Sharks Extend Warsofsky To Multi-Year Deal

While the San Jose Sharks opened training camp for the 26-27 season, the team announced a multi-year extension to head coach Ryan Warsofsky.

“Mike (Grier) and I and my agent have talked a lot through the summer. I wasn’t too concerned about it,” Warsofsky said after the first day of Sharks training camp. “(I’m) super excited, grateful, humbled by what they’ve done, and it’s a great place to live. It’s a great organization. They treat people and families first-class. Thank you to Hasso (Plattner), Jonathan (Becher), and Mike for giving me the responsibility.”

Warsofsky has been part of the San Jose Sharks organization for four years, two as an assistant and two as the head coach. The Sharks showed massive improvement last season, posting a 39-35-8 record. Their 86 points were just four points behind the Los Angeles Kings for the second wild card into the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

“We worked on today, first day of training camp, some things that we needed to work on, put some foundational pieces in place for the season,” Warsofsky said. “We’ll go tomorrow, do it all over again. We’ll push our players to be better individually in this group. That will really be the message all year long.”

Sharks GM Mike Grier told reporters he wanted to give his head coach peace of mind about his job security heading into the season.

“It’s giving him a little bit of peace of mind to go out there and do his job without having this hanging over his head a little bit, if things don’t go well to start the season,” Grier explained. “He’s shown enough here in these four years, even as an assistant, that he can do the job. The timing just worked out that we wanted to get ahead of it before the season started.”

Warsofsky wouldn’t admit that going into the final year of a contract would affect him.

“That was the goal when we took over: to make this team relevant again. Start being more competitive, and we’ve taken some steps,” Warsofsky said. “I give a lot of credit to Mike for bringing in the right people. You don’t change a culture with one person; you change it with a lot of different people. We’ve done that.”

It is unclear how long the San Jose Sharks extended the 37-year-old. Grier also confirmed that Warsofsky’s assistants have not received any extensions yet.

The Sharks begin the regular season on Oct. 1 at home against the much improved Florida Panthers.