Nikolai Kovalenko’s brief but rocky tenure with the Sharks has come to an end.

The Sharks announced Monday that Kovalenko, along with a group of other pending restricted free agents, have not been given qualifying offers and will be allowed to sign with any other team when unrestricted free agency begins today.

Other pending RFAs not retained by the Sharks were NHL forwards Noah Gregor and Klim Kostin, minor league forwards Carl Berglund, Nolan Burke, Mitchell Russell, and Brandon Coe, and goalie Georgi Romanov.

The Sharks issued qualifying offers to forwards Thomas Bordeleau and Danil Gushchin, as well as defenseman Jack Thompson, thereby retaining their negotiating rights.

The Sharks are expected to be active in free agency and the trade market over the next few days as they seek a goalie to pair with Askarov and make upgrades to their defense corps. Now, finding a replacement for Kovalenko might also be on general manager Mike Grier’s to-do list.

Kovalenko was the primary piece the Sharks received in the December trade that sent starting goalie Mackenzie Blackwood to the Colorado Avalanche, and he got off to a fast start in San Jose as he played inside the Sharks’ top-six forward group and had five assists in his first four games.

However, Kovalenko experienced numerous issues and, between injury issues and healthy scratches, never seemed to find a groove in San Jose.

Starting in mid-January, Kovalenko missed nine straight games from the start of February to early March due to an upper-body ailment. In February, Kovalenko appeared on a Russian hockey podcast and jokingly said of Ryan Warsofsky, “The coach doesn’t like Russians. The GM likes Russians, the head coach doesn’t.”

Warsofsky and Kovalenko cleared the air, but then came the repeated healthy scratches, including seven in a nine-game span from March 15 to April 5, which put his future in San Jose in question as the Sharks’ coaching staff had issues with his consistency.

For the season with the Sharks, Kovalenko had 12 points in 29 games, averaging 12:40 in ice time, as he was moved up and down and in and out of the lineup.

Asked about Kovalenko late in the season, Warsofsky said, “I think every time you’re on the ice, if it’s a practice, if it’s a morning skate, that’s your game. You’re always being evaluated.”

Kovalenko mentioned in April that he’d like to return to the Sharks, but only if his usage and playing time increased. It was a bold if not haughty declaration for a player who had just completed his first NHL season. But Kovalenko felt he had options and did not rule out a return to the KHL.

Kovalenko stressed that he wanted to remain in the NHL. But asked in April if he wanted to return to San Jose if Grier wanted him back, Kovalenko, referring to his playing time, said, “I think if it will be the same thing like this year, obviously no. So, maybe if something changed, or something like that, we can have this conversation.”

In the trade with the Avalanche, the Sharks sent Blackwood, forward Givani Smith, and their own 2027 fifth-round pick to the Avalanche for Kovalenko, goaltender Alexandar Georgiev, Colorado’s 2026 second-round selection, and a conditional fifth-round draft pick in 2025.

Georgiev, a pending UFA, was told by Grier in April that he would not be back in San Jose, and used this year’s fifth-round pick to select center Max Heise at 150th overall.

Bordeleau, 23, battled injuries at the start and the end of this past season and spent most of the year with the AHL’s San Jose Barracuda, where he had 38 points in 59 games. He played one game this season with the Sharks on April 13 in Calgary, but suffered a concussion against the Flames and was not able to join the Barracuda for the playoffs.

Bordeleau, a second-round draft pick (38th overall) by the Sharks in 2020, signed a one-year deal with the Sharks last July and is a restricted free agent with arbitration rights. He has 18 points in 44 career NHL games and 107 points in 161 games over three-plus seasons with the Barracuda.

Gushchin, a third-round pick by the Sharks in 2020, is the Barracuda’s all-time leading scorer with 150 points in 182 career regular-season games. This past season, the 23-year-old Gushchin had 51 points, including 28 goals, in 56 games. Gushchin had one point in 12 games this season with the Sharks.

Thompson, a right-shot defenseman, had 10 points in 31 games with the Sharks this season. He also had 14 points in 27 regular-season games with the Barracuda.

Nevertheless, the Sharks, who have finished in last place in the NHL standings each of the previous two seasons, have several roster holes to fill. San Jose, while armed with a truckload of promising prospects, scored a league-low 2.54 goals per game and allowed a league-high 3.78 per game.

The young guys need support, and that’s where Grier and his staff come in, starting Tuesday.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Grier said Friday after day one of the NHL Draft. “We’re starting to lay the foundation, but we need to get better on the back end. One, we’ve got to keep the pucks out of our net, for sure.

That’s probably priority one. We’ve got to get a goalie to kind of support (Yaroslav Askarov) here and push (him). There’s holes up front, too.

“We’ve got some good vets that played well. … (Macklin Celebrini and Will Smith) played well, and then we’ll have some internal competition with (Collin Graf) and (Igor) Chernyshov and (Quentin) Musty and those types of guys.

“There’s lots of holes. We could use a lot of things.”