That's Better...But it Still Needs Improvement

The Sharks were sent into a funk on Sunday, the 13th of January, when they lost a game at Anaheim that they had led going into the final minute of regulation. They did not snap out of that funk until 13:39 of the first period last night against the Chicago Blackhawks, when Sandis Ozolinsh scored a power-play goal with a nifty little backhand, the first Shark goal in a game San Jose went on to win 3-2. In the interim, they lost three games (I'm not including the loss to the Ducks), two of them against divisional opponents.

The malaise was disturbingly familiar, looking very similar to the break in morale suffered by the team in last year's playoffs, when, less than a minute from going up on the Red Wings 3-1 in the Conference Semifinals, Robert Lang scored to send the game into overtime. Of course the Wings won that game, and the next two as well to end San Jose's season.

For the first period of last night's game, the Blackhawks absolutely had San Jose on the ropes. The players in teal looked like they didn't want anything quite as much as they wanted to get off the ice before the inevitable Bad Thing happened. In short order Chicago turned this domination into a 1-0 lead, with Jack Skille scoring past a flopping, wild Evgeni Nabokov.

But for whatever reason, Ozolinsh's goal seemed to rally the team. From then on they (mostly) played with some zip--you could see it in the great individual effort of Joe Pavelski in the second period, when he beat a too-casual Patrick Kane to a loose puck and rocketed in for a short-handed goal.

It was great to see this rally, but it needed to occur in overtime against Anaheim, not more than a week later. Hockey has its ups and downs, and sometimes the other team will have momentum--the "ebb and flow" I spoke of in my post about the Detroit game. Sometimes the puck will go into your net off a defenseman's skate. But hockey teams need to have a short memory when it comes to dealing with the inevitable bad breaks that are intrinsic to the sport. The Sharks seem to brood like a bunch of sullen teenagers when things go badly.

Doug Weight's goal off of Alexei Semenov's skate is not the last piece of rotten luck the Sharks will have this season. It is not even the last piece of game-changing, couldn't-have-happened-at-a-worse-time rotten luck the Sharks will have this season. But it had better be the last time such a piece of rotten luck throws them into a three-game slide, or the team's prospects for the postseason do not look good.


On Wisconsin!

Of the five goals scored in last night's game, three were scored by former Wisconsin Badgers (Pavelski, Skille, and Adam Burish). I'm sure my buddy Badgerbucco would be proud...