Blood pressure off the charts. I love/hate this game.

Amazing finish to a game that was pure torture, thanks to our Nabby. I love how the Sharks competed, never gave up and dominated the majority of this game. Nabby should have to buy every guy on this team a steak dinner tomorrow to say thank you for not ruining the entire season.

And a special thank you to Adam Foote for being a tool and taking that penalty in OT.

It’s my fault. I take full responsibility for what happened at the Tank of Wednesday night and I’m prepared to make amends.

It was my playoff beard – or lack their of. I’m not a morning person, and in my haze on Wednesday AM and deprived of all caffeine, I shaved the beginnings of my fighting facial follicles – and the Sharks lost. Rest assured that this has been corrected and because of my two day old beard, the Sharks will win four games in a row and right the wrongs and heckles from Sharks haters that we as loyal fans have been subjected to the last 48 hours.

A few other thoughts before I wander to the Tank tonight:

It didn’t make me feel much better this morning to see Joe Thornton and Patrick Marleau both proclaim that tonight’s game is not considered a “must win” in their minds. Really guys? I guess we shouldn’t expect anything else from them, but I certainly hope they play with a different intensity than that quote. If not, we’ll all be pointing to those comments as the slogan for why this team fails in April.

I’m not sure what Todd McLellan doesn’t see in Jamie McGinn but he played the fewest minutes of any player on both teams in Game 1. Based on reports from practice yesterday, it appears that Ortmeyer will be in for Game 2. Does that mean we’ll see two guys glued to the pine in the 3rd period? I thought this roster was deeper than last years, but the lack of love for his 4th liners is a consistent theme from McLellan this time of year.

If the Sharks have any hope of advancing, they need to make a statement tonight. There have been lots of Game 1 upsets this week and as Bill Shakespeare once said, “One game does not a series maketh, Hamlet”, but another bomb on home ice won’t have this team feeling lots of love from their home fans as they leave the Tank and head to enemy territory.

Respect the Superstition. Grow Beard Grow.

One is the loneliest number. The cheese stands alone. Whoever smelt it, dealt it.

The Sharks lived up to their postseason label tonight. They let the underdog Avalanche dictate the game and paid the price, forcing lonely fans like us to wonder, as Mike said leaving the Tank, “if we’ve seen this movie before.”

What went wrong? To me, it was pretty obvious. The Avalanche had a game plan. Be tenacious with the forecheck and when the Sharks enter the zone, especially the top line, prevent the backpass and don’t allow them to set up shop from the point. Colorado did this to perfection, especially in the 2nd period, and it took 40 minutes and countless high turnovers from Dany Heatley and company, for the Sharks to make an adjustment. Once they did, the Sharks got better opportunities driving the net after gaining the zone or dumping the puck and going to get it.

The Sharks say all the right things but tonight they proved to be all talk and no action. They claim to be well aware of past playoff failure, public perception and the impeding label of “Biggest Chokers in NHL History” if they bow out two years in a row in the first round – but tonight, the first ten minutes of the 1st period excepted, they showed little emotion as a team and crumbled at the end of the game – allowing the Avs to score in the final minute to win the game. Not the start of a history changing Cup run any of us were hoping for.

The top line tonight was impotent. Do you break them up? I was honestly surprised it didn’t happen mid-game. Seto and Clowe were on fire most of the night, so why not give them a shot with Jumbo Joe to see if you can kick start something? Nah – we’ll just let it play out and see what happens. Didn’t work out so well, did it?

What’s next? It’s tough because the Avs took the Sharks out of their game and prevented their best weapon, the shot from the point. Dan Boyle had no shots on goal tonight. That has to change – find a way to get your quarterback involved. Drive the net. Anderson got the first star tonight, but there were opportunities to be had. He gave up many a PHAT rebound and proved he is prone to the soft goal.  So – you tell me. If you’re San Jose, what changes do you make if any – or do you just chalk it up to dumb luck? I expect the Sharks to adjust and rebound with an effort on Friday that puts the Avs squarely in their 8th place – but that should have happened tonight.

Alright. Time for beer.

