NHL trade deadline: Sharks will be busy, but how drastic will changes be?

Before officially missing the playoffs the last three years, and also in 2015, the San Jose Sharks, predictably, were sellers, offloading some pending unrestricted free agents to recoup assets, namely in the form of draft picks.

The Sharks’ inner core, though, usually remained intact, although do-everything forward Barclay Goodrow was traded to the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2020 for a first-round draft pick that was used to select Ozzy Wiesblatt.

The Sharks are once again out of the playoff picture and once again have multiple pending UFA’s, notably forwards Nick Bonino, Matt Nieto, and goalie James Reimer, players that should attract interest prior to NHL’s trade deadline, now just six weeks away.

“You get down to this time of year and guys like (Bonino, Nieto, and Reimer), they’re valuable for a reason,” Sharks general manager Mike Grier said last week. “(The) reason we want them around here and we want them around our young guys, kind of driving the culture here, is the same reason playoff teams will have interest in them.”

This year, though, there’s a chance — perhaps a strong one — that Grier moves one or more of the Sharks’ most productive players, as he looks for ways to better position his team in the long run.

Right now, Timo Meier’s name is front and center.

Selected ninth overall by the Sharks in 2015 and on pace for his first career 40-goal season, Meier, a tantalizing combination of size and speed with a deadly shot, figures to be one of the league’s hotter commodities prior to the March 3 deadline.

Entering Saturday’s game against the Columbus Blue Jackets, which starts a five-game road trip for the Sharks, Meier is tied for 11th in the NHL with 26 goals. is tied for 29th among all forwards with 46 points and is averaging over 20 minutes of ice time per game for the first time.

Meier’s also shown he can produce in the playoffs, as he has 20 points in 35 career postseason games with the Sharks, all before his 23rd birthday.

“He’s the type of player that teams want, especially teams are planning to be in the playoffs,” Grier said. “He’s big, he’s fast, he can score. There’s plenty of interest in him. We’ll see how it goes.

“I’ve had some good talks with him, too, about his situation and the team’s situation. I’ll keep those between me and him and me and his agent (Claude Lemieux).”

As has been noted multiple times, Meier, in the final year of a four-year, $24 million deal, is a pending restricted free agent making $10 million in salary this season, meaning the Sharks will have to issue him a qualifying offer of that size this offseason to maintain is negotiation rights.

That massive qualifying offer could affect the type of return the Sharks would get in any potential deal.

However, Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman speculated on “The Jeff Marek Show” Thursday that if Grier and the Sharks get a trade offer they like, they will let the other team speak with Meier and Lemieux to help work out a potential contract extension to avoid paying the QO.

“I’ve got all the respect in the world for (Meier) as a player,” Grier said, “and we’ll have to kind of see how it all shakes out.”

Other NHL teams have also reportedly inquired about defenseman Jaycob Megna, Barracuda defenseman Ryan Merkley made his trade request earlier this month, and just for good measure, speculation about defenseman Erik Karlsson’s long-term future in San Jose also isn’t going away.

Although an offseason trade involving Karlsson might make more sense, given that general managers would know then exactly what the NHL’s salary cap will be, acquiring him now also has plenty of allure.

Karlsson is healthy and with 62 points, is on pace to become the first defenseman since Brian Leetch in 1991-92 to register at least 100 points in a season. He could easily help any team go on a long playoff run, particularly in the wide-open Western Conference.

Obviously, there are impediments to a Karlsson trade, namely the fact that he has four years left on his contract that carries an average annual value of $11.5 million. The quality teams that Karlsson might waive the no-movement clause in his contract for simply don’t have that kind of cap space, now or in the long term.

But that doesn’t mean that the Sharks and other teams can’t try to figure out a way to make something work. Karlsson has stressed – repeatedly – that he wants to win and he hasn’t dismissed the idea of going to another team to make that happen.

Grier confirmed last week that other NHL executives have reached out to him to see what the framework of a potential Karlsson deal might look like.

“I know that it’s a possibility in my future that things might change, or they might not. I don’t know,” Karlsson said recently on the ‘Got Yer Back’ podcast with TSN’s Ryan Rishaug and Pierre LeBrun. “I don’t like to live in the unknown and I don’t like to think about it too much. So I’m going to do what I can, which is to take care of myself and play as good as I possibly can to help San Jose out, to try and get us back to where we want to be.

“If that changes at some point throughout this journey, then it will, and we’ll deal with it in an appropriate way. But I think (Grier) has done a great job in everything that he’s said and everything that he’s done and how he’s acted through all this. I think he should explore all his options and his possibilities and do what he believes is best for this organization because that’s what it’s all about.”