Sharks sign coach Ryan Warsofsky to multi-year contract extension

Jon Becker, The Mercury News on Sep 17, 2026

Published in Hockey

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SAN JOSE, Calif. — The Sharks’ Ryan Warsofsky, the NHL’s youngest coach who has helped orchestrate a turnaround for the franchise during his two seasons as its head coach, has signed a multi-year contract extension, the team announced Thursday.

Terms of the 38-year-old Warsofsky’s new contract were not disclosed, but he was entering the final year of his original deal.

Warsofsky is about to begin his third season behind the bench as the 11th full-time in Sharks history after being named to the role on June 13, 2024. This is his fifth season overall with San Jose, where he previously served as an assistant coach.

Sharks general manager Mike Grier did not want Warsofsky to be concerned about his contract status going into the regular season.

“He’s shown what he can do, and it’s kind of giving him a little bit of peace of mind to go out there and do his job without maybe having this hanging over his head a little bit if things don’t go well to start the season,” Grier said. “But he’s shown enough in his time here in these four years — even as an assistant — that he can do the job.

“The timing just worked out that we wanted to get ahead of it before the the season started.”

In just his second season as Sharks head coach, Warsofsky nearly helped lead a team that finished last in the overall standings for two straight years to a playoff berth. With his developmental approach to guiding several of the organization’s youngest players and a commitment to franchise’s identity and team culture, the Sharks authored a historic turnaround – they had a year-over-year improvement of plus-19 wins, nearly doubling the team’s total wins from 2024-25 and saw its overall points increase by 34.

The on-ice success of Warsofsky’s direction resulted in the team in the hunt for the postseason for 80 of the team’s 82 games, just missing the playoffs by four points.

NHL head coaches can have notoriously short tenures, but Warsofsky said he still would have had a job to do even if he didn’t get a new deal.

“That’s the business that we’re in,” Warsofsky said. “I mean, I’ve grinded. I’ve been in the East Coast League on one-year contracts, basically for three years in a row when I was down there. So it didn’t really matter. I was just going to stick to what I believe in and what I believe in as a coach, and let it all kind of play out.”

He has been successful at nearly every level of hockey he has coached at in his career. Since becoming a head coach for the first time in 2016 with the South Carolina Stingrays, he has earned an IIHF World Championship gold medal as head coach with Team USA in 2025, a Calder Cup Championship with the Chicago Wolves (head coach, 2021-22) and Charlotte Checkers (assistant coach, 2018-19) in the American Hockey League (AHL), and owns a career 105-47-11-7 regular season record (.671%) in the AHL.

San Jose led the NHL in scoring from players 22 and younger last season, finishing with 192 such points, second-most in club history behind only 2006-07 (197).

Additionally, Macklin Celebrini, the organization’s first-overall selection in 2025, set several franchise rookie records and by the end of the season was named a Calder Finalist.

Will Smith, despite having a slow start to the year, catapulted himself into the conversation, finishing top-5 among rookies in nearly every offensive category. Before his trade to Ottawa, Fabian Zetterlund was on track for a second consecutive 20-goal season, and William Eklund, Collin Graf, and Shakir Mukhamadullin all improved significantly, with Eklund setting career bests in goals, assists, and points.