The San Jose Sharks have confirmed to media that they are still in San Jose as a shocking FAA outage affects several NHL teams.
The outage has hit the US travel system on a Friday night. The Sharks are one of the clubs affected, along with other US teams that were planning to travel tomorrow.
Right now, the Sharks' confirmation is the only concrete update. The team is on the ground in the Bay Area, and that is all we have on their departure.
Nothing has been said yet about when San Jose might leave. The team has told the media that it will provide another update when there is one, and we will pass it along as soon as it arrives.
The schedule shows the Sharks at Utah on Saturday, November 14. How the outage affects that trip has not been addressed in what the team has shared.
The same goes for the other teams caught in this. Their names and plans have not been laid out, so a league-wide picture will have to wait for more word from the clubs themselves.
Why a travel mess is the last thing San Jose needs
The Sharks are coming off a 3-2 shootout loss to the Penguins on Wednesday. It was a point, but it was still a loss, and it left them 8-11-2 and 24th in the NHL.
The recent run is the real concern. San Jose is 2-7-1 over its last 10 games, and a team in that spot wants a clean, routine trip to a road game, not a night of waiting on flight information.
It's a bad break at a bad moment. Ryan Warsofsky's group has been looking for rhythm, and travel disruption chips away at the rest and preparation that rhythm depends on.
The Sharks are 4-6-1 on the road this season, so the trip to Utah already looked like a hard assignment before the FAA outage complicated things.
For now, the question is simply when the plane leaves. The next word is expected from the Sharks themselves, and any change to the Utah plans will come through the team.
More to come.
This article was written with the help of artificial intelligence, based on public reports and official sources.
How should the NHL treat games affected by the FAA outage?
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