When Were the San Jose Sharks Founded, and How Did It Actually Happen
The short answer is 9 May 1990. The longer answer involves a sold hockey team in Minnesota, a rejected nickname and two seasons in a livestock arena in Daly City.
The San Jose Sharks were founded on 9 May 1990, when the NHL formally approved an expansion franchise for the San Francisco Bay Area, and they played their first game on 4 October 1991. If that's all you came for, you can stop reading. But the way it happened is one of the strangest ownership stories in the history of the league, and it's worth the extra five minutes.
It started with a team in Minnesota
Gordon and George Gund III owned the Minnesota North Stars and didn't want to. What they wanted was a hockey team in the Bay Area, a region they had a history with: the Gunds had owned the Cleveland Barons, the franchise that began life as the California Golden Seals in Oakland before it was moved east and eventually folded into Minnesota. So on 5 May 1990 they agreed to sell their North Stars stake to a group led by Howard Baldwin, and four days later, on 9 May, the league gave them what they had asked for: an expansion team for the Bay Area, for an expansion fee of forty-five million dollars.
That trade of a team for a team is why the Sharks didn't start from nothing the way most expansion clubs do. As part of the arrangement, San Jose held a dispersal draft and took twenty-four players out of the Minnesota organisation, and then went through a regular expansion draft against the rest of the league. It was still a bad roster. It was just a bad roster with a head start.
How they became the Sharks
The name came from a public contest and more than five thousand entries. The winner of the vote was Blades. The Gunds rejected it, on the reasonable grounds that a hockey team named after a weapon wasn't the image they wanted, and went with the runner up instead.
Sharks wasn't a random pick either. The stretch of Pacific water off this coast is known as the red triangle because of its shark population, which is why there's a triangle in the logo. Matt Levine, the club's first marketing chief, put the reasoning plainly at the time: sharks are relentless, determined, swift, agile, bright and fearless, and the plan was to build an organisation with those qualities. Then they chose Pacific teal, a colour no professional team in North America was using, and by the mid nineties that jersey was one of the best selling pieces of merchandise in world sport. The logo, a shark biting a hockey stick in half, arrived in 1991 and has barely changed since.
Two seasons in a cow barn
Here's the part people forget. The San Jose Sharks didn't play in San Jose for the first two years of their existence. The arena downtown wasn't built yet, so the club played the 1991-92 and 1992-93 seasons at the Cow Palace in Daly City, a building that opened in 1941 and is named after exactly what you think it's named after. It's about forty miles up the peninsula from San Jose and it isn't, by any definition, a modern NHL arena.
They averaged 10,888 fans in that first season anyway. Bay Area hockey had been gone since the Seals left in 1976 and there was clearly an audience waiting for it, even in a livestock hall in the wrong city.
The first season, and the second one
Jack Ferreira was the first general manager. George Kingston was the first head coach. Doug Wilson, acquired from Chicago, was the first captain. The first game was 4 October 1991 at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver, a 4-3 loss, and the first win came four days later on 8 October at the Cow Palace, when Kelly Kisio scored at 16:45 of the third to beat Calgary. Pat Falloon, the second overall pick in the 1991 draft, led the team with twenty-five goals and fifty-nine points. Jeff Hackett won eleven games in goal and was voted the team's most valuable player, which tells you plenty. Link Gaetz took three hundred and twenty-six penalty minutes, which tells you the rest.
The record was 17-58-5. And then it got worse. The 1992-93 season finished 11-71-2, one of the worst records anybody has ever put up in the National Hockey League. Seventy-one losses. If you were around for it, you remember that the crowd showed up anyway.
1993, when everything changed at once
The San Jose Arena opened in 1993, the team finally moved into the city on its jersey, and in the same season the Sharks made the playoffs for the first time and knocked out the Detroit Red Wings, who had the best record in the Western Conference. Two years after one of the worst seasons in league history. The building has been called the Shark Tank ever since, it's now SAP Center, and it's still the loudest room in Northern California when the hockey is good.
Why the origin story still matters
Because San Jose has kept this team for thirty-five years without once seriously threatening to move it, in a region that has watched the Raiders leave twice, the Warriors cross the bay and the A's pack up for Nevada. The franchise relocations page is a long one around here. The Sharks aren't on it, and the reason traces directly back to a family that wanted a Bay Area hockey team badly enough to give up a team in Minnesota to get one.
The rest of the story is the hard part. Thirty-five years, twenty-one playoff appearances, one Stanley Cup Final and no parade. The franchise history is in our franchise history page, the current roster is on the depth chart, and the season that starts in October gets tracked on the season hub.
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