2016 playoff run franchise-record wins

Lore & Background

The 2016 run began with a whisper and ended with a roar. As the seventh seed, the Sharks were expected to be swept or, at best, to push a top-two team to seven games before bowing out. Instead, Martin Jones produced what many in the Bay Area still describe as the single greatest goaltending stretch in franchise history, turning away pucks that should have been goals and giving his teammates the confidence to play with a loose, fearless edge.

The second-round battle with St. Louis and the Conference Final against Chicago were both decided in seven games, grinding the Sharks' bodies and nerves to the breaking point. Joe Thornton, the aging captain, carried the team's identity on the ice and in the locker room, while Brent Burns and Marc-Edouard Vlasic anchored a defensive structure that held up under the most intense pressure the franchise had ever faced. Logan Couture, in particular, elevated his game to a level that made the entire organization believe they could go all the way.

The Cup Final against Pittsburgh was a different animal. The Penguins, with their depth and speed, exposed gaps that the Sharks simply could not close over four grueling games. The final buzzer in Game Six was not a defeat the team could immediately process; it was the end of the longest, most emotionally exhausting stretch of hockey the franchise had ever endured. But the 16 wins that preceded it remain etched into the building's history, a testament to a group that played beyond every expectation placed on them.

In Their Own Story

The SAP Center was a cauldron. Sixteen thousand voices shook the concrete floor as the puck dropped for Game Seven against Chicago, and Martin Jones, eyes locked on the net, felt the vibration travel up through the blades of his skates. He had been playing on nothing but adrenaline and a stubborn refusal to blink for eleven days. Thornton skated past him, tapped the ice once, and said nothing. Jones didn't need words. He dropped into his butterfly, and the next forty minutes were a blur of rubber and ice and the particular silence that falls over a crowd when a puck is about to cross the line. It didn't. Not once. Not in the game that mattered most. The roar that followed was the loudest sound he had ever heard, and he knew, even then, it was not the last one they would make.

Reader's Guide

The San Jose Sharks' franchise record for wins in a single playoff run is 16, set during the 2015–16 postseason.

Before 2016, the Sharks had never advanced past the second round of the playoffs, meaning their previous best single-run win totals were far shorter. The 2016 campaign shattered that ceiling: the team, entering as the seventh seed in the Western Conference, won four consecutive best-of-seven series to reach the Stanley Cup Final for the first time in franchise history.

The record was set under extraordinary circumstances. Two of the four series—the second round against St. Louis and the Conference Final against Chicago—went to a decisive Game Seven, meaning the Sharks played 26 total games in the postseason and had to stay physically and mentally sharp across nearly a month of near-daily competition. Martin Jones, the goaltender, was the engine of the run, and the team's ability to close out two seven-game battles before losing the Cup Final to Pittsburgh in four games made the 16-win mark feel both earned and bittersweet.

For a franchise that had spent its first decade in the league as a perennial also-ran, 2016 proved they could stand with the NHL's elite for a full month and leave their mark on the sport's biggest stage.

Did You Know?

• The 2016 run was the Sharks' first appearance in the Stanley Cup Final in franchise history, meaning the 16-win record was set in the same campaign that established the team's deepest-ever playoff reach.
• Two of the four series the Sharks won in 2016 went to a full seven games, meaning the team played 26 total playoff games in that single postseason stretch.
• Martin Jones, the goaltender who anchored the run, had been a journeyman who spent time in the minors and with other NHL clubs before becoming the Sharks' starting goalie just before the 2015–16 season.
• As the seventh seed, the Sharks were the lowest-seeded team to reach the Stanley Cup Final that year, a feat that underscored how far the team overachieved relative to its regular-season standing.