Hunting the whale

http://www.acapitalwasteland.com/2013/02/2013-nhl-jersey-rankings.html

The Vancouver Canucks have unforgettable uniforms: A splashy blue, green and white color scheme with an aesthetically pleasing font of VANCOUVER across the top with a C-outlined majestic Orca (Killer Whale) leaping towards its prey.  It's the only pleasing part of the Vancouver Canucks. Everything else screams arrogance, dirty play, diving, obnoxious fans etc. I believe the Canucks and their mouthy coach, Alain Vigneault, take pride in being in the team everyone else in the NHL loves to hate, despite recent claims of Vancouver abhorring the villain title. I think the Sedin twins, the Alex twins (Burrows and Edler), Kevin Bieksa, Mason Raymond, Bobby Lu (are you gonna get traded or not?) and Alain privately wanting to be Bond bad guys (can you imagine Henrik and Daniel as Swedish twin assassins chasing Daniel Craig around Stockholm, or maybe even Craig as Mikael Blomkvist, the identical twins wielding hockey stick-shaped swords?). 

So it's pretty clear beating Vancouver -2011 Western Conference finals be damned- will carry a little extra pep in your step if you're the San Jose Sharks tonight when they play the Canucks in British Columbia.  The Sharks arguably need this win a little more if you consider Vancouver holds a two-point lead in a mostly pedestrian Northwest Division. Conversely, the Sharks are already nine points behind Anaheim in a Pacific Division that also features the defending Stanley Cup-champions, four of five teams currently in playoff position and another in ninth place but currently tied in points. The Sharks will have a makeshift lineup in place with Marty Havlat injured and unknown career journeyman Bracken Kearns -son of a former Canuck- getting his crack to provide the Sharks with some unexpected scoring punch.

So it's Good Guys Wear Teal against the Mean Old Whale. May the nicer team win!

Power points

1,100 for Jumbo, one big step for Sharks 

If the Sharks can bottle up anything from Saturday's 2-1 win -in regulation!!!!!- over the Nashville Predators,  it would be the above sequence that led to Joe Pavelski's eventual game-winning goal. It was the kind of determined and persistent hustle the struggling Sharks need to duplicate again and again if they're going to clearly break this funk they'd endured throughout the last month. What was an anemic power play that defined a miserable February of hockey epic failure had already scored one goal Saturday when Dan Boyle rifled in a one-timer through a traffic jam driven by Pavelski past screened Preds goalie Pekka Rinne.  Now it was time to grind out another goal. Pavelski and Couture chased Joe Thornton's deflected shot behind the net. Couture managed to flick the puck past former Shark Scott Hannan back in front of the net. Pavelski then epitomized the term "dogged" he can Couture worked for and flipped a shot off Rinne and into the goal (Thornton scored his 1,100th career point). All of a sudden a power play that found the net just three times covering 14 games managed two against one of the elite goalies in the NHL (though Rinne had struggled mightily in the previous three games, so perhaps it's not appropriate to get too excited yet)...


...Still, the Sharks needed something to feel good about after going 33 days without beating anyone in regulation and thus not giving away free points to overtime or shootout losers. Those precious three-point games are going to impact the playoff race in such a tightly-bunched Western Conference. How tough? With two points scored the Sharks jumped from ninth to fifth in the West. And though there was some nervous energy building after the Predators pulled within a goal with just over five minutes left in the third, San Jose held on to prevent Nashville from ensuring yet another overtime period at HP Pavilion. Now the Sharks must regain...

...Some mojo on the road. They head to constantly controversy-free Vancouver Tuesday night, and need to continue firing shots on goal after sending 39 at Rinne. Nine of the next 11 games are on hostile territory, and who knows if the Sharks will be aggressive as the April trade deadline looms? That's a good segue to saying a few words about Pavelski, who quietly continues to perform at a high level. Ross McKeon, the San Francisco's new/old beat writer who's back on board as a free-lancer, called Pavelski the team's midseason "Mr. Consistency"  during his midseason progress report for the Sharks.  This is what McKeon wrote even before Pavelski was arguably the best skater on the ice against Nashville:

Joe Pavelski just keeps chugging along, producing points, playing well in all situations and providing leadership.

