Measured and Found Wanting

Ice hockey is a game of mistakes. The action of the play is free-flowing, possession of the puck is tenuous at best, turnovers occur constantly. It's all about minimizing the damage caused by your own mistakes and taking full advantage of your opponent's. Tonight, after largely controlling play for the first twenty minutes plus, the Detroit Red Wings somehow, against all reason and justice, found themselves tied 2-2 with the San Jose Sharks, and with their opponents in possession of all of the momentum.

Then, the Sharks made a series of mistakes, mostly of the discipline-related variety, and the Wings drove the advantage that had been dealt to them lethally home. Almost before you knew it a 2-2 game had turned into a 5-2 game, and Detroit eventually coasted to a 6-3 win.

That's why the Wings are the class of the league. Every hockey game between reasonably competitive opponents has an ebb and flow, and we saw that tonight. The first period of the game was tight and listless--some of the dullest hockey I have seen all season, frankly--but the Wings were clearly in charge, not even conceding a shot to San Jose until more than seventeen minutes had passed. After a short-handed goal at the beginning of the second period put the Sharks down 2-0, they mounted a rally, with newly-recalled Devin Setoguchi tipping in a Sandis Ozolinsh drive to make it 2-1, and Jonathan Cheechoo showing a nose for the goal and scoring to make it 2-2. Now, San Jose seemed to have the momentum. Ebb, flow.

Then the Sharks began a grim march to the penalty box, sometimes two-by-two, and the Nicklas Lidstrom-led Red Wings power play made no mistake about making San Jose pay.

(At this time I must mention Detroit goalie Dominik Hasek's dreadful dive in the course of this sequence. Go find the replay on the internet if you want to look at it--essentially, Christian Ehrhoff skated by Hasek behind the Detroit goal and Hasek went down like a stuntman in a western feigning being blown up by dynamite. The Sharks didn't lose tonight because of this call--they made a whole series of other errors, too lengthy and depressing to tabulate--but for the sake of the quality of play in the league, players who flop like Hasek need to be suspended. If the officials on the ice miss the call and fail to hand out the minor for unsportsmanlike conduct, fine, whatever, it's a fast game and they miss some calls, but the dive is so obvious on the videotape that there's no excuse for the league's disciplinary committee not to take action.)

It's becoming increasingly difficult to regard the 2007-2008 edition of the San Jose Sharks as a Stanley Cup contender in any except the broadest sense (that is, the sense that any team making the playoffs has a legitimate chance to reach the finals). Except for a few stretches, the Wings dominated San Jose tonight. I wrote in my mid-season assessment about the nagging feeling that the Sharks, even when they were putting together their remarkable road winning streak and sitting in second place in the West, were living on borrowed time. This makes four losses in a row now, and one gets the sense that that time is running out.