This is Not a Slam

This is not intended as a criticism of either Todd McLellan or Patrick Marleau, but David Pollak's article in the Merc over the weekend illustrates exactly what I'm talking about when I assert that Marleau is high maintenance (see last post).

McLellan:

"I think we need to give him some breathing room right now to see if the (coaching) change is going to affect him positively or negatively."

"I think he's excited about a fresh start and we have to let that evolve a little bit."

I mean, the whole piece strongly suggests a "Shhh! Don't scare the Marleau!" tenor to the relationship between coach and captain. Which is fine, really...everyone's different and if Marleau is high maintenance, he's high maintenance. If McLellan can find the secret to successfully maintaining him and he scores 40 goals, I'm cool with him being as high maintenance as he wants.

Marleau or Mar-Low?

The preseason is underway, and the time is ripe to look ahead to the 2008-2009 edition of the San Jose Sharks.

Fans of Team Teal will be all too familiar with the storyline heading into this campaign...despite being one of the league's top teams for most of the 00's (and in the post-lockout years in particular), the Sharks have consistently wilted where it matters--in the playoffs. Early playoff exits have become an annual event of gloomy regularity for Sharks fans, rolling around to ruin those great regular seasons the way the first day of school inevitably shows up and ruins summer for small children.

The organization's management gave the team a good shake in the offseason in an effort to produce a different ending this year. San Jose's defensive corps will look very different this season, and of course there's a new man in charge behind the bench. But I can't help thinking that the key to a reversal of fortune lies with a guy who's been on the roster for years--the man wearing the "C", #12, Patrick Marleau.

Let's not mince words: Marleau had a horrible year last year. After a career-high 34 goals and 52 assists in 05-06, and an only slightly less productive 06-07, Marleau skidded down to 19 goals and 29 assists last year, for a mere 48 points, and was -19 on a team that was generally good defensively. And this was with a relatively strong finish: nine of those 19 goals came after the trading deadline.

Not every captain has to be a pugnacious, fiery scrapper like Bob Errey or Jeff Odgers. A guy can have a low-key on-ice personality and still be an effective captain. But to do so, he has to let his production do the talking. Marleau simply has to increase his production this year...particularly because he has retained the "C".

I'm betting this must've been a tough decision for new head coach Todd McLellan. If it were his decision to make--if Craig Rivet (traded to Buffalo) had been last year's captain, for instance, and there were no incumbent--it is difficult for this particular fan to believe that Marleau would get the "C". But it would clearly be very difficult to take the "C" away from any player who wears it, especially Marleau, who appears to be burdened by at least some amount of psychological fragility. (Did the fact that he was widely blamed for allowing Robert Lang to score the series-turning goal in the 2007 playoffs contribute to his poor start last year? Is it a coincidence that his best stretch of the 07-08 season came after the trading deadline, when all of the rumors that swirled around him could finally be put to rest?)

Marleau strikes me as a brilliant but difficult player who must be handled with great care and precision at all times--kind of like a Formula 1 car. Make a mistake and he can stall out or fly off the road. It was widely reported that Marleau had a relationship with former coach Ron Wilson that ranged from merely cordial to downright poor. Maybe coach McLellan can solve the Marleau Enigma, and ensure that this essential element of the team contributes to his full potential.

"My Client Has No Comment!"

The Sharks hired John Ferguson Jr.--GM of the Toronto Maple Leafs until he was fired by that organization in January, leaving it in pretty rough shape--as a scout over the weekend.

Ferguson seems to be pretty universally reviled by Leafs fans...there were several players the Leafs would've liked to have moved for draft picks and young talent at the deadline last year (Mats Sundin chief among them), but they all had no-trade clauses inked by Ferguson and the organization was paralyzed.

So the guy's reputation is in need of a makeover. You would think in announcing his hiring on their official site, the Sharks could've found at least one picture that didn't make it look like he was making a perp walk...



Inspires confidence, doesn't it?

Maybe he'll do better as a scout...

We Got News

Training camp tends to be one of those time periods for which "no news is good news" holds true. Well...we got news.

Media reports indicate that second-year center Torrey Mitchell--who provided a nice, unexpected spark as a rookie last year, although he faded somewhat down the stretch and flashed his rookie side a little too often for my comfort--has broken his leg and will be out for eight weeks.