Only hours away before puckdrop, and in visiting my usual blog suspects this morning, I got a little more interested in the goaltending matchup.  On the podcast (scroll down) David said that Anderson needs to have a near-perfect series in order to win, and I guess I might have mistakenly took this to mean that the Sharks have a goaltending advantage.  Gabe Desjardins disagrees, to put it mildly:

Is there any aspect of the game where Colorado’s better than San Jose?  Just one: goaltending.  Craig Anderson is a vastly better goaltender than Evgeni Nabokov, even if Nabokov has somehow managed to put up respectable numbers this season.

I asked him about it a bit in the comments saying I’d put them about even, and his reply was:

Since the lockout: Craig Anderson save percentage = .916; Nabokov = .910. Nabby sucked for four seasons; he didn’t become good this year.

Interesting.  I wouldn’t make the claim that Nabby is an elite goaltender, and reading the great Brodeur Is a Fraud blog where the argument is made that SV% isn’t the perfect stat, but it’s a hell of a lot better than all the others, seems to back this up.  However, Nabby does have a better SV% this year than Anderson – .921 to .916.  Also, after reading this and this from Jonathan Willis, we see that Nabby and Anderson are above average in consistency, with SV% standard deviations of 0.064 and 0.054, respectively.  Those are new numbers I calculated based on their stats from the entire regular season.  We did see Nabby regress a bit in save percentage, as Gabe pointed out, but stayed relatively consistent.

Also, since Nabby ‘sucked’ the last four years, I wanted to find out the difference between sucking and not.  So let’s look at last year, where Nabby’s SV% was 0.910, good for 27th in the league.  Certainly not great, not even good.  If Nabby faced the exact same number of shots, and ended up with a 0.921 SV%, a tick better than Bobby Lou and good for 4th in the league, I think we could call that a great (or even elite) performance.  So what was the difference between Nabby’s and Luongo’s performances?

That’s seventeen goals over the course of the season, equivalent to around 4 or 5 wins.  Another way to put it , since Nabby only played 62 games, that’s one goal every 3.6 outings.  To me, that doesn’t sound like a lot.  It really shows that the difference between an average or below-average goalie and an excellent goalie is very small- just one fewer shot facing a late lateral push, an open 5-hole or a sluggish glove.  If Nabokov didn’t do that once every 216 minutes of playing time he would have been a top-5 goalie in the NHL last year, versus a top-30.

Oh yeah, GO SHARKS.

Now that the Sharks have drawn the Colorado Avalanche in the first round of the playoffs, the Dudes bring David Driscoll-Carignan in from Mile High Hockey to talk about the upstart Avs.  Mike, Doug, and David talk about the teams’ strengths, weaknesses, and likely outcomes of the serious.  After the Dudes are properly educated on all things Avalanche, they give their picks for the rest of the first round series.

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After a nail-biting good time yesterday watching the three games on tap at noon Pacific time, the Sharks finally caught a break.  It didn’t always look good.  The Avs were up 1-0, which was the be-all end all: if the Avs won in regulation, there was no chance the Sharks played the Wings. But the Avs coughed up a goal with 4 minutes left, and I was a little peeved, to put it lightly.  I would have thrown a snow blower at Joe Sakic at that moment if I could have.  And when the Hawks tied Detroit and then went on the power play with less then two minutes left, I had an instant feeling of dread.  And although we were all collectively forced to root for our sworn enemies, the Red Wings, they managed to kill the penalty and go on to win in overtime.

Which gives us the Avs, of course.  We are trying to line up an Avs voice for the podcast tomorrow, but either way, you’ll have the mp3 in your grubby little hands on Wednesday morning.  Some good listening before the Sharks’ playoff start.  Could this be the easiest draw in Sharks playoff history?  Could the Sharks possibly sweep, like my co-host Chetan thought on the radio show last night?  Or will those plucky Avs give the Sharks a good run, and Scott Hannan will be the making of nightmares?  Predictions in the comments, please.

David Perron is my hero. I have a David Backes USA jersey on as I type. Eric Johnson is the future of our children. I love (gulp) Paul Kariya.

