We are now 6 days into the playoffs, and all of the series have played three games so far. I’ve only had the opportunity to see a few of them, though I’ve watched a lot of games. After the disconcerting 4-0 loss in Game 1, the Sharks seemed to have regained their offensive form, winning games 2 and 3 in pretty decisive fashion. Game 4 tonight in SJ is absolutely key. If the Sharks lose game 4, then game 5 is in Nashville, and we could be looking at game 6 down 3-2. We’ll be in the driver’s seat if we win tonight.

As for the other series, I sure know how to pick ’em. If the current leaders in all the series go on to win, I’ll be 2-6. All three of my underdog picks are losing (the Sharks don’t count as an underdog), and there are two huge upsets in the works in Edmonton and Montreal. Carolina, while not playing well, managed to win last night, so they could pull it out. Same with Detroit, but the Oilers have a history of being giant killers.

New prediction- Joe Thornton will have 2 points or more tonight.

Like the West, I’m picking two lower seeds to advance in the Easter Conference first round. Here are my thoughts:

Buffalo vs. Philadelphia – For some reason, the Flyers find a way to win the first round, then lose later. I’m predicting that trend will continue. I must say that this is the series that I’m least informed about- I have only seen Philly play a few times this season, and maybe Buffalo never. It could be that bias that’s causing me to pick against the Sabres- a team with balanced scoring but no stars. Afinogenov and Kotalik are good, but Forsberg and Gagne are better. If Forsberg gets hurt and misses a lot of time, I can see the Flyers losing this series. My prediction is that Forsberg stays intact for this round, and the Flyers advance.

New Jersey vs. New York (Rangers) – New York went on a horrible slide to end the season, and the Devils did just the opposite, winning 11 in a row. Martin Brodeur, as always, is the key to the Devils’ success. The Devils still play their brand of shutdown hockey, but their D isn’t as strong as past years, with Niedermayer and Stevens gone. I think the Rangers’ O will overcome the Devils’ D, with Jagr, Prucha, and Nylander all scoring. The Devils will need random goals from random players. Brian Gionta has 48 this year (where did he come from??), but after Scott Gomez, the scoring gets pretty scarce. No other Devil has over 20. When it comes down to it, I think the Rangers will have a better shot of shutting down Gionta than the Devils have of shutting down Jagr. This is a HUGE underdog pick, I think the Devils are -240 in Vegas.

Carolina vs. Montreal – Everyone is talking about the loss of Eric Cole, and it does hurt Carolina, but not as much as everyone thinks. I think Montreal may be able to steal a game or maybe two, but the ‘Canes are too strong. They have four good centers in Brind’Amour, Staal, Recchi and Weight (Weight is playing the wing now), and plenty of D. Add to that a breakout year in goal for Martin Gerber and the best faceoff man in hockey (Brind’Amour), and you’ve got a team that is in a position to win the Cup. Les Habitants are similar in makeup to Carolina, but just not as good. Cristobal Huet has really come on late in the season, but neither him nor David Aebischer are playoff tested. I just don’t think the Canadians can keep up.

Ottawa vs. Tampa Bay – Scott Burnside in ESPN has picked the Lightning to upset the Sens, but I don’t think he could be more wrong. Ottawa has had a terrible reputation for coming into the playoffs as a high seed, and folding in the first round. Everyone in town will be intent on not taking the 1-8 matchup lightly. The Senators will come out fast and hard, and Tampa Bay, while having one of the better defensive corps in the East, do not have the goaltending. They hoped that John Grahame would be the obvious #1, but they’ve ended up platooning him with Sean Burke. I see some big games in this series from the top line. Even if Kubina and Sydor can shut down the best line in hockey (Alfredsson, Heatley, and Spezza), Ottawa can hurt you with Havlat, Smolinski, and Schaefer. If Hasek doesn’t make it back, I can see the Senators being vulnerable in later rounds, but not in the first round.

Can’t wait for the first games tonight!

Actually, the matchups are set in both conferences, but I’m only going over the West today. I might be doing a little devil’s advocate work here, and pick some underdogs. Unlike ESPN, which makes for some pretty boring articles. Ok, they picked the Sharks, but as I talked about before, that’s hardly going out on a limb.