Coach McClellan, meet your first major-league curve ball.

With Mitchell down, someone will have to step in. Who will that someone be? Very very early indications (via David Pollak's blog at the Merc) indicate that Once-And-Future(?) Shark Jeff Friesen could have the early inside track.

Certainly a situation to watch as camp continues.

Why the Sharks? (Part IV)

It's my observation that generally people inherit their sporting allegiances from the people around them--very frequently their families, often their larger geographical communities. It is certainly possible for an individual to adopt a team representing a town that he or she has never visited and to which he or she has no other community connection, but this is relatively rare, as near as I can tell. As a kid, for example, I rooted for the Minnesota Twins, the North Stars, and Golden Gopher teams, because although I was born in Virginia and grew up in Northern Wisconsin, both of my parents are Twin Cities natives and attended the University of Minnesota. I suppose I'm nominally a Timberwolves fan as well, although I've never been a huge NBA fan and I'm not especially engaged by the team's fortunes. (My NFL allegiances have been nebulous, multitudinous, and mercurial, and lately chiefly revolve around A) my fantasy team and B) the desire to see the people I care about happy, which puts me in the odd position of throwing my karmic support behind the Vikings and Packers and Cowboys and Eagles, all at the same time. Many will likely say "No real NFL fan could root for both the Vikings and the Packers," to which I reply, "True".)

I think it took the peculiar set of circumstances that existed in 1993-94 to make me a Sharks fan. Certainly if the North Stars were still in Minnesota I would to this day be a North Stars fan through and through. When the Stars moved, though, it really threw the future of my hockey fandom up in the air, and in the summer of 1993 I had no idea where it would land.

I do not think I could have arbitrarily adopted a new team and made it stick. It's not enough--at least, it's not enough for me--to wake up one morning and say "Hey, I think I'll be a Vancouver Canucks/Hartford Whalers/Los Angeles Kings fan." It's not enough for me to say it...I have to really feel it, to really believe it.

If I had stayed in the Twin Cities after college, or if I had moved to a community that didn't have a hockey team (San Diego, say, which I looked at pretty seriously for grad school), who knows where I would be today? Maybe I would have lost interest in the pro game and threw my support entirely behind Gopher hockey. In a previous post I mentioned the possibility that I may have successfully adopted the Washington Capitals, on the basis of a thin association with that team in my early childhood, but who knows if this would've stuck?

Even if I had moved to a community with an established team--New Jersey, say (I also seriously looked at Princeton)--would I really have become a die-hard Devils fan? Maybe, but somehow I doubt it. The Devils were a successful team in 1993-94 (they went to the conference finals), with an established fan base...it was their team, not mine. I think it would've been difficult to feel that I was really part of that community. I may have taken some interest in the Devils' playoff run that spring, but I'm doubtful any allegiance would've endured. I wouldn't have felt it. I wouldn't have believed it.

It took moving to exactly the right place (and, for those who may have been wondering, no, the presence of a hockey team was not a factor in my choice of graduate school) at exactly the right time for me to become the hockey fan I am today. It was not just a hockey market that I moved to, it was an embryonic hockey market in the midst of growth and fermentation, and I happened to come along at one of the truly decisive moments in the history of the franchise. In fact, I would argue that until the team hoists the Stanley Cup, there is no on-ice moment in San Jose Sharks history more important than that Game Seven victory over the Red Wings on that day in 1994. It was a crisp and decisive watershed moment. If the Sharks had been as dreadful that year as they had been the previous season, I am doubtful I would have found myself as engaged in their fortunes as I was, and I doubt if my support for the team would have persisted beyond my brief stay in the Bay Area.

So, in this way as in many others, I am a very, very lucky man.

This is the last post in this series about how I became a Sharks fan. I encourage you to reflect upon why you love your favorite team(s) (both hockey-playing varieties and others). I'll bet you'll find there are great stories there!

*****

Training camp is underway, and the first preseason game is only a week or so away. I'll be posting a few thoughts about the upcoming season over the next few weeks.

Stay cool. Happy equinox.

Why the Sharks? (Part III)

First, a few words about the NHL playoffs.

