Marcel Goc makes his triumphant return to the Sharks Tank tonight after signing a one year deal with the Nashville Predators in the offseason. When you take a look at how much the Sharks bottom six forwards have improved, one has to tip their hat and give an assist to Predators GM Dave Poile for not resigning Scott Nichol and underutilizing Jed Ortmeyer, allowing them to fall into the clutches of our own Doug Wilson. Nichol and Ortmeyer have been two major keys to the transformation of the Sharks third and fourth line. Last season, the Sharks got limited offense and very little grit from their bottom six and this year these former Preds have brought a new attitude and work ethic to the mix. So, welcome back Marcel Goc. We may miss your blogging, but we do not miss your consistently disappointing play. I hope Poile is happy with your stat line and the $250,000 he saved by letting Nichol walk. Let’s look at the difference with the three stats that really matter for a bottom six center like Goc and Nichol: Hits, Faceoff % and PK time.

Marcel Goc (2009-10) 8 hits, 55.5% and 1:23 PK time.
Scott Nichol (2009-10) 53 hits, 64.2% (2nd in the NHL behind Paul Gaustad) and 2:07 PK time

Not to mention that Scott Nichol is a whopping 62% on PK faceoff draws and Goc is under 50%. Doug Wilson has delivered change in a big way with a player that might not get the press, but Nichol for Goc was a remarkable and much needed upgrade.

The Predators will be without their star blueliner, Shea Weber, tonight while the Sharks are getting back Seto and Vesce. I could see this causing semi-chaos upfront initially with the Sharks falling behind early, and I could also see this as what they call in the betting world a “trap game” with the Sharks perhaps looking ahead to a date with Dallas on Thursday. It’s for this reason that I hope McLellan starts Thomas Greiss tonight to keep the Sharks focused in their own end, forcing them not to check out against the weaker, hoe down dancing opponent. While the Preds are 2-9 against the Sharks in their last 11, I still smell trouble and a tight 3-2 win by the Sharks.

How do you like the new blog and sexy features? Just in case you were having trouble getting up for the game, a little dance down memory lane for you. Will McLellan play Staubitz tonight and scratch McGinn? We’ll have to see…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTpl_SuXygw[/youtube]

W-O-W.  That’s how Jamie Baker described the keep-in Dan Boyle performed at the blueline before he passed to Thornton, who then dumped it into the slot for Pavelski, and Heatley cleaned up the garbage for the Sharks’ fourth goal.  This is after Dan Boyle made Ruslan Fedotenko and Martin Skoula look like a couple of beer leaguers, faking and deking right and left before burying a low wrist shot far side that chased Marc-Andre Fleury from the Pittsburgh net.  Second in the league in points by a defenseman, Boyle has played the first month of the season with a broken thumb, and we witnessed last night what can happen when Danny is 100%.  Holy crap.  Is this guy fun to watch or what?

But Jamie’s exclamation about the clinic Boyle put on really applies to the whole 5-0 Sharks trouncing of the defending Stanley Cup champions.  Actually, it wasn’t completely unlike the win the Sharks handed to the Pens last year at this time, though that one had a much more modest score (2-1).  Sidney Crosby is still a handful, and he got a few dynamite chances, but we saw none of the breakdowns the Sharks commited against Columbus a few weeks ago in leaving Rick Nash alone in the slot, or the head scratcher against Washington in leaving Ovechkin alone on a 2-on-1.  The Sharks quietly dominated play much of the game, and answered the bell with physicality when Pittsburgh got tired of being humiliated.  I think Jody Shelley’s fight against Eric Godard was the best one I’ve seen him fight in two years.

The Sharks are again on top of the NHL in points (although Colorado is tied with us with a game in hand), and many of the kinks have worked themselves out.  Pavelski, despite missing 15 games, was an integral part of everything last night.  Malhotra chipped in on the power play.  Scott Nichol continued his domination in faceoffs, got an assist, and had several scoring opportunities.  We witnessed last night how good the Sharks can be.  All this without Devin Setoguchi, Rob Blake, or Torrey Mitchell in the lineup. Of course the next question out most Sharks fans’ mouths will be “but can they do it in April?”

