The Sharks returned to a modicum of respectability last night in winning 3-2. It was an all around better effort than Tuesday. Has anyone else noticed that Milan Michalek is jumping again? It seemed like he had made several power moves in the last few games, after being invisible for the better part of two months. If we can get that second line humming (hopefully Joe Pavelski will be back soon) we will be a lot more dangerous. Marleau playing with Joe makes the #1 more potent, but certainly answers the question as to which line the top D should play against. I think Pronger/Niedermayer were on the ice for every one of Patty’s shifts.

Also, I should mention that even though the Sharks are 2-3 against this Ducks this year, they’ve been outscored 22-13. All the Sharks’ victories have been close, and two of the Ducks’ victories have been blowouts, amongst the worst the Sharks have had this season.

I must say, the circumstances of the next Ducks matchup don’t exactly bode well for the Sharks. It’s the first home game after a long road trip. The Sharks are 2-2 after road trips of 3 games and longer. And the Philly win shouldn’t really count. I wish I had the data to easily crunch W/L records after long road trips, but I don’t feel like poring over the schedules of all 30 teams by hand.

After a fairly good outing against the always-bad Blackhawks on Thursday, the Sharks go completely in the tank (believe me, no pun intended) against the Ducks last night. It was 2-1 after 1, but 6-1 after two periods. The Sharks showed a little pluck in the 3rd en route to a 7-4 loss.

The Ducks are better than the Sharks. It’s just that simple. They have better D, better O, better goaltending. The Ducks first line matches up almost even with our first line, but their second line is head and shoulders better than ours. Penner, Getzlaf, and Perry made the Sharks’ young D look foolish, and even the third line played well. Travis Moen went right around Marc-Edouard Vlasic on two occasions, scoring on the first, and barely missing on the second. Matt Carle might get sent back to the minors after last night’s effort, including an outlet pass that was intercepted between the Sharks’ circles, for God’s sake. I think Rob Niedermayer thought it was Christmas.

After the Ducks put the game out of reach, they sat back a bit, and the Sharks surged. But even Philly could protect a 5 goal lead, and the Ducks managed. There were several tense moments after Cheech made it 6-4 late in the third, but after inexplicably keeping Toskala in the net on a Sharks power play, the Ducks scored an empty netter as soon as the PP expired. Generally you keep a goalie in net on your power play, because the other team won’t get penalized for missing an empty net (no icing on the kill), but in this case, I think the Sharks should have gone for broke. Try and salvage some worth out of the game.

I think I’ll be watching tonight’s game while peeking through my fingers.

Man, if the last two games are any indication, the Sharks are in trouble. Dallas’ top goal scorer has only 16 goals, and their top two points players are defensemen. If you can name their top scorer without looking it up, my hat is off to you. Possibly too easy hint: he has won the Selke.

Anyway, the moral of the past few games is, as the power play goes, so do the Sharks. Their recent stretch is 1-for-32. Doug thinks that Ron Wilson is skating on thin ice, but I think we need to have a bit of a wait-and-see attitude. The upcoming stretch is going to be huge, with a home-and-home against Anaheim, and road games against Nashville, Dallas, and Calgary all in February. If the Sharks continue to stink, maybe they’ll pull a Robbie Ftorek. I’m obviously way too emotionally invested in this, but I like Ron Wilson. I think if he got canned and they bring in somebody like Pat Burns or Jacques Demers, it won’t be for the better. On one hand, they would install a defensive-minded system, which might help shape up some of the poor defensive efforts (Jonathan Cheechoo -10, I’m looking in your direction), but I think it’ll squash some offensive creativity. With young talents like Michalek, Bernier, and Clowe, I want to see them turn into Kovalchuks, not Daigles.

In their infinite wisdom, the NHL has decided to hold the All-Star game and skills competitions on a Tuesday and Wednesday, the time when everyone is thinking about hockey. I’m sure the skills competition will run neck-and-neck with American Idol in the ratings. And by ‘neck-and-neck’, I mean, ‘the neck of a gnat vs the neck of a giraffe’.

And I like the All-Star game. I hate basketball, so the NBA All-Star game is out. Baseball’s All-Star game is lame, because the commisioner attached some ginned-up consequences to it. And the Pro Bowl is after the season is over, so who cares about that? The NHL All-Star game is purposefully not serious. Sure, wimps like Scott Niedermayer won’t show up because they’re ‘hurt’ or whatever, but it’s really not a big drain on one’s constitution. You skate around with some buddies, no one hits anybody else, and you take a few shots.

Ok, so the game is kinda like a family Thanksgiving touch football game on ice, without all the contact. Which is why the skills competition is the better event. As a hockey player myself, I definitely appreciate the skills shown in a regular season game, but I like to see the nuts and bolts of stuff. How fast can you shoot? How are you at saving breakaways? Plus, you get to see all the players trash talk each other, which is pretty fun.