The NHL playoffs are frequently mocked because "everyone makes it in". This criticism simply isn't warranted in this day and age--just ask, say, Chicago Blackhawks fans. There are plenty of good teams that miss the playoffs, and numbers one through eight in each conference are always solid. Anyone can beat you. In the spring of 2009, the eighth-seeded team will be a legitimate threat to beat the top-seeded team, both in the East and out West. Upsets of this nature happen with enough frequency these days that they aren't even that surprising anymore.

But it wasn't long ago--in the era when the NHL comprised twenty-one teams, and played an entire regular season to eliminate five of them--that this criticism was warranted. The '93-'94 season was part of the transitional era between those days of the "Original 21" and the current thirty-team league. In the Western Conference, of which the Sharks and the Red Wings were and still are members, there were only twelve teams in '93-'94, and eight of them made the playoffs. The Sharks were the eighth seed that year. As you can see by looking here, all of the teams that finished behind them in the standings--the Jets, the expansion Mighty Ducks, the Oilers, and the Kings--lost 45 games or more, and only one (Anaheim) won more than thirty. You could make a case that the Sharks weren't the eighth best team in the conference as much as they were the fifth-worst.

The point of all the preceding is to emphasize how wide the gap was perceived to be between Detroit and San Jose as the playoffs got underway in 1994. Those who are relatively new to the league may have recent memories of, say, 2006, when the eighth-seeded Edmonton Oilers defeated the top-seeded Red Wings in six, or maybe this past May, when the eighth-seeded Boston Bruins took the top-seeded Habs to seven games before finally losing. The league didn't have the kind of parity in 1994 that it has now, the playoff field was nowhere near as deep, and very few people gave the Sharks a shot against the Wings. You would have found far more hockey fans predicting a Detroit sweep than a San Jose victory.

*****
On the Stanford campus at this time, there was a little shop that sold sandwiches (really good tuna salad) and frozen yogurt...it might still be there, for all I know. Game One was of course at Detroit, and therefore on television relatively early on the Pacific Coast. After it was over, I was in the mood for a sandwich.

When I walked into the shop the guy behind the counter said, "Hey, who won the game?" (I was wearing my jersey).

"The Sharks!" I chortled. I was pretty excited.

"Hey, great," the guy said.

"You'll never guess who scored!" I continued to chortle. "Shawn Cronin!" I didn't even give the poor guy a sporting chance to guess.

"Wow," he said. "Cool."

Of course, he had no clue who Shawn Cronin was.

*****

You knew it was going to be a weird series when Shawn Cronin--who had no goals whatsoever during the regular season and throughout his career was known almost exclusively for his fighting--found the twine for the Sharks in the course of a 5-4 win. If you were a Sharks fan, weird was good.

My recollection of the series, fourteen-plus years later, is like this: first, the Sharks steal a game, probably through the heroics of Irbe. Then, the Red Wings wake up and come back and beat the Sharks like a drum in the next game. Then this process repeats, through two more iterations, until each team has three wins and it's time for Game Seven.

Looking at the actual history, provided here, I can see it didn't quite go like that. Yes, the Wings did win decisively in Game Two by a 4-0 margin, but I see that they also came back and won Game Three (the first game in San Jose) 3-2. It was then the Sharks who won two straight, taking a 3-2 series lead back to Detroit for Game Six, which the Wings won in a 7-1 rout. That particular thumping I remember for sure...I recall finally having the sense that the Wings had righted the ship and were ready to take care of this pesky Californian team with their stylish logo and their oh-so-nineties teal sweaters once and for all.

I may have been confident that the Wings had righted the ship, but their own fan base was not. In 1994 the Wings were still in the midst of a decades-long championship drought--I don't think anyone at the time could have known they would be consistently at or near the top of the league for most of the next two decades. So at the time it probably seemed that having finally assembled a good team, the Wings were about to blow a precious chance at the Cup, with no guarantee of how many more there would be.

A Detroit journalist--I think it was Mitch Albom, but I'm not positive--wrote a piece around this time that reflected the anxiety of Wings fans. It was written from the point of view of a fan so preoccupied with the Wings' difficulties that everything he heard reminded him of the possibility of impending playoff disaster...

"A coworker poked his head into my office, smiling. 'All's good'?

'What?' I screamed. 'What about Osgood? That kid couldn't stop a beach ball!! This is the best we can do? Seriously?'"