Well put. I wondered last summer as Rick Nash-to-San Jose trade rumors bubbled but never came to a boil if Pavelski's solid two-way play throughout his career was worth being the lead piece in a deal to land the explosive scoring and rugged Nash. Obviously neither Columbus nor San Jose agreed on any trade, so it became moot. And Pavelski is one of the few A-list Sharks not bogged down by any no-trade or movement clauses, so if San Jose General Manager Doug Wilson is forced to make a blockbuster move, Pavelski provides one bargaining chip who he wouldn't need permission to trade. But as the Thornton's, Boyle's and Patrick Marleau's get closer and closer to the end of their contracts and their prime, it's probably for the best if Pavelski, still about a year-and-a-half south of 30, can stay a Shark and form the next generation of leaders along with Couture, Marc-Edouard Vlasic and Brent Burns. But the Sharks have to feel like there is still some -but not much- time left to make one last run at a Stanley Cup. However, there is still much to prove as San Jose heads north of the border. 

Baseball mojo

Driving with my pooch to the dog park this afternoon reminded me baseball season is approaching fast. The radio said as much, as it was my first opportunity to hear some spring training play-by-play of the Athletics' 6-3 win over Colorado in Phoenix. There's never too much to get excited about in exhibition baseball games, though Josh Reddick and Brandon Moss each homered and Tommy Milone threw a couple of scoreless innings. 

But what was fun about catching a couple innings of audio was the banter among A's announcers Ray Fosse, Ken Korach and Vince Cotroneo. What's about fun play-by-play in baseball is you have to fill air space during a sport that even in the most tense of situations still maintains a level of passive moments. So Fosse, Korach and Cotroneo did what good baseball radio guys do best: You enjoyed their recollections of spending together so many March afternoons and evenings in Arizona. There was a Bill King memory, an encounter with Bob Feller, some good-natured jabbering to each other.

It was a reminder of how low-key baseball can be, especially on lazy and meaningless spring training Saturdays.

Difficult to watch

"It's the same story every game. We have to find a way to score more goals. Personally and as a team, we have to find a way to put it into the back of the net. You're not going to win many games scoring one goal, and we've found that out lately."

—Sharks forward Logan Couture

By next Thursday, I'll be in the Pacific Northwest starting for at least two months, just about the time the Stanley Cup playoffs will be in full force. Considering I'll be out of Comcast SportsNet California range by then, my plan is to order the NHL GameCenter Live to I can keep track of Sharks games on my laptop. I'm now having second thoughts if that 50 bucks is worth spending, because it finally hit me last night: The Sharks are becoming unwatchable...

...It's not because the effort isn't there, or the team is that overmatched, or that Antti Niemi's mostly heroic play in goal should be ignored. But watching Thursday's 2-1 shootout defeat to the Detroit Red Wings was just so darn frustrating to see what should be at least an above average offensive team get repeatedly smothered by opposing bluelines and goalies. San Jose has scored just 16 goals in its last 12 games, and contrary to how little I care about a boring ESPN show, numbers indeed never lie as to why the Sharks have won just two of those 12 contests. This team has proven goal scorers (Patrick Marleau and Joe Pavelski), arguably the greatest playmaker of his era (Joe Thornton), one of the game's bright young stars (Logan Couture), a veteran who when healthy is a steady scorer (Marty Havlat), and a defenseman who's known as a premier power play quarterback from the point (Dan Boyle). Yet with all this firepower -and even knowing this team isn't getting a lot of scoring from the third or fourth lines- the Sharks stink on the offensive end, and it's gotten to be a tired act. Twelve games covering a 48-game season is exactly 25 percent of the year, and it's now a large enough sample size to argue this isn't working. The Sharks had every advantage going into the Detroit game: the Red Wings played (and lost) in Los Angeles 24 hours earlier and trotted out the less than Hasek-esqe backup goalie Jonas Gustavsson against the Sharks. But everyone looks like a Monster in goal against San Jose these days...

...And everyone in Teal looks as harmless as  this "Monster"  when it comes to firing the cookie into the jar. The Swedish Monster, in his first start as a Red Wing after he was chased out of Toronto for lack of productivity (the PC way to put it), stoned the Sharks save for a Couture one-timer in the third, a Sharks' lead that last all of 92 seconds. The Sharks couldn't get a puck Gustavsson otherwise, including three consecutive misses in the shootout. Todd McLellan, whose San Jose coaching seat may still be in the preheat stage but is warming nonetheless, clearly was losing his patience when asked about two odd-man rushes led by Marleau and Thornton that resulted in no shot taken and if he would have preferred more selfish play rather than a pass-first mentality that the Red Wings sniffed out both times:

“Yep, how’s that for an answer? I want to see Marleau shoot the puck, too. We talked about it between periods. We haven’t exactly been lighting it up. They’re smart people, they can watch the game and they know they’ve got to shoot the puck to score. It’s disappointing. We have those opportunities, we’ve got to make good on them. Other teams in the league are, we have to.”

I've got $50 and a laptop that says the Sharks need to start doing that soon or this season is toast.