SAN JOSE — Sharks general manager Doug Wilson pulled the curtain back Thursday night on the thinking behind the team’s decision last August to take the captaincy away from veteran center Joe Thornton.

The topic was raised in a question-answer session with about 350 season-ticket holders before the Sharks faced the Nashville Predators, and Wilson prefaced his remarks by saying he is a huge Thornton fan.

“He cares about the game so much. The reason we took the ‘C’ off him … Joe carries the weight of the team on his shoulders, and he’s got such a big heart that when stress comes on him, he lashes out at people,” Wilson said, “and it kind of impacts them.

“The pressure and stress, I felt, was getting to Joe,” the general manager said. “And I sat him down and said we need other players to step up and share this. He got it. He didn’t like it, but he got it and he understood it.”

The Thornton explanation was one of many provided by Wilson at the Ice Insights session. The topics ranged from the Sharks’ goaltending situation — with Wilson indicating the next 15 games could say a lot about Antti Niemi’s future in San Jose — and defending the decision to move Brent Burns back to the blue line.

It took about 45 minutes, but things did get a little heated at one point.

With the Sharks in danger of missing the playoffs for the first time in 11 years, a man asked Wilson if he accepted any blame for the problems the team has had and would he do anything different.

“Our commitment to what we were going to do was going to come with pain,” Wilson responded. “What I did last summer, I told you exactly what we were going to do — that we were going to rebuild, that we were going to rebuild the culture and that young people were going to play.”

Wilson talked about his ability to both accumulate draft picks and clear space under the salary cap by moving veterans over the past two years.

He stressed that transition periods take time, pointing to elite NHL teams such as the Chicago Blackhawks, who missed the playoffs 10 of 11 seasons before becoming the powerhouse they are today. Not that his plan called for that, of course.

“We did an awful lot this summer,” Wilson said. “What you want to have happen, you want it to happen today. I get that.”

And he offered up a maxim.

“I’m going to give you a statement I believe in — ‘Vision without action is a dream, action without vision is a nightmare.’ We put a crystal clear plan in place,” Wilson said. “I told everybody exactly what we were going to do and we followed through.”

As a team in transition, Wilson said at one point, “we are certainly focused on next year, but we’re not going to turn our back on this season. We still have a chance — probably I’m surprised we have a chance, but if we can get on a roll and play the way we have the last four games, we have a chance to make the playoffs. We put ourselves in that position.”

For more on the Sharks, see David Pollak’s Working the Corners blog at blogs.mercurynews.com/sharks. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/PollakOnSharks.