Almost. The most exciting things of the night (by far) was seeing the new scoreboard, the new ‘ribbon’ screen that goes around the arena on the upper deck, and the new unis. Ryan Garner has a full screed on it, and I agree with his major points.

The scoreboard is great. It’s bigger, much clearer, and does away with the hard-coded section for penalties, time left, shots, and timeouts. It’s all integrated into the large hi-def screen display. Replays are actually worth watching. It’s not quite as good as a decent consumer plasma or LCD, probably because of the size, but a fantastic improvement. Watching the action on the screen is no longer useless, although you do see trails on the puck when it moves quickly, which is most of the time.

When I first saw pictures of the new unis on sjsharks.com yesterday, I was a little disappointed. I thought the teal was too bright, and I’m not a huge fan of the orange. I’m happy to report that the teal has not changed at all- I stood next to a guy with the new jersey wearing my old teal jersey, and the colors are the same. I’m not sure I like the shoulders, and wish they’d use the fin logo instead, but I’m ok with the overall look. The new home whites are actually pretty snazzy.

Enough about fashion. Supposedly a game happened, but I think I blocked it out. It was basically an ‘A’ level Sharks Ice game without the intensity. (For those not in SJ, Sharks Ice is the local place where the Sharks practice, and where I play amateur hockey. Badly.) Everyone was trying to thread the needle with passes, often bypassing a good shooting opportunity. Might be kind of exciting when it’s Joe making the passes, but it’s dull when it’s Brad Norton. The goalies looked good- there were some times where I got to see Dakers’ positioning and Greiss’ blinding lateral speed. But the game ended in a 0-0 tie, then went to an unwatchable shootout, with only Steve Bernier scoring. Joe’s shootout attempt was so lazy and slow that if I wasn’t already bored with the whole thing, I would have been insulted.

Unfortunately, the quality of the game was so bad that it wasn’t even possible to do any evaluation on the young kids and new players. Devin Setoguchi has good speed, Ty Wishart is a beast, and Logan Couture needs to gain size. But that’s about all I could see. I’m hoping they will get good minutes in the preseason, so I can properly form an opinion about their chances of making the big club. The way the roster is so jammed up right now, Setoguchi may be the only one with a decent shot.

Since there probably won’t be anything that exciting to debut next year, I have doubts about going. If I do go, I’ll want to go early so I can at least get some free stuff.