Meet the New Boss

The Sharks have a new coach, and it is Todd McLellan.

McLellan was an assistant coach with this year's championship edition of the Detroit Red Wings, and therefore still has a bit of a whiff of Stanley Cup about him. He has been a head coach at several levels of hockey (including a stint with the Houston Aeros, a team he led to the Calder Cup) but never held the head job in the NHL.

To which I say, "Huzzah!" Praise be to the hockey gods that Doug Wilson did not pick his new head coach from amongst the many who make up the ranks of the recently fired (like this guy, or this guy). I never really believed that Wilson would show such a lack of imagination that he would actually go with a retread, but let's face it, it's impossible to hear the rumors that Joel Quenneville is a candidate to coach your team and not shudder.

As a Sharks fan, I'm feeling pretty happy about this move. Once the Mike Ricci Kool-Aid passed through my system, and I realized that seeing Reech behind the bench would be cool for, like, a day, after which it would be exposed as kind of a bad idea, I pretty much just hoped that Wilson would go outside the ranks of former NHL coaches and pluck someone from the minors, junior hockey, or the ranks of NHL assistants...someone with a ton of energy and some new ideas.

McLellan is exactly the kind of guy I had in mind. And you gotta feel happy thieving someone from the Red Wings--the league's model organization. Yes, he's an untested rookie, but I for one am certainly looking forward to the next season with just a little more optimism than I had before.


He's Used to Robbing Guys, Not Being Robbed!

Well, Bully! to the NHL general managers for awarding Marty Brodeur the 2008 Vezina Trophy on the basis of his reputation. Whatever. Yes, Brodeur's a great goalie, yes, he's a shoe-in Hall of Famer, but Evgeni Nabokov had a better year. You can argue all you want about which stat is more important than another (Nabokov had more wins and a better goals-against average, while Brodeur had a better save percentage), but when you get right down to it what really ought to matter is that Nabby led his team to victories through an entire half-season during which the team in front of him, talented but very green at defense, could (unexpectedly) barely score.

It's that word in parenthesis that's really the difference, because, of course, the Devils aren't exactly known for lighting the lamp, either. But that's the way the Devils are built--they are designed to strangle you with defense and beat you 2-1. The Sharks, coming into this season, were expected by many to blow other teams out of the water with their supposedly potent offense (Cheechoo! Marleau! Thornton!) but it didn't work out that way. The offensive woes of Cheechoo and Marleau were much-discussed, with an ever-increasing amount of panic, by Shark watchers for the first months of the season. The team was frustrated and frustrating, clueless as to its own identity, and seemingly only one solid losing streak from falling apart. Yet they kept winning, largely through the efforts of Joe Thornton and Evgeni Nabokov.

In other words, while the Devils were like a little Honda Civic, puttering their way across the country with a slow-but-steady-wins-the-race philosophy that they executed perfectly, the Sharks were like a Porsche that blew a tire right out of the gate and needed emergency repairs and clever, desperate driving to make it to the finish line.

By holding the team together until it found a groove, Nabokov put San Jose in position to make a charge at the Wings for the best record in the league. You'd think the league's GMs could have recognized this and thrown a little love his way for this extraordinary effort. But I guess not.


Honorary Hockey Player of the Night (Redux)

I was watching "So You Think You Can Dance?" last night, and it transpired that one of the dancers (20-year-old Comfort Fedoke) had dislocated her shoulder during rehearsal. Did this stop her from perfectly executing a tough Jive number? Nah. Didn't miss a shift, as we say in hockey.

Give her some skates!