The word is that Cheech, Marleau, and Joe will be on the same line during the game itself, so I’ll be tuning in for that. Maybe we’ll see something that rivals Owen Nolan’s called shot, my favorite All-Star moment ever.

What a shitty game. The Sharks gave up the first goal (AGAIN) last night, and quickly found themselves in an 0-3 hole less than 12 minutes into the game. Marcel Goc managed to score only seconds later to make it 3-1. I’m sure anybody that listened to the game or watched it on TV heard that this is the third straight start where Nabokov gave up 3 goals in the first period. The first time was Phoenix, when the Coyotes ended up winning 8-0 (too cold), the second was against the Wings, when the Sharks ended up winning 9-4 (too hot) and last night, when we lost 3-2 (just right).

It certainly seems that Nabokov has trouble making the early save. Two of the goals last night were on the power play, and those two probably weren’t his fault. But spotting the other team 3 goals isn’t exactly a winning formula. It’s pretty much common sense that the team that scores the first goal has a much better chance of winning, but let’s flip that aphorism on it’s head, and look at it from the other direction.

In the last 15 games, the Sharks are 8-7. In 10 of those games, the Sharks did not score the first goal. They are 5-0 in the games they did score the first goal, and 3-7 in the ones they didn’t, which sounds like a decent percentage. But it’s not- this year, the league average winning percentage of teams that don’t score first is .315.

Using nhl.com’s handy-dandy stats tool, we can see that the Sharks are the best in the league when they score first – 18-3. If they don’t score first they 10-12, which is good enough for 5th best. Believe it or not, Buffalo is 10-4-2 when they don’t score first, a .625 winning percentage.

Clearly, the Sharks need to focus more on 1st-period play.

I saw this rumor on the SI.com “Truth and Rumors” page:

Many rumblings throughout the league, you should know, that the Sharks are becoming somewhat impatient with Ron Wilson‘s work behind the bench.

I like Ron Wilson, so my analysis is a bit skewed. But an 8-7 run isn’t all that alarming, is it? What do I do? I go back to the stats. Let’s start with last year, the Detroit Wings, President’s trophy winners with 124 points. Their worst 15-game stretch was November 15 – December 15. They went 6-9. 2003-4? Red Wings again, with 109 points. Worst 15 game streak – 6-7-2.

If 8-7 turns into 8-12 or 10-20, then I’ll be getting skeptical of Wilson myself. But let the man do his work. A bad stretch isn’t a calamity- in most seasons, it’s inevitable. Let’s be glad it didn’t happen at the end of March.

I really should have posted something about the Detroit game after I went… at 0-3 I was threatening to walk out if it became 0-4. Then the Sharks scored one in the first to make it 1-3, and I figured I’d stick around. I’m glad I did. That’s probably a game I will never see the likes of again. 9 straight goals, and 6 on the power play. Possibly the best offensive effort ever, only days after one of the worst defensive efforts ever.

And it was a nice win against Columbus on Saturday, but it looks like Josh Gorges got hurt. It appears I’ll be wearing my Carle jersey again a bit sooner than I expected. If the Sharks skate 6 defensemen with Davison and Murray getting regular shifts, that would be a terrible mistake.

So I get a new Matt Carle jersey for Christmas, and what happens? He gets sent down to the friggin’ minors. After the pasting by the Coyotes and the benching of Bell, Carle, and Bernier against Dallas, the latter two get sent down to Worchester.

All is not lost. Doug Wilson intimated that Carle may not be gone very long, but it did pique my interest in the business side of this transaction. If you are like me, and wonder about the minutia of NHL rules and regs, you might have asked yourself, “Why didn’t they get claimed off of waivers?”.

For those who don’t know, generally when a player moves from a NHL team to the minors, they have to “clear waivers”, which means the team notifies the league and all other teams that the player is available. Any team who wants that player can “claim him off of waivers” which means they assume his contract (and count half his salary against the salary cap). If more than one club wants the player, he goes to the team that has the worst record at the time. A player also has to clear waivers when moving from the minors to the NHL (called “re-entry” waivers), and there are more exceptions for this. Some players may not be exempt from “regular” waivers, but are “re-entry” waiver exempt. Jeez, how confusing is that?

Anyway, there is a “regular waiver exemption”, which means that certain players young enough, and with little enough NHL experience can go straight to the minor league team without having to go through waivers (there are other exemptions as well, but I’m not going to mention them here- it’s complicated enough as it is). The experience exemption is applicable for both Carle and Bernier. I’d bet at least half the teams in the NHL would claim these guys if they did have to go through waivers. If they weren’t waiver-exempt, they wouldn’t have been sent down.

The waiver exemption is 80 games for 21 year olds (Bernier) and 60 games for 22 year olds (Carle). Bernier has currently played 78 games in the NHL, and Carle 51. They barely made it under the wire for the exception, and it’s extremely unlikely they’ll get assigned again, due to their talents, and likelihood of being claimed.