Why am I Blues fan today? Because their matchup against the Nashville Predators today at 5pm is the single most important game of the season for the San Jose Sharks. Why? If Nashville wins, the door to Hell opens and the potential for playing the Red Wings in Round 1 remains a possibility. Even if the Sharks beat Phoenix tonight, if Chicago beats Detroit tomorrow, LA gets two points in their last two games and Nashville win tonight – guess who’s coming to dinner next week? Son of a B.

BUT – If Nashville loses tonight, even in OT, the nightmare goes away. It’s not possible for Detroit to fall past #6, and the Sharks would snag LA, Nashville or Colorado in the first round.

It’s as simple as that. I believe the road to the Cup goes through Detroit no matter what – but not in Round One. So strap it on Ty Conklin and win one for the Dudes. The Sharks need a little postseason luck to bounce their way after last season’s Hell-ish draw and this could be step one towards a beautiful Stanley Cup run.

One more guys. Just win one more.

This comes from an email we got for the podcast (make sure to listen, we actually have a guy with credibility this week), asking essentially, “Does the Sharks losing streak (or later, the winning streak) help or hurt the Sharks’ playoff chances?  Does success in the last 10 or 20 games result in deep playoff runs?”

This is an important question, and let me be perfectly honest- Gabe Desjardins’ recent post on something similar is probably a lot better than this one is going to be.  So I’d read this first with a sense of charity, then click over to Behind the Net and read the real stuff.  To defend myself, I was planning this post since a week ago, so I’m not copying Gabe- I swear.

To answer this question, I compiled the record of the last 10 and 20 games of every playoff team since 2001.  This gives us 112 teams, which isn’t a giant sample size, but it should smooth over some rough edges.  I correlated this (Pearson product-moment if you must know) against the round where they eventually lost (or not), but then I decided to copy Gabe just a little and use playoff wins instead, because that gives us more granularity than just rounds achieved- we get 16 gradations instead of 5.

Here’s the chart.  I’ll explain in a minute.

blah blah blah math

Ok, so this is what’s called an XY scatter plot, with the number of points in the last n games (red dots are last 10 games, blue dots are last 20) versus how deep that team went in the playoffs.  0 wins is swept in the first round, 16 is the Stanley Cup Champions.  If there were a strong correlation, we would see something of a line going from the lower left to upper right in each color.  That is, the teams that do poorly in the last bit of the season also bow out early.  Or we might see something completely counter-intuitive-  a negative correlation, in a line that goes from the upper left to bottom right.  That would signal that teams that do well in the final stretch “peak too early” and are more likely to bow out in the first few rounds.

We have what we call in the mathematics world, a “mess”.

Of course there’s going to be some variance, and the graph would be more like a cloud than a line, but here we just have a plate of spaghetti.  If you want numbers, the correlation for the last 20 games points and playoff wins is 0.12, and the last 10 wins 0.08.  Correlation ranges from -1 (late points always means bowing out early) to +1 (late points means going deep in the postseason).  0.12 is slightly positive- it’s probably a tiny bit helpful to do well late in the season- but it’s certainly nothing predictive.  It’s essentially a crapshoot- performing worse (or better) doesn’t mean much.  Let’s look at some extremes:

• The team with the most points in the last 20 games among all teams I looked at is the 2006 Red Wings, who only lost one game in regulation in the last 20.  That team lost in the first round to Edmonton.
• That very same year, the Carolina Hurricanes scored only 21 points in the last 20, barely .500.  That’s the second worst record of any of the playoff teams that year (only the #8 New York Islanders were worse).  For those that remember, the Canes won the Cup.
• Last year, the team that had the best late record of all playoff teams, the Pittsburgh Penguins, won the Cup.  They played the Wings (again) in the Finals, who had 12 fewer points in the same number of games, good for 13th amongst playoff teams.

Does anything correlate better to playoff success?  The answer is yes.  The overall 82-game record correlates better: 0.32.  And even better is the correlation of seeding to playoff wins: -0.37 (negative because a lower number (seed) correlates to a higher number (playoff wins)).  This does tell us something interesting- it’s better to be lucky than good.  It’s better to luck into a higher seed with a worse record (in a weak division) than score a ton of standings points and only get the #4 or #5 seed.  With the Sharks guaranteed the #1 or #2, they are in the best possible position.  Now the question is, can they transform this advantage, however slight, into real playoff happiness?