...or words to that effect...I don't remember it precisely. ("Osgood" was a reference to Wings rookie goaltender Chris Osgood--yes, the same one who added his name to the Stanley Cup this spring for the third time).

*****

Osgood actually had a decent series, with three wins, two losses, and a 2.35 GAA, but ultimately the series-deciding goal was scored off of his mistake. It's a measure of the guy's mental toughness that he was able to shake it off and go on to have a career that has been and continues to be stellar.

With only a few minutes left in a tense 2-2 game, Osgood went into the corner to play a puck along the boards. Unfortunately for him, his backhanded flip went right onto the stick of Shark Jamie Baker, who immediately shot the puck into the unguarded net for a 3-2 lead. (Video here).

I was watching the game in the dorm room of my friend the Wings fan--he had an actual color TV. When Baker scored I leaped up in joy, running into the corridor, screaming, no doubt disturbing many students who were deep into their linear algebra homework. Considering that I was watching the game on a color television through the kind invitation of my friend the Wings fan, I probably should have conducted myself in a more subdued manner. But what can I say? I'm rarely subdued when it comes to hockey.

The Sharks made the lead stand up in the face of an all-out assault by waves of future hall of famers over the last minutes--Fedorov, Yzerman, Coffey--and won the game. Then they moved on to face the Toronto Maple Leafs, who at the time were in the Western Conference. That series is much less memorable--the one detail I recall is that the Sharks led that series three games to two as well, and Johan Garpenlov hit the post in overtime of game six with a shot that would've sent San Jose to the Western Conference finals. As it happened, Toronto eventually won that game, and game seven as well, ending the month-long thrill ride that was the Sharks' 1994 playoff appearance.

I'll have a few concluding thoughts in the fourth and final post of this series.

Why the Sharks? (Part II)

First of all, this is a way better sepak takraw link than the one I used yesterday. (I'm pretty sure this is how I sound to non-hockey fans when I talk about hockey...)

The conclusion of my last post found me--a refugee from the Land of 10,000 Frozen Lakes and still mourning the Anakin-to-Vader-like transformation of my Minnesota North Stars into the Dallas Evil Empire--adrift on the left coast amongst a sea of hoops fans, the only land in sight a two-year-old NHL team that might not've given the Baltimore Skipjacks much of a scare.

I starting watching the Sharks, just because...well, they were on. And man, did they stink. They lost a bunch of games off the bat and didn't win at all until nearly the end of October. Still, I watched them anyway, on my tiny little black-and-white TV...or, if I was puttering around my dorm room doing homework or whatever, I would listen to Dan Rusanowsky, then as now the voice of the Sharks, then as now one of the best in the business. Maybe they had some sort of lovable loser appeal to them. Maybe it's just a measure of how much I like hockey that I found following the team worthwhile, despite their (apparent) futility.

Then, so subtly that one almost didn't notice it, the Sharks began to dig their way out of that initial hole. They didn't burn up the league or anything, but they began to win a few games, sometimes a few at a time, and they avoided any lengthy losing streaks. A scrappy Latvian named Arturs Irbe gave them good goaltending--the one ingredient absolutely essential to turning a marginal team into a contender--and former Soviet stars Sergei Makarov and Igor Larionov started to click on offense.

It was around this time that I convinced several of my friends to accompany me down to San Jose to actually take in a live NHL game. I remember that it was a 3-3 tie with Winnipeg. To this day, this remains the only Sharks home game I have ever attended. Was this the night I actually turned the corner and became a full-fledged Sharks fan? I dunno...maybe. I remember rooting for the home team, and I remember being impressed by the gleaming new building and the enthusiasm of the Northern California crowd. Possibly a combination of all these things won me over. Or possibly it was just one more element in a long, gradual process.

What I do know, for sure, is that I was firmly in Team Teal's camp by the time of the one regular-season game that season that I remember even more than the one I attended--a 7-1 shellacking of the wicked Dallas Stars, in the enemy's building. For whatever reason that was a game I listened to on the radio--I don't know if it wasn't on TV, or if I had homework to do, or what. If the latter, I didn't get much work done, because I can remember pacing furiously back and forth in my room, listening to Rusanowsky call the action, getting more exhilarated with every San Jose goal. When it became clear that my team (yes, by this time the Sharks were my team) was not going to just beat the Evil Empire on their home ice, but absolutely paste them, I remember being so elated that I felt that I was about to float up off the floor.

