Test Passed

I just wanted to get in a quick post on the subject of this week's games against last year's Stanley Cup finalists.  The Sharks beat the Penguins 2-1 on Tuesday night, and the Red Wings 4-2 last night.  

Both wins were pretty convincing.  The poor defense I complained about in my last post was in little evidence for San Jose...they held Pittsburgh to only eleven shots on goal, and conceded few good chances to the Red Wings.  In both games the Sharks came out with a high level of energy and sustained it throughout, in contrast to the team's habit of coming out flat time after time last season.  Most importantly, Team Teal is possessing and pursuing the puck in a way that I don't think I have ever seen;  the reason the Penguins only had eleven shots is that the Sharks dominated time of possession.  

Any team is going to have ups and downs over the course of a long season, but I think it's very fortunate that the Sharks have started off the season strong.  Hopefully the good start will aid the credibility of new coach Todd McLellan's system in the locker room.  If the team continues to play at the level they demonstrated this week, they'll have to be included in any discussion about which team is the best in the league.  

There are still a couple of worrisome areas.  There still appears to be some vulnerability to letdowns at crucial times...in the Pittsburgh game, no sooner had Mike Grier put San Jose up by two than the good team defense falls apart, guys start to chase around anxiously, and all of the sudden Ruslan Fedotenko puts the puck behind Nabokov and the finish is far more dramatic than it needs to be.  The ability to grimly close out opponents in a boring, efficient way still seems to elude this team.  

Also, the play of Evgeni Nabokov this year has been highly average.  Detroit's opening goal, by Marian Hossa, was a shot Nabby should've stopped.  Coming into the year, it was presumed that goaltending would be one of San Jose's strengths, but this hasn't been the case.  I'm confident that Nabokov is just fighting through a rough patch, though...I'm sure his game will improve, and it's a good thing that the rest of the team is clicking at the moment and they're piling up the points, anyway.  

All in all, a good week for the Sharks.  There are still some things that need to improve, but so far this team looks like a legitimate Cup contender.

Next game Sunday against Colorado, one of my most hated teams.  I'm hoping the Sharks win 11-0.  Nice and boring.

Pause & Reflect

All thirty teams in the NHL were in action yesterday, and today they all rest. My own life has been joyously busy for most of the last two weeks, and while I've been having a blast I have not had much of an opportunity to update this blog. So today, while the NHL is taking a league-wide timeout, seems the perfect moment for me to get back on the proverbial digital horse.

So, where are the Sharks nine games into the 08-09 season? Honestly, it's tough to tell.

At first glance, the state of the team looks very good indeed. They are 7-2 and atop the Western Conference with 14 points. Captain Patrick Marleau, who I asserted would be the bellwether player for the Sharks this year, leads the team in points (9) and is tied for the team lead in goals (5) with the emerging Devin Setoguchi. Unlike last season, the team is getting balanced scoring--after Marleau, there are four players with eight points each. The promised increase in blue-line contributions to the offense has indeed transpired--Dan Boyle has two goals and six assists and, more surprisingly, the talented but (formerly) frustrating Christian Ehrhoff (who had one goal all last year) has identical numbers. Furthermore, there is substantial reason to believe Ehrhoff's increased production will continue, simply because he has clearly taken to heart the importance of putting his shots from the blue line on goal. This was absent from his game last year. Ryan Clowe, who I believe has legitimate claim to being a genuine NHL badass, is showing aptitude for getting to the costly and painful twenty square feet right in front of the enemy goal and causing opposing defenses serious problems. Comparisons to Detroit's Tomas Holmstrom are reasonable.

So far, so good, right? Well, maybe. Look beneath the gaudy record and the surface positives, and there are some reasons for concern.

San Jose's schedule so far this season has been extremely soft. Of their nine games to date, only four have come against teams that made the playoffs last year, and those four games were against two teams (Anaheim and Philadelphia) that have struggled badly so far this season. They lost one of the four (4-0 to Anaheim), and another game, a 7-6 shootout win over the Flyers, had everyone in the organization sour-faced over the dismal defensive effort.

It's the absence of a level of team defense remotely close to what is required of a contending NHL team that has me most worried. Yes, they shut out Tampa Bay 3-0 last night, but the Lightning are the consensus worst team in the league, so I hope my skepticism can be forgiven. I watched the 4-3 loss to Florida on Friday night, and the Sharks made a Panthers team of very modest offensive talent look at times like Gretzky's Oilers. San Jose still put fifty shots on the Florida net and probably would've won if not for the heroics of Panther goalie Tomas Vokoun, but maybe it's good that they didn't...after getting away with similarly bad defense in back-to-back games with Philly, a deserved loss may have provided a much-needed kick in the pants.

The Merc reports that a Saturday-morning meeting of Shark defensemen occurred. Maybe this meeting can be credited for last night's shutout over Tampa. Maybe Tampa's own ineptitude had more influence on the results. Maybe it was a little of both. Upcoming games at home against last year's two Cup finalists should provide a more legitimate test of this new San Jose team.

I'll Have the Roasted Duck, Please

The Sharks' 2008-2009 campaign began tonight with a convincing 4-1 win over the Anaheim Ducks. (Yay! for the start of the new season!) It's late and I have a busy day tomorrow, so just a few quick comments.

Man, is it nice to stomp Anaheim for once. And it's nice to get off to a good start for once, too.

New coach Todd McLellan promised us more offense from the blue line, and sure enough, there it was tonight. One of San Jose's goals was scored by a defenseman (Christian Ehrhoff, who has apparently been taught that he will score more if he actually hits the net with his shots) and defensemen figured in all four one way or another. Dan Boyle and Rob Blake were both impact players on the power play.

