Apparently, the Sharks Have a Player Named "David Setoguchi"

Hockey play-by-play guys have a tough job, I need to state right away. I try to temper my criticism, as should all fans. However, one of the funny things about watching the same team play so many games, as I have this season and last, is that it really becomes clear just how tenuous a grasp broadcasters can have of the opposition's roster.

During tonight's game against Chicago (which the Sharks won 3-2), Blackhawks broadcaster Dan Kelly called Sharks forward Devin Setoguchi "David" several times. Someone must have slipped him a correction at some point, because later on he called him by his correct name (although mostly he seemed content to just refer to him by his surname).

On a number of instances I have heard Craig Rivet's last name pronounced as though it describes a fastener used to join pieces of steel. And I suppose opposing broadcast teams can't be blamed for shortening Douglas Murray's first name to Doug, but Randy Hahn and Drew Remenda always call him Douglas, and it's my understanding that this is what the guy in the #3 sweater goes by.


Good Game

'Twas a good one tonight in front of a boisterous crowd at United Center. Both teams showed some jump early--although the Hawks maybe had a little more, possibly fueled by an emotional pre-game ceremony honoring legends Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita--and the score was tied at two after one. The game simmered down a bit in the second, and remained tied until a series of crisp passes found Patrick Marleau, who made a pretty move to get some room and beat Patrick Lalime for what stood up as the eventual game winner.

Marleau...well, there's not much to be said that I didn't say in my post about the Ottawa game. I don't know where this has been all season and it doesn't matter. Now that it's back, I'd like to see it stick around.


Unsung Hero

The official "Three Stars" of the game were Joe Thornton, Brent Seabrook, and Jonathan Cheechoo, but tonight my vote for first star would have gone to Kyle McLaren. And not just because he scored a goal...he was a nasty physical presence all night long, and may have saved what would have been the tying goal by deftly sliding the puck out of the crease with Nabokov down and out, denying the salivating Rene Bourque a crack at an open net with a little under three minutes left.


What's that thing that just whizzed past our ear?

The Hawks thought they tied the game with Lalime pulled and less than a minute left on a goal by Bourque, but replays clearly showed that he had advanced the puck into the net with his glove, and the goal was correctly disallowed. For a sickening moment, though, I thought that San Jose had let yet another lead slip away with only seconds remaining.

They dodged a bullet tonight, but the Sharks have to figure out some way to play better 6-on-5...they are likely to face this situation many more times this season and into the playoffs. And in the playoffs you can't console yourself with the knowledge that at least you got a point...


Hey! Which side is that guy on, anyway?

It's not too often you see an NHL general manager on the ice before a game wearing the other team's sweater, but that's just what we saw tonight. Doug Wilson took part in the pre-game ceremony, wearing 'Hawks colors. Wilson, of course, was a lethal offensive defenseman for Chicago for many years (39 goals in 1981-82!), before closing out his playing career with the Sharks.

Since I started off this post with a criticism of the 'Hawks broadcast team, I'll close it by extending kudos to them for recognizing the class of the Sharks organization in taking part in the pre-game festivities.


Next Game on Sunday at the X

I'll be there...

More About the Ottawa Game...

Despite their recent struggles and turmoil (head coach John Paddock was fired at the end of February) the Ottawa Senators are still a very dangerous hockey team. The Sharks got them last night in a fairly vulnerable state, however...the Sens were a long way from home, coming off a 3-1 defeat against the punishing Anaheim Ducks, and without goal-machine Daniel Alfredsson. So I was disappointed that the Sharks did not come out of the gate looking for blood last night. Most of the first period was played in their zone, the Senators were winning all of the battles for loose pucks, and overall San Jose was lucky to get out of the first period scoreless. The lack of energy was particularly apparent on the heels of the electrifying win against Montreal on Monday. The Sharks did not really start to look dangerous last night until late in the second period, by which time the Senators had finally taken a deserved 1-0 lead.

I give the Sharks credit for storming back to win...I'm certainly delighted to see Marleau net a couple of goals, and Cheechoo continues to be on a tear, which is fantastic. Brian Campbell played well again last night--San Jose has yet to lose a game with him in the lineup. But they were playing against a tired, slightly struggling team with some drama going on off the ice. Against an energetic, confident, distraction-free opponent, the lack of intensity the Sharks exhibited for the first half-plus of the hockey game last night could have sunk them into too deep a hole, beyond the reach of any late-game heroics.


Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!

The Sharks will face such an opponent tomorrow night when they travel to Chicago. I watched the Hawks gleefully stomp a more talented Vancouver Canucks team on Sunday, and since then they have chalked up wins at Minnesota and against Anaheim--those are two very tough teams. The Blackhawks are making a virtue of their youth and inexperience...the former they tap for energy and enthusiasm, and the latter is almost certainly a factor in their failure to be awed by the red-hot defending champions, whom they shut out last night 3-0.

If the Sharks come onto the ice tomorrow night as flat as they did against Ottawa, they will trail after the first period, probably by multiple goals. Hopefully San Jose will come out flying, and this assertion will go untested.

Sunday Scraps (March 2nd, 2008)

Fun Conquers All

In the third period of this afternoon's game at United Center in Chicago, Blackhawk defenseman Duncan Keith found himself breaking alone into the Vancouver Canucks' zone, defended by veterans Matthias Ohlund and Kevin Bieksa. Keith tried a nifty between-the-legs spinny move in an effort to beat the defense. It was a cheerfully optimistic effort which utterly failed, and for good measure Bieksa clobbered Keith as punishment for his cheek, but the move was characteristic of the youthful exuberance, even naivety, with which the Chicago Blackhawks defeated the grim, anxious Vancouver Canucks this afternoon by the score of 4-1.

The Blackhawks have fallen to the very margins of the playoff race, but it's still been a very promising year for this very young team. With veterans Martin Havlat, Robert Lang, and Yanic Perrault out with injuries, the squad that took the ice today looked even younger than the Hawks typically have this season. One of the Rogers Sportsnet analysts calling the game for Vancouver joked that it was like the Canucks were playing the Rockford Icehogs (Chicago's AHL affiliate). Today the Hawks were able to channel all that youth into hockey energy, and they controlled almost all of the play. They threw the body, won the battles along the boards, fought with gusto, and swatted pucks out of the air and into Vancouver's net as if they don't understand that that's hard.

The Canucks, on the other hand, are still very much in the playoff picture, but have had some grim outings lately. Vancouver has lost its last two games in overtime after giving up third-period leads. At this time of year you absolutely have to beat the teams behind you in the standings, and I'm certain that the Canucks approached today's game as a must-win.

But they played like a team expecting things to go wrong, and it was a self-fulfilling prophecy...they were tight and never got into a groove, allowing themselves to be pushed around by Chicago from wire to wire. I had a mental image of them standing on a precipice, having just lost their balance, and windmilling their arms in terror in an effort not to fall.

The broadcast team alluded to the sheer quantity of one-goal games that Vancouver's reliance upon Roberto Luongo and a tiny dram of scoring obliges them to play, and one wonders if they aren't beginning to crack under the constant pressure.

The Canucks today were more talented and vastly more experienced than the Hawks, but the Hawks looked like they were having infinitely more fun and in the end that made all the difference.


Wings-Sabres Observations

The Red Wings visited Buffalo today, having gone 1-8-2 in their prior eleven games. East vs. West matchup involving a Western team other than San Jose, so of course I was pulling for the Sabres to do the Sharks and everyone else out west a favor. Alas, the Wings gave the Sabres a pretty good drubbing today, and came out with a 4-2 win.

Much like the other night against the Sharks, the Wings were victimized by a bizarre goal involving the officials allowing play to continue when (almost) everyone was anticipating a whistle. With about four minutes gone in the third period and Detroit leading 3-1, there was a hard hit along the boards, followed by some face-washing, followed by some more face-washing, followed by a few punches. It certainly looked like a melee was imminent, and a linesman had already stepped in to start prying players apart. However, at no time was the whistle blown, and after several seconds the puck, which had been generally disregarded in all the ruckus, squirted free. Jason Pominville scooped it up and bore down on a cruelly marooned Dominic Hasek, beating him glove side to pull the Sabres to within one. Tonight, however, the Wings weathered the bad break...that was Buffalo's last marker, and the Wings added an insurance goal later to provide the final margin.


Rick Jeanneret

One of the great things about watching Sabres games is that you get to hear the action called by Rick Jeanneret, one of the legends of the business. It's pretty much the equivalent of listening to Vin Scully call a Dodger game. He has that energetic tenor that is perfectly pitched for hockey play-by-play. There's a cool video here with some highlights from his great career.

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...