San Jose Sharks Play-By-Play Announcer Randy Hahn Talks Personnel

The Sharks have 20 players whose contracts expire, including some minor leaguers with NHL experience and a dozen who played significant roles for San Jose this season. Many will earn more than the contracts they had, so it will be nearly impossible to re-sign all of them.

Do you think Doug Wilson will take this opportunity to change the makeup of the team, or consider will he consider this season enough of a success to keep with the same approach?

Well, the Sharks were the best team in the Western Conference, the second-best team in the regular season, and they got to the final four in the playoffs. So I don’t think that you would take this team and tear it apart. You know, you’re on the right track here.

Does it need to get better? Obviously: It wasn’t good enough to win the Stanley Cup.

But you know, anyone who thinks that they’re gonna blow up the Sharks, and I always get a kick out of this: How do you propose blowing up the Sharks? What exactly do you do? Where do these players that everybody thinks the Sharks need magically appear from?

Just like every player in the league, (if you) trade away some of the warts of your team...you inherit some others. Players that get traded, they’re not perfect playe—there’s a reason they got traded.

Will there be changes in the team? Yes, but I think that if you go through the lines and try and figure out who can stay and who has to go and how it’s all gonna work out financially, you know you’re gonna have (fewer) changes this year than you did last year.

One of the big free agents will probably leave, and I don’t know who that’s going to be. I’m just guessing that one of them will leave.

The math tells you that it’s going to be hard to keep them all together and sign those other players that you talked about and keep them. Somebody that we’ve come to know and love probably won’t be here next year.

Right, and that leads to my follow-up question...