Evgeni Nabokov gave up some scary looking rebounds early in the game--one of which was barely missed by a charging Chris Pronger--but these appeared to vanish after the midway point.

I think this team still has some lessons to learn about the duration of hockey games. Sixty minutes, guys. At about the fifty-four minute mark tonight the Sharks took their eye off the ball, and the next thing you knew Anaheim had a goal and was threatening to make this thing interesting. This was a problem all last year, and absolutely has to be fixed. (Some redemption points awarded for Devin Setoguchi's late clinching goal.)

Overall, though, a good win against a tough opponent and a good start to the year.

Out of town over the weekend...I'll rap with y'all when I get back.

It's a Business

Veteran defenseman Kyle McLaren has been waived by the Sharks, and as no other team claimed him he has been assigned to San Jose's AHL affiliate in Worcester. (Story here and many other places...McLaren's career stats here.)

The placing of McLaren on waivers was a move that even the most casual Sharks watchers saw coming. Something had to happen to get the team under the salary cap, and he was pretty clearly the odd man out in a defensive corps that features three new imports (Dan Boyle, Brad Lukowich and Rob Blake) and three up-and-coming homegrown players (Christian Ehrhoff, Douglas Murray, and Marc-Edouard Vlasic).

He didn't have a very good year last year--he struggled with injuries, and I'll bet he couldn't be as physical as he wanted to be--but as a fan of the team, I have to recognize that McLaren was an essential member of some of the best Sharks teams ever to hit the ice. This seems such a melancholy way for him to leave...dismissed by the team, unwanted by any other, sent to Worcester to suit up against the Lowell Devils and the Hershey Bears. A tough reminder that at the end of the day, professional sports is a business, and a particularly hard-nosed and unsentimental one at that.

I hope McLaren catches on with another NHL team. He's been a tough, solid player for many years, and I hope that when the end of his career comes it can be on his terms.

"Starting in Goal, Number Seventeen..."

A curious story in the NHL as the regular season gets underway concerns the Vancouver Canucks and their new captain, Roberto Luongo.

What's curious about it is that Luongo is the Canucks' goalie.

The official role of the captain in ice hockey is actually pretty limited...the captain (or one of his alternates, if he is not on the ice) is the only player empowered to engage in discussions with the officials about the rules (and then only when invited), and has various other relatively minor functions concerning communications. The captain is identified by a letter "C" stitched to his sweater.

The rules of the sport prohibit goalies from acting in the capacity of captain or even from wearing the "C". (The intent is to prohibit the goalie from constantly leaving the crease and interrupting play to converse with the officials.) Apparently the Canucks are going to get around the latter provision by painting a "C" on Luongo's mask, but there's no way they'll be able to get around the former.

Of course, the unofficial role of the captain--to be the team's emotional leader, to be the go-to guy at critical moments, to provide a source from whence the other players can draw confidence and intensity when adversity strikes--far outweighs any official nonsense about who supposedly gets to talk to the refs. So since Luongo is by far the best player on a weak-looking Vancouver team, maybe making him captain makes sense...although it smells a bit gimmicky to me, and besides is something that Just Ain't Done.

I understand the purpose of the rule prohibiting goalies from being captains. But another thing that Just Ain't Done, apparently, concerns the numbers worn by goalies. In all my years of watching hockey, I don't think I've ever seen a goalie wear a sweater number between 2 and 19.

There are plenty of goalies who are number 1, and there are plenty with really high uniform numbers--Jose Theodore wears number 60, just to name one. But you're not going to see any goalies wearing 8, or 11, or 17.

What's up with that? As near as I can tell there's no rule governing how players are numbered, as long as it's with an integer between 1 and 98 (Gretzky's 99 having been retired league-wide). There are particular rules that apply only to the goalie, but his identity on the ice is of course obvious...it's not like scrimmage football, in which uniform numbers serve to distinguish eligible from ineligible receivers. As near as I can tell, it's just a cultural thing.

Does anyone have any insight into this? Can anyone provide a counterexample of a goalie wearing a uniform number between 2 and 19? In the NHL or any other league? If you can, please leave a comment...I'm interested in hearing from you.

Drop the Puck!

And...we're underway!

Even though most teams are still finishing out their preseason games, the NHL regular season officially began today with a pair of games in Europe. The New York Rangers just defeated the Tampa Bay Lightning 2-1 in Prague, and they're just about to drop the puck in Stockholm for a game between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Ottawa Senators. (The Sharks open next Thursday against the Ducks).

Wow. Pittsburgh already leads 1-0 on a very soft goal against Martin Gerber forty seconds in. Goalie woes continue in Canada's capital, apparently.

As the world gets smaller, all the North American pro leagues are looking to expand the market for their products. With so many Europeans playing in the NHL, countries like Sweden and the Czech Republic would seem like "low-hanging fruit" for the league's efforts in this regard. England--where the league opened last year with back-to-back games in London between the Ducks and the Kings--would really be virgin territory. And our very own San Jose Sharks are looking even further afield, sponsoring China's only pro hockey team, the China Sharks. The goal in China would be to emulate the NBA's success in growing a massive new market in the blink of an eye. Maybe we'll see a couple of teams opening the NHL season in Shanghai someday soon...

Well, regardless of where the games are played, it's just a great feeling to know the season has started.

Oh, and before it gets too late, I guess I'd better make a Stanley Cup prediction. So here it is: Red Wings over the Habs in the final. Of course I want the Sharks to win it all (duh), but Detroit has to be the favorite...they were the best team in the league last year and only got better in the offseason.

Happy Hockey Season!