Nashville vs. San Jose – as a Sharks fan it’s tough to accurately handicap this series, so I have to go with the Sharks. They have the two hottest players in the league, against a disciplined team with a scrub goalie and several injuries. And their offense isn’t that great either. Pop quiz- who has more points- Patrick Marleau or Paul Kariya? Hint: it’s not Kariya. The bad news for the Preds is that Marleau isn’t even on the top line. Don’t get me wrong, the Preds will be a pain in the ass to play against, with Brendan Witt, Kimmo Timmonen and co. on the blue line. But I think our relatively inexperienced blue line coupled with the best goaltending duo in the NHL will be able to solve their offense. And no one in the league right now can stop Thornton and Cheechoo.

Calgary vs. Anaheim – This entire series hinges on one player – Mikka Kiprusoff. If the Kipper can look like he did in the 2003-2004 playoffs (and the regular season this year), the Flames will win. If he stumbles just a bit, the Ducks will steal some games, and the series will be on. My guess is that the complete lack of Calgary scoring will bite them bad, and the Ducks will be able to squeak at least one game out of the first two in Calgary. Anaheim is also a very good team at home, and I could see the series going back to Calgary for game 6 with the Ducks up 3-1. The Ducks’ top line of Selanne, McDonald and Kunitz is very good, and it’s not all Selanne. Another pop quiz: who has more goals- Andy McDonald or Marleau? Ok, that’s cheap – they’re tied with 34. I’m going with my gut on this one and picking the Ducks. It won’t be a cakewalk by any means; it’s going to go at least 6 games, and if the Ducks win, they’ll be very beat-up for the conference semis. But I’m still going to be a man and pick Anaheim.

Dallas vs. Colorado – As much as I want to pick Colorado, I can’t. The loss of Forsberg, the lack of consistent scoring from Tanguay and Hejduk, and a defensive corps of castoffs like Bob Bougner and Patrice Brisebois adds up to too many mistakes against a solid Stars team. Jason Arnott has been a force, Mike Modano, while rickety, still has some of the best moves in the NHL, and Sergei Zubov has got to be a Norris finalist. If Colorado gets another Conn Smythe performance out of Jose Theodore they might have a shot, but that’s a big if considering Theodore hasn’t had any quality minutes in months. I doubt this series will even go 6.

Detroit vs. Edmonton – You can say what you want about Manny Legace playoff experience, but the whole Jussi Markkanen-Dwayne Roloson goalie tandem isn’t exactly taking the league by storm. Detroit’s special teams play just too good, and they don’t have any holes other than general age. Without any explosive stars on the Oilers, they don’t have much of a chance. This could easily be a sweep.

Feel free to blast me in the comments section, and I’ll be back later this week to go over the Eastern Conference.

I’m a lazy ass. Suffering a little blog burnout here. Doug especially has been really busy. Ok, done with excuses. Now it’s time to talk about how bad I screwed up. In the last post, I basically said that the Sharks were done, and would need to go on a crazy tear to make it. I was right about the latter, but wrong about the former. The Sharks have gone 12-3-2 since then, for 26 out of a possible 34 points. They now have 97 points, and are guaranteed at least the 7th spot. They eliminated Vancouver last night, which was particularly sweet. Joe Thornton has had 7 points in the last two games, and is now tied with Jaromir Jagr for the NHL points lead.

What a run! If we win the next two games, we’ll clinch the 5th seed, which means we get to play the Predators. Talk about Christmas coming early this year- their all-world goalie, Tomas Vokoun, went out last week with some weird blood disease, and won’t be coming back this season. So the Preds will be playing Chris Mason, a 29-year-old journeyman with only 41 games of NHL experience. The old saw says that you win in the playoffs with hot goaltending (see JS Giguere in 2003) and I find it very difficult to believe that Mason will pull it together. The difference between playing Nashville and Calgary will be night and day. Kiprusoff is a Hart and Vezina candidate this year; the Flames could ride him all the way, the way they almost did in 2004. I think that could be a tougher matchup than even Detroit in the first round. If you make it past Detroit, which would be very difficult, you won’t be nearly as banged up as making it past Calgary.