For more interesting information about how waivers work in the new CBA, here’s a great blog post I found. Very enlightening. You can even download the whole CBA (all 472 pages of it) here in PDF form. Works better than NyQuil.

After 3 consecutive losses, all to division opponents, and losing 5 of 7, the Sharks are officially in the doldrums. That is, before the win last night. The 8-0 loss to Phoenix on Thursday night is probably the worst, most embarrassing loss in franchise history. Two other times in their history the Sharks have lost 8-0 and worse. But both came in the first two season, when the Sharks were playing under Kevin Constantine, and had such superstars as Link Gaetz and Kelly Kisio. A team with four All-Stars, including a Hart and Richard winner they weren’t.

So management kicked ass, took names, and benched three good players on Sunday vs. Dallas, choosing to suit up Scott Parker, Rob Davison, and Doug Murray, generally healthy scratches all.

And the Sharks looks great … for 20 minutes. The first period they were flying around the rink, contesting every loose puck, forechecking hard, and driving to the net for rebounds. Frankly, they looked like the Ducks. They went up to a 4-1 lead, and it appeared the rout was on. And then it wasn’t. Dallas managed to regain control of their zone, playing their ho-hum, slow-tempo, lock-the-neutral-zone, dump-it-in-and-let-Zubov-take-slap-shots style of play. In the Sharks’ defense, they did play the night before, and may have shot their wad proving that they could be dynamic and dangerous in the first period. But it still makes periods 2 and 3 a little disturbing. If the Sharks can’t put together a good 60 minute performance after the worst loss in franchise history, exactly when is it going to happen?

There is a bit of a respite, now that Pronger and Giguere are both hurt for the Ducks, arguably the two best players on Anaheim this season. Maybe the Ducks won’t end up with 124 points, their current pace. To put that in perspective, the only team that finished with 124 points in the last 10 years is Detroit, last year. In a division which included the three worst teams in the Western Conference. By contrast, the Pacific division this year has the three of the top five teams in the conference. And the two worst. Even so, if the Ducks finish the season with 120 points or more, I would argue it would be the best regular season performance since 1995-6.

With only two really good opponents in all of January (Dallas on the 30th, Detroit next on the 4th), the Sharks need to make a run here. And we need to stop friggin‘ losing to the Kings and Yotes.

Everyone’s heard about the NBA brawl that happened last weekend in New York, right? Players fighting, a cheap shot by Carmelo Anthony on Collins, and a resulting 15 game suspension. I watch PTI religiously for some reason, even though they rarely talk about hockey. They spent a good portion of Monday’s show talking about the brawl. And inevitably, the racial component comes up. Mike Wilbon made the good point that there have been NBA fights since the 50’s, and no one complained then about the violence in the sport, and the “thuggish” behavior. No argument here. He also mentioned that the fighting is worse in hockey and football, and no one complains about that. I have a bit of an issue with that, but read on.

So I wouldn’t even be blogging about this if there wasn’t a similar incident in the NHL just a few days ago. Scott Nichol of the Preds gets driven into the net by Joseph Spacek of the Sabres, the net comes off it’s moorings and Nichol goes down. With Spacek’s back to him, Nichol drops one glove, comes up behind him, and hits him in the jaw from behind. Spacek goes down like a sack of bricks, but has no long term injury. Nichol gets 9 games for the cheap shot.

This is patently outrageous. If you saw the Bertuzzi hit on Steve Moore a couple of years ago and the Nichol hit side by side, without knowing the aftermath of the hits, you would think the Nichol hit was much much worse. Bertuzzi had his glove on when he hit Moore, and the hit came partially to his helmet. Nichol hit Spacek flush in the face with his fist. The only reason Nichol got only 9 games is because Spacek wasn’t hurt.

Maybe Spacek’s drive of Nichol into the post was cheap. I doubt it. I’ve watched it a few times, and I think if Nichol wanted to bail out on the play, he could have easily avoided the post. Nichol was ahead of Spacek, and he wasn’t being held, although his stick was tied up. Hockey is full of plays like this- two players struggling against each other, and someone gets rammed into something or someone.

The reason hockey isn’t “worse” in the fighting department than the NBA is because there a set of written and unwritten rules about it. If Nichol turned Spacek around, dropped the gloves, and went after him, then it’s a fair fight. No problem. The problem with the NBA is no one knows how to fight worth a damn, and there all this crap with players swinging wildly, refs not knowing what to do, people falling into the stands, etc. Carmelo’s punch was about as cheap as Nichol’s but he’s a little punkass. He threw the shot at an unsuspecting Collins, then ran away. Classy. Nichol at least kept going while all the Sabres piled on.

But Nichol should have gotten 25 games. It actually worse when stuff like this happens in hockey, precisely because there’s a semi-legal way for these conflicts to be resolved. If Spacek refuses to fight in that situation, then he gets hit at every possible opportunity for the rest of the game, and maybe beyond. He puts his head down in the neutral zone, and he’ll wish he fought Nichol.