"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."
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.
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