We’re going to find out.  I’m nervous.

Craig Custance, the NHL writer from the Sporting News (and new podcaster) joins the Dudes in starting the playoff coverage.  He talks about the top prospects, and the Sharks prospects in the soon-to-be playoffs.  Mike and Doug then continue those points in reading listener emails.

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The Sharks are entering another, to quote Paris Hilton, “Huge” game vs. Colorado on Easter Sunday. The Avs will be desperate, their Cinderella season fading before their eyes. As a potential first round matchup, the Sharks would be wise to be on their A game and not give Colorado any sort of confidence heading into mid-April.

Since I’m in the playoff spirit, let’s take a look at how some of our Sharks draft picks are faring in the NCAA and Canadian Hockey League playoffs.

Thomas Heemskerk (WHL/Everett Silvertips)

Heemskerk, who signed a three year entry level deal earlier in the season, didn’t see much time in net after getting lit up for five goals in an 2OT loss in Game 4 vs. Kelowna (2009 WHL champions). Everett battled but lost a seven game series, with Heemskerk posting an unimpressive 3.70 GAA and .870%. These numbers are way off from his solid regular season stats (2.34 GAA and .927%) but his inability to outbattle fellow goalie Kent Simpson leads me to believe the Sharks will leave the undrafted Heemskerk in Everett for another year. He was a find at Sharks rookie camp but at 19, it appears he needs a little more time.

Marek Viedensky (WHL/Saskatoon Blades)

Saskatoon swept Red Deer 4-0 in the first round and Viedensky played a major role, with five points (4 goals/1 assist) in four games and notching a +3. The 6’3 center Viedensky is having a great year and is proving to be a player to watch after his appearance for Slovakia at the World Juniors. Keep an eye on this kid and Saskatoon. He already has two goals in the first game of Round Two vs. Brandon.

Julien Demers (OHL/Ottawa 67's)

No relation to current Shark Jason Demers (insert joke here) this kid is still playing in Round Two of the Ontario Hockey League playoffs. So far, pretty impressive stats – 6 assists in 7 games and a +9 puts him among the OHL’s elite in d-man playoff scoring with names like Alex Pietrangelo and Ryan Ellis. Another guy to keep an eye on as they battle in the 2nd round with Mississauga St. Michael’s Majors. From what I understand about junior age rules, this is Demers last year of eligibility – so we’ll be seeing him around next year in camp atleast. A lock to get an entry level deal.

Taylor Doherty (OHL/Kingston Frontenacs)

Kingston folded in seven games vs. Brampton, but it certainly wasn’t Doherty’s fault – he pulled five points in five games with a +4 and a remarkable zero penalty minutes for a guy with 372 career junior PIM’s. At rookie camp this year, Doherty looked lost and fell fall short of his 2009 2nd round draft pick billing, but his numbers suggest he’s starting to figure it out and how to use his 6’8 size effectively and responsibly. He missed two games due to injury in this playoff series and his team lost them both. Interesting.

Tommy Wingels (NCAA/Miami Ohio RedHawks)

The RedHawks survived a 2OT thriller vs. University of Michigan and are the top seed remaining. They have a date with Boston College on Thurs, April 8th on ESPN2 and the winner plays for it all on April 10th. Wingels has no points in the Frozen Four after being the third leading scorer during the season. I would expect after the tourney ends, Wingels will be appearing in Worcester for their Calder Cup run – especially with Couture now entrenched in the Sharks top nine.

Samuel Groulx (QMJHL/Victoriaville Tigers)

The Tigers won their 1st round matchup vs. Shawningan with Groulx chipping in three points. He is now matched up with the team that traded him midseason, the Quebec Ramparts, in Round Two. Groulx had by far his best season as a junior, with 43 points – and he could be a candidate to be signed to an entry level deal in the offseason. Remember, this is the kid who said his favorite player is Vlasic at the draft. Some guys idolize Owen Nolan or Steve Yzerman – not this kid. He loves him some Pickles.