The president of the San Jose Sharks believes the NHL’s ban on players displaying “cause messaging” on their equipment, including the use of Pride-themed tape on their sticks, will undergo some adjustments, possibly this season.

An NHL memo earlier this month informing clubs what players could no longer do on theme nights, including using the rainbow-colored stick tape – often used during LGBTQ+ Pride celebrations in pregame warmups — was met with both confusion and derision, with some feeling the league was backtracking on its long-running “Hockey is for Everyone” campaign.

Perhaps, though, the conversation isn’t over, with Jonathan Becher, president of Sharks Sports & Entertainment, feeling those rules will go through some modifications.

“Is it unfortunate that the league took that out of the player’s hands? For sure,” Becher told this news organization last week. “Do I think it’ll get back? Yes. And I think probably sooner than everyone is expecting.”

Read the rest of the article here.

For more than two decades, success was about the only thing Sharks fans knew. Behind a generation of great players that included Patrick Marleau, Joe Thornton, Brent Burns and Joe Pavelski, San Jose’s NHL franchise reached the postseason nearly every year from 1997 to 2019.

But in between then and now, some of those good feelings soured. Sharks Sports & Entertainment, the company which operates the franchise, battled with the city and developers over two major projects that could drastically remake the area around the Sharks’ home at SAP Center — Google’s plan to build an 80-acre, mixed-use campus to the south of the arena, and BART’s extension into San Jose.

Team President Jonathan Becher said that when you’re winning for as long as the Sharks were, it’s “hard to plan” for a sharp turn the other way. “All of that down-side protection you would normally do in other businesses, we didn’t necessarily have to do it,” Becher said in an interview just before the 2023-24 NHL season officially kicked off Oct. 12.

Not that they didn’t want to, but rather the daily demands of the sports and events business make it difficult to step back and plan for the long-term, Becher said, characterizing the job as the “tyranny of the urgent.” The former longtime SAP executive acknowledged that the pandemic and losing seasons precipitated a necessary rethink.

Read the rest of the article here.

Asked if the San Jose Sharks are considering leaving downtown or San Jose, Team President Jonathan Becher said they don’t want to leave, though Google’s major Downtown West project and other infrastructure plans downtown have raised concerns for the team about parking, stadium access and fan experiences.

But Becher noted that for now, it isn’t an issue.

“We want to pioneer the future of sports and entertainment,” said Jonathan Becher, president of Sharks Sports & Entertainment, the organization that owns the San Jose Sharks. Late last year, it unveiled a state-of-the-art scoreboard that allows fans to project themselves on it via their smartphones.

Fans of the NHL San Jose Sharks can avail themselves of a new SAP Center premium seating option when the team starts the 2023-24 season: a luxury lounge with mingling space and seats in the bowl.

The roughly 4,000-square-foot Penthouse Lounge is the newest $10-million-plus improvement at the 30-year-old building, whose “good bones” allow for regular upgrades that have maintained the arena’s vitality, as opposed to relying on more intermittent $100 million-range upgrade and maintenance projects, said Sharks President Jonathan Becher.

“Each summer we do one large mega project and a bunch of smaller ones where we invest in modernization and upkeep,” he said, adding that $5 to $10 million has gone into upgrades every year since the building opened in 1993 at a cost of $183 million. “The building doesn’t feel as old as it is chronologically because we are constantly working to refresh it and keep it up to date.”

The Sharks’ new premium project at SAP Center, the Penthouse Lounge, will get underway May 4 and be completed in time for the 2023 NHL season later this year. The Lounge, divvied up into four and six-person theater boxes with a private bar, replaces seven suites and three rows of bowl seats at the top of the arena. “This is part of our strategy to deliver experiences to fans that are not limited to the game of hockey, where it’s as much of a social interaction as it is just viewing the hockey game,” said Sharks President Jonathan Becher. “A modern building has to be designed for many different audiences. And what our building historically had less of is those communal environments. … I would not be surprised if we build more of these in the future.”

Coinciding with SBJ’s ALL IN conference on April 20 at BMO Stadium in Los Angeles, we recognize the work of individuals across sports in the area of diversity, equity and inclusion. They are leading important discussions and decisions within their organizations and throughout the industry about how diversity is a business imperative. We relied on input from industry sources and leaders who have been recognized in our previous DEI coverage to help us identify those who lead by example in how sports business can be a welcoming and open forum for all.

The city of San Jose on Thursday celebrated legendary Sharks player Patrick Marleau, the franchise’s all-time leader in regular season games played, goals and points, ahead of his historic number retirement on Saturday.