I’m getting tired of that question.  I’m savoring this win.

Because I have U-verse, that means I can’t get Center Ice (stupid AT&T).  The one plus with U-verse is I get great internet bandwidth at home, which makes NHL Gamecenter an obvious choice.  A bit more money than Center Ice with several more features.  The big downside is obvious- you can’t crack a brew in front of the TV at home and watch Canes-Sens.

The live streaming is just ok.  Not sure if it’s the server load or what, but I generally get better video performance with hulu or other video sites (admittedly that’s not live).  The “Adaptive” streaming mode, which gives you tivo-like features as well as changing quality of video depending on your pipe, is a decent compromise.  When the quality goes down, the video gets a bit more pixelated and the puck harder to follow, but at least the link stays up.  If you aren’t in adaptive mode and the network slows, the whole video freezes for a moment or two, which gets infuriating very quickly.  Adaptive mode also enables you to watch up to four games simultaneously.  Click on the game you want to get the sound from that feed.  It’s pretty intuitive.  I don’t really use (or have a use for) the in-game features like chat and running stats, and even if I did they are overlayed on top of the video.  Why would I want to block my own view with that crap?

The big benefit to getting NHL Gamecast is the games archive.  You can get games all the way back to the 2007-2008 season, or games from just a few days ago.  Because Tom asked in the last thread about the Pens, I watched their Thursday night matchup with the Kings.

The biggest annoyance with Gamecast is the way you access archived games.  Across the top of the screen is the schedule, going back only a few days.  That’s one way to access games that already happened.  This is good, although I wish that scroll went back a week or more instead of a couple of days.  The other way to access an old game is very backwards- you choose the team from a list, then the opponent, then the date.  I want to choose a game by two different methods: by date, and by team then date.  For instance, if I want to scout the Sharks opponent, I have to know who they played last (and the date) in order to watch that game.  Dumb.  You should be able to choose a team, then have that team’s schedule appear.  Choose the game you want from the list.  The other thing is, that backwards method is only for the games that don’t appear in the schedule on top.  I tried to choose Pens-Kings from that list, by selecting Archive, then this season, the Pittsburgh, but LA wasn’t in the opponents list.  Really dumb, and I almost just gave up then, figuring the archive wasn’t available yet.

Anyway, once you actually get into the archived game (assuming you found it), the video quality is great.  You can even picture-in-picture (or multi-play) with other archived games.  That is really sweet.  One problem- if you switch to multi-game from single game, it starts the single game you’ve been watching over from the beginning.  And there’s no way to skip ahead, except by 10-second increments. This almost makes multi-game archive viewing useless.  Another thing- if I have the game paused for a while (to write parts of this post, for instance) sometimes the whole thing freezes up, and I have to start the game over again.  Clearly, there’s room for improvement with NHL Gamecast.  Overall grade: C+.

After all this playing around, I finally get around to watching the Kings-Pens contest on Thursday night.  The Kings were on a major hot streak at the time, and continued it by beating the Pens 5-2, cracking the Pens perfect away record so far this year.  This sounds like a beatdown, but in fact the Pens were up 2-1 until Kopitar tied it almost 7 minutes into the third.  The go-ahead goal didn’t happen until there were less than 8 minutes left in the game.  It was a pretty even matchup until then, with both goalies making very good saves.  They had to because the D on both sides seemed a bit weak.  The Pens did play without Malkin, Gonchar, and Tyler Armstrong.  All three will probably be out tonight, and according to this, even Alex Goligoski is questionable.  That’s huge.  Goligoski has 13 points, only one behind Boyle, and has really stepped up with their top offensive defenseman (Gonchar) out.  It’s been Letang and GoGo on their top PP unit, and they might have to put Brooks Orpik up there tonight.

The Pens top line is still very dangerous- Bill Guerin had a ton of chances against the Kings, and we all remember how annoying Chris Kunitz can be since he played with the Ducks.  The second line is much easier to handle, with Staal used to playing with Kennedy and Cooke, now he might be playing with Fedotenko and Chris Bourque.  I hope the Sharks can jump on that weakness, though they have injury troubles of their own.  With Blake out, there is no defensive depth.  Glad we get the last change tonight- if we get the wrong matchup against the top line, there could be trouble.  And now with the news Pavs is back, and Crosby a bit banged up, I have to call a win for the Sharks.

