An already ailing San Jose Sharks defense corps is now dealing with another malady as Shakir Mukhamadullin will miss Friday’s road game against the Utah Mammoth and likely Saturday’s home game against the Pittsburgh Penguins with an upper-body injury.
Sharks coach Ryan Warsofsky told reporters Friday that Mukhamadaullin sustained the injury in a recent practice and is now considered day-to-day. Mukhamadullin, who has not played since the Sharks’ season-opener on Oct. 9, participated in Thursday’s practice in San Jose.
After Saturday, the Sharks open a four-game road trip on Tuesday against the New York Islanders.
Mukhamadullin’s injury, and those to John Klingberg (lower body) and Timothy Liljegren (upper body), will thrust Vincent Iirio into the Sharks’ lineup on Friday, one day after he was claimed off waivers from the Washington Capitals. Rookie Sam Dickinson will also dress on Friday, marking his third straight game.
Iorio, listed at 6-foot-4 and 220 pounds, has one assist in nine career NHL games. He spent all of last season with Hershey of the AHL, with his last NHL game coming on April 16, 2024, when the Capitals played the Flyers in Philadelphia.
Liljegren and Klingberg were both injured in the Sharks’ home game on Tuesday against the Carolina Hurricanes. Liljegren was placed on injured reserve on Thursday, and Klingberg, who flew with the team to Salt Lake City, remains day-to-day.
Rookie center Michael Misa is not injured but will not be in Friday’s lineup, as the Sharks did not want to play him on back-to-back days. Misa could return to the lineup on Saturday.
SCHEDULE QUIRK
After this weekend, the Sharks play games on back-to-back nights 15 more times, and eight of those involve some travel from one city to another. But the real issue for the Sharks is that the opponent they’ll be playing on the second half of those back-to-backs, most times, will be the more rested team.
Of the Sharks’ 16 back-to-backs, their opponent will be the more rested team 13 times, including Saturday’s game with the Penguins, who played the Los Angeles Kings on Thursday.
There will, of course, be other instances this season where the Sharks will be the more rested team. The NHL is playing a somewhat compressed schedule this season, with the league pausing for three weeks in February to allow players to compete for their countries at the Winter Olympics in Milan.
Starting with Tuesday’s game against the Islanders, the Sharks play eight times in 13 days, as a four-game road trip is followed by a four-game homestand that starts Oct. 28 against the Los Angeles Kings.
“Everyone is dealing with it,” Klingberg said recently of the busy schedule. “I heard we might have one or two more back-to-backs, but it’s just the way it’s going to be.”
STARTING GOALIES
Yaroslav Askarov will start Friday’s game, perhaps indicating that Alex Nedeljkovic will start Saturday against the Penguins, one of his former teams.
Nedeljkovic spent the past two seasons in Pittsburgh and went 32-22-12 with an .898 save percentage, but that save percentage dipped to .894 last season as the Penguins missed the playoffs for a third straight year.
The Penguins traded Nedeljkovic, who had one year left on his two-year contract, to the Sharks in July for a 2028 third-round draft pick. Like the Sharks, the Penguins appear to be in a transition phase as they begin to integrate younger players, such as defenseman Harrison Brunicke, 19, and forward Ben Kindel, 18, into an otherwise aging lineup.
“The biggest difference is just mentally staying with it, and I’ve really tried to take every day by itself,” Nedeljkovic said when asked about playing on teams not necessarily trying to win the Stanley Cup right away. “You don’t look ahead, you don’t look behind you, and you worry about what’s happening today. I find generally, when I’ve had success and when I’ve been consistent, it’s when I’ve focused on just what’s happening today.”
In four career starts against the Penguins, Nedeljkovic is 2-1-0 with an .858 save percentage. In two starts this season for the Sharks, Nedeljkovic is 0-1-1 with an .878 save percentage.
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The Sharks on Friday acquired right-shot defenseman Kyle Masters from the Minnesota Wild in exchange for forward Oskar Olausson, who San Jose acquired in July for forward Danil Gushchin.
Masters, 22, is in the final year of a three-year entry-level contract and was on the roster of the ECHL’s Iowa Heartlanders. It was not immediately clear whether Masters would report to the Sharks’ ECHL affiliate in Wichita or join the Barracuda of the AHL.
Masters, a fourth-round pick by Minnesota in 2021, had three points in 16 games last season with the AHL’s Iowa Wild, and 13 points in 27 games with the Heartlanders.
Olausson, 22, did not play in the Barracuda’s season-opener last Saturday. Gushchin, the Barracuda’s all-time leading scorer with 150 points in 182 regular-season games, has two goals in his first two games with the Colorado Eagles of the AHL.
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