San Jose Sharks August Prediction No. 4 of 2016-17 Season

August prediction No. 4 of the 2016-17 San Jose Sharks concerns Logan Couture…

The San Jose Sharks have high expectations for the 2016-17 NHL season. With a great deal of continuity, all a fine coaching staff needs is enough talent.

Any august predictions about the team’s or an individual’s performance start there. Since there are not many questions about who makes the roster for the 2016-17 NHL season, its results are easier to predict.

Logan Couture seems as good a place as anyone to examine next. The news he is bulking up was broken by CSN Bay Area Insider Kevin Kurz Thursday, August 11. That is good for the Sharks but not so much for everyone else.

One can see what the Columbus Blue Jackets coveted when they were dangling Rick Nash. Why they thought San Jose general manager Doug Wilson was desperate enough to trade away his young talent for yet another Stanley Cup run is something else.

Couture was a finalist for the 2011 Calder Trophy as NHL rookie of the year and was an All-Star selection in 2012—both before the trade. He is notable for his defensive prowess and was almost as good as Nash at that point already.

Injuries kept him from getting into the flow of last season, but he was as good as any Sharks in earning a franchise-first Western Conference championship. They were 15-16-1 without him and 31-14-5 with him before he led them to a 14-10 record in the 2016 Stanley Cup playoffs.

May 25, 2016; San Jose, CA, USA; The San Jose Sharks stand with the Clarence S. Campbell Bowl after defeating the St. Louis Blues 5-2 to win the Western Conference Finals of the 2016 Stanley Cup Playoffs at SAP Center at San Jose. Mandatory Credit: Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports /

Couture’s finish to the 2015-16 NHL season was strong. He had 25 points in his last 32 games and was San Jose’s leading candidate for the Conn Smythe Award with 30 points in 24 Stanley Cup playoff games.

He’s likely to be between the fleet Mikkel Boedker and last season’s Sharks rookie of the year Joonas Donskoi. Couture is almost certainly going to remain on the world’s most dangerous five-man power play and rack up points.

He has a veritable host of other skilled forwards to work with when injuries or slumps cause lines to jumble: Joel Ward, Patrick Marleau, Tomas Hertl and Timo Meier as well as scoring machines Joe Thornton and Joe Pavelski.

Prediction No. 4: Logan Couture scores at least 30 goals and 60 points. This is no easy feat since those both exceed his career scoring rates over 82 games.

However, his decision to bulk up make it a better-than-even chance he can play close to a full season. So long as that happens, so should the scoring.

Couture accomplished each of those scoring feats in two of the three seasons in which he played at least 79 games and at least one all three times, doing both in the 2011-12 NHL season. He scored 90 goals and 188 points in the 239 games over those three seasons.

Getting bigger should especially help Couture’s goal scoring near the crease, where goals are more likely to be scored. If he reaches the 30-goal plateau, the 60 points will probably already have happened.

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