(It was around this time that I made this purchase.)

The game had significance beyond settling a personal score for me. It, and every other game on the schedule as winter turned to spring (an imperceptible change in temperate northern California, by the way) now had genuine playoff implications. Indeed, the Sharks had successfully put the '92-'93 season and the horrible start to the '93-'94 campaign behind them, and were now firmly in the running for the franchise's first ever playoff spot.

When the last game had been played, the Sharks had managed to finish eighth out of twelve teams in the Western Conference, good enough for a cameo playoff appearance as Speed Bump #1 between the hundred-point Detroit Red Wings and the Stanley Cup. The fact that San Jose was so badly outmatched in the first round didn't really matter, to Sharks fans...just getting to the playoffs was an accomplishment to be proud of.

Then this happened...


It was one of the biggest upsets in the history of hockey. I'll talk a little more about how it went down in my next post.

Why the Sharks? (Part I)

I get this one a lot, and I'm looking to warm this blog back up again in preparation for the season, so I think I'll post a little of what The New Yorker calls a "Personal History". It's a somewhat lengthy tale, so I'll break it into multiple parts...

I was born just outside of D.C. in northern Virginia, grew up in northern Wisconsin, and have lived in the Twin Cities for nearly all of the past nineteen years. How is it, then, that I became such a die-hard fan of a hockey team hailing from San Jose, of all places?

It's the "nearly all" in the previous paragraph that is key, for the small sliver of time between 1989 and the present that I did not spend in frosty Minnesota found me hanging my hat in California.

The autumn of 1993 was a pivotal time for the National Hockey League, the Sharks franchise, and myself. From the point of view of this hockey fan, the changes in the league were mostly baleful--the classy old conference and divisional monikers (Norris, Smythe, Patrick, and Adams Divisions, Prince of Wales and Clarence Campbell Conferences) were abandoned and replaced with vague references to North American geography, and my beloved North Stars were stolen from Minnesota and sent to Texas. On the other hand, there was a new and particularly curious team down in SoCal that piqued my interest called the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim (opinions vary, but I personally think their original logo rocked, and I lament its demise), and the Winnipeg Jets and Quebec Nordiques were still where they belonged, so it wasn't all bad.

The San Jose Sharks, at the forefront of the '90s wave of expansion (part of the "Original Twenty-Two", as we Sharks fans like to say) were entering their third year, and their first in their new building, San Jose Arena. At last the team was truly resident in the city of its appellation, having played in the Cow Palace (just outside of San Fransisco) for the first two years of its existence. In addition to their new building, the franchise possessed a new head coach (Kevin Constantine) and the fresh and painful memories of one of the worst seasons in NHL history (an 11-71-2 record in '92-'93, for a whopping 24 points--this was back when expansion teams actually had to suffer a little).

As for me, well, I finished college at the University of Minnesota that spring and had just been delivered, by a few kind friends of mine, to the campus of the Leland Stanford Junior University, thousands of miles from anyone I knew, to start grad school. Amongst my carload of possessions was a combination radio/black-and-white television with a five inch screen. I didn't anticipate using it much. As things turned out, I was wrong.

With the exception of a fellow mechanical engineering student down the hall from me in my dorm who was from Detroit ('nuff said--the Wings were as good then as they are now, and have pretty much maintained that level of play for every year in between), my new circle of Stanford friends were fans of scrimmage football, basketball, and baseball--in other words, they were fairly typical American sports fans. The fact that I was so devoted to hockey was curious and somewhat bemusing to them--they reacted largely as they would have if I had expressed deep interest in shinty or sepak takraw. One friend gave voice to this when I mentioned that I would value a national collegiate championship for the Minnesota Golden Gophers in ice hockey more than I would in basketball. The friend, a Duke alum and the type of college basketball fan who inspires this sort of thing, took a moment to convince himself that I was serious and exploded "Hockey? Who cares about hockey?"

At this point, though, despite loving the sport, I really had no team. The wounds left by the North Stars moving to Dallas were raw, and I did not know how, or even if, they would ever heal. I still cheered for the Gophers, of course, but I've always had a particular liking for the pro game.

Where, or where, was I to turn? For the answer to this and many other questions, see "Part II", coming soon.