In the “who cares” department, you may have heard the last podcast where we beat up on the Columbus announcers a little bit.  The Pens announcers, Paul Steigerwald and Bob Errey (one-time Sharks captain) are on the opposite end of the spectrum.  Great play-by-play and commentary, up there with Randy/Drew and Dan/Jamie.  On the radio side, which I didn’t listen to, is the legendary Mike Lange, who always sounds like he smoked 10 cigars then swallowed a bag of charcoal right before the game starts.  And he says stuff like “scratch my back with a hacksaw, he SCORES”.  Can’t beat that.

We’ll see you tonight with our Dudes On Hockey shirts on.  Come and say hi if you see us.  Might I suggest a free beer to break the proverbial ice?

Welcome to the new Dudes On Hockey, which takes care of all your San Jose Sharks podcasting needs, and hopefully much of your San Jose Sharks blogging needs.  For other great San Jose Sharks blogs, see the blogroll on the right.  Some new things to think about:

1. Threaded comments!  Just click the “Reply” link beneath anyone’s comment, and you can reply to that person.
2. Easy sharing.  If you click on an individual post, you will see some sharing links at the bottom which enables you to quickly share the post on facebook, twitter, or a number of other sites.
3. Synergy.  You can get the podcast feeds and the blog feed (which contain the podcasts) separately.  Click on the links there on the top right to see what’s what.  In the course of this conversion and upgrade, I had to change how the podcasts get posted here, which changes the feed link.  I did some things to hopefully make it seamless for all of you, but if you happen to not get podcasts in your player a week or two from now, visit back and update your podcast feed.  I will post more on that if/when it happens.
4. More control.  DOH has its own host, and we have full access to do whatever we want, be it look-and-feel or features.  If there are things you want, or don’t like, we have the ability to change those things.  Within reason.  And no, “write better posts” doesn’t count.  We all know we’re not doing that.

The Sharks continue their roll with a shootout win over Columbus, and the Dudes continue their roll on the podcast.  Even though several Sharks are hurt, the wins keep coming.  Mike and Doug wonder what will happen to the lineup when everyone gets healthy, take some listener emails, and try and predict which Sharks might make it to the Olympics.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

As Jerry said in the last thread- the Sharks.  They’ve strung together three good wins in a row- that’s wins against two of the top teams in the West points-wise (Colorado and L.A.) and a beatdown win on the road against a struggling Carolina team.  And having Eric Staal leave the game early on Sunday certainly didn’t hurt.

Now we just got word that Nabokov was named the third NHL Star of the Week.  Even though Nabby got (and deserves) kudos, I still want to see more Thomas Greiss.  The conventional wisdom is that Nabby won one or more of those games last week for the Sharks, but I wouldn’t mind seeing that put to the test.  My new fantasy hero Andrew Raycroft pitched a shutout last night for the Canucks, so even backups can have a good game now and again.  As Doug has said before, Nabby generally misses a little time each year, so do we really want Greiss riding the pine for weeks before he finally gets the call?  Could McLellan get freaky again and start Greiss on the second half of the back-to-back this week, that is, against Detroit?

Speaking of that game, the Canucks shut down the Avs, who really looked rather ordinary to me last week against the Sharks.  Were it not for Craig Anderson, it would have been much worse for Colorado.  Could it be this team is regressing back to where we thought they’d be?  Some good young players, but not enough horses to get to the playoffs.   After Matt Duschene and Wojtek Wolski and… uh… Ryan O’Reilly (?) there are not a ton of bright spots in the lineup.

And I hope to say here that Ryane Clowe doesn’t suck after three good games (shootout winner against LA, finally a goal against the Avs, and two assists yesterday), but it’s still a little soon.  We all hoped he’d snap out of it, and it appears he has, but let’s see 10 games of good play before the Newfoundlander gets off the hook.  I have to say, “The Newfoundlander” wouldn’t be a bad nickname, but it does remind one of Christopher Lambert and one of the worst sequels of all time.