubs falter — no Vegas Golden Knights-style instant success stories here! Among Washington’s league records for futility that still stand are 446 goals allowed and a negative-265 goal differential, to go with defenseman Bill Mikkelson’s all-time individual record for negative plus-minus (minus-82). Out of the 24 Capitals skaters to play at least 20 games, more than one-fifth of them never played in the NHL again after the 1974-75 season — they’d had enough. While the 2023-24 Sharks are slightly ahead of Washington’s pace for losing and getting outscored, they have a long way to go to maintain that level of misery over an entire season.
Record: 10-70-4
Winning %: .143
Goals/Game Diff: -2.30
SRS rating: -2.10
Lowest Elo rating: 1283
Picking between the expansion-year Senators and their follow-up effort in 1993-94 is like splitting hairs, but we’ll go with the version that didn’t even have rookie Alexei Yashin to provide some offensive spark. The ‘93 team was truly devoid of skill, with journeyman D Norm Maciver ranking as the only member of the roster to crack 50 points. In a sign of tanking tactics that would later become commonplace, the Senators lost 24 of their last 27 games to end the season, with owner Bruce Firestone admitting under the influence of "eight, maybe nine beers" that the losing was perhaps deliberate in order to secure the rights to pick Alexandre Daigle in the draft. (Saddest of all, Daigle ended up being a notorious bust.)
Record: 11-71-2
Winning %: .143
Goals/Game Diff: -2.33
SRS rating: -2.29
Lowest Elo rating: 1290
The 1992-93 season is still one of the most beloved in the minds of many NHL fans who were around back then, between Mario Lemieux’s legendary cancer comeback, Wayne Gretzky’s run to the finals and the most recent Canadian team to win the Stanley Cup. But it was also a banner season for really bad hockey. On top of the expansion Sens, the ‘93 version of the Sharks were unbelievably bad in the franchise’s second year of existence: San Jose gave up 414 goals (the third-most ever in a season) and was outscored by 196 goals overall (tied for second-worst ever). The 2023-24 Sharks would have to lose by 2.21 goals per game over the rest of the season to match that ‘92-93 mark. What’s remarkable is that this Sharks roster actually had some players who would go on to do good things in the league — from cat-quick goalie Arturs Irbe to dynamic D-man Sandis Ozolinsh and pint-sized winger Ray Whitney — but in 1992-93 this group was decidedly not ready for prime time.
Record: 6-39-5
Winning %: .170
Goals/Game Diff: -2.96
SRS rating: -2.47
Lowest Elo rating: 1381
Before they were setting the all-time record for consecutive losses to start a season, it hadn’t been too long since the Rangers hoisted the Stanley Cup in 1940 — but New York’s roster was hit hard by absences for World War II, and the team saw its fortunes sink quickly as the mid-1940s approached. The 1943-44 season was a clear low point, as New York set a record for the fewest wins (6) in a season that was at least 50 games long, and bore witness to hapless netminder Ken McAuley allowing by far the worst single-season Goals Against Average (6.24) in NHL history. When your team is largely responsible for a curse that eventually lasts 54 years, you know things have gone very wrong.
Record: 4-36-4
Winning %: .136
Goals/Game Diff: -2.45
SRS rating: -2.17
Lowest Elo rating: 1318
Long before the Penguins came around, Pittsburgh had an NHL team in the 1920s that shared a name with its MLB squad, the Pirates. Though the hockey Pirates never won a Cup, they did make the playoffs in two of their first three seasons before everything started going downhill. Pittsburgh went a combined 14-63-11 in 1928-29 and 1929-30, then relocated to Philadelphia to become the Quakers for a disastrous 1930-31 campaign. The team won only four of 44 games that year, then folded the next fall amidst mounting financial troubles caused by the Great Depression. The only positive part of the Quakers’ legacy? Future Hall of Famer Syd Howe played his first full NHL season with Philadelphia in 1930-31 at age 19.
1919-20 Quebec Athletic Club/Bulldogs
Record: 4-20-0
Winning %: .167
Goals/Game Diff: -3.58
SRS rating: -2.69
Lowest Elo rating: 1326
If any team can relate to the huge drubbings suffered recently by the Sharks, it would be the 1919-20 Quebec Athletics. The team gave up an average of 7.8 goals per game in its losses, including allowing eight or more goals 10 times and 11 or more goals five times — highlighted by the 16-3 defeat laid on them by the Montreal Canadiens on March 3, 1920, still the most goals allowed by a team in a single NHL game ever. Remarkably, Quebec winger “Phantom Joe” Malone led the league in goals (39) and points (49) in what was a typical season for the high-scoring Hall of Famer, but it wasn’t enough to overcome a defense that yielded 7.38 goals per game — still easily a record for the most pathetic defensive showing in NHL history.
Record: 1-11
Winning %: .083
Goals/Game Diff: -3.50
SRS rating: -3.24
Lowest Elo rating: 1391
We haven’t seen a non-recent expansion team as bad as San Jose in quite a while. (The last may have been the 2019-20 Detroit Red Wings during the depths of their rebuild.) The Sharks got this way by gradually dismantling the core of a team that came within two wins of playing for the Stanley Cup in 2019. Brick by brick, the foundation of that team — Brent Burns, Timo Meier, Joe Pavelski, Evander Kane, Joe Thornton and Erik Karlsson — was dismantled and sent out across the league, leaving San Jose with little in the way of a competitive roster. (It hasn’t helped that captain Logan Couture, one of the few Sharks with the talent to actually help, keeps facing setbacks in his return from injury.) Will it be enough to crown these Sharks the worst ever, though? Sure, the early returns are plenty bad. But they’ll need to keep losing (and losing, and losing) to truly etch their names in infamy alongside the teams above.
Filed under: NHL
Original story: The San Jose Sharks May Be the Worst Team in Hockey History