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.

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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.

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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).

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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.