Doug and I got playoff tix, so look for a playoff preview once the seedings are set, and game analysis once the games start. I’m so excited! We’re going to Fan Appreciation night on Monday too, so hopefully we’ll win some free stuff.

The season is 75% over, and the Sharks currently have 71 points, 5 out of a playoff spot. San Jose has won their last three games, and have three more home games to go before a 5 game road trip. Here’s my current status report, done in the same style as my half-season report:

Offense: The Sharks have scored 197 goals, 9th in the West. Their top line still scores very consistently (Thornton is the NHL points leader right now, and Cheechoo had his 4th hat trick of the season on Monday night). The problem is, the second and third lines aren’t scoring as much as I would hope. I predicted that Marleau would score more, and he has (29 goals, his career high). But the other young players that I thought would flourish against 2nd and 3rd line D have come up short. Michalek has only 13 goals. Goc has 15 points, and is -12. I think the top line has as much firepower as any other in the NHL, but if they hit a cold streak, I’ve seen zero evidence that other players will pick up the slack.

Defense: Still spotty. I expected the Sharks to be in the hunt for a veteran defenseman at the deadline, but no big moves happened. Hannan has gotten his +/- up to a -3, which is quite an accomplishment given where he was earlier in the year. Erhoff looks solid, Murray hits like a freight train, but the jury’s out on Gorges and Davison. On Monday, the Sharks gave up a goal twice on the shift following a Sharks goal. Everyone knows that a successful shift after you score is critical to keep the momentum, and the Sharks couldn’t keep it. On the positive side, the Sharks have looked horrible with 1-goal leads late in the game, and this time, they kept it without too much scrambling.

Special Teams: Both the PP and PK have improved since midseason- both are middle of the pack. I think I saw a stat a few weeks ago that said that the Sharks are over 20% on the PP since the Thornton trade. It’s amazing watching the D clear out when Joe has the puck on the half boards- they know how dangerous his passing is. I which he would shoot a touch more from that spot though.

Goaltending: I was very surprised to see the Sharks re-sign both Toskala and Nabokov, and not trade either. That being said, Toskala has clearly been the better goalie since the halfway point. It’s a good feeling knowing you have two quality goalies for the playoff run, but I wonder if there will be a controversy next season if Toskala continues to play well. Nabby had a great Olympics and will want to be the starter.

Looking Forward: The Sharks are picking up speed at the right time, but their margin for error is now very small. With LA, Vancouver, and Edmonton struggling, the Sharks must win every game against inferior opposition. The last two and a half weeks of the season are absolutely brutal- 10 games in 17 days in April. If I had to choose right now, I would say that the Sharks will not make the playoffs. But as a fan, I think of all the opportunities they have this month. if SJ can beat STL twice, and win the Chicago, Columbus, and Phoenix games, that will put us at 81 points with 10 games to go. If the Sharks can get 11 more points in April, I think they will make the playoffs. Only two of the games in April are against teams not in the top 8 (and one is against the Ducks, who are ahead of us), so that’s actually a pretty tall order.

Trading Note: I’m glad Niko Dimitrakos is gone, and I don’t really care that much about the Ville Niemonen pickup. While it would have been nice for Doug Wilson to get another D man, I’m glad he didn’t trade away high draft picks or young players to get a 3-month rental. There’s plenty of cap room, so I’m hoping for some free agent fireworks in the off season.

My friend Jeremy sent out an email recently where all NHL teams with PP% + PK% was over 100. His idea was that teams with PP+PK>100 will make the playoffs. Unfortunately, that list has a couple of weird teams in it. Minnesota is 106. Boston and Phoenix are over 99. And LA is third from the bottom, with 94.1. I tried to put the table in here, but I can’t get blogger to put it in right. If I put in the html, it’s looks like crap. I uploaded a gif of the table from Excel, but it shrinks it to nothing. If you want the data, email me.

This has all of those stats , plus a few more. The bottom line is how each column correlates to each of the states. 1 means a perfect correlation, 0 means no correlation. Wins has an almost perfect correlation to the number of points a teams has (duh!), and the number of games played has almost no correlation to the number of points (also duh). But lets look at the other stats. Wins and losses mean points, so seeing that those strongly correlate isn’t really suprising or useful either. But let’s look at PP%, PK%, and PP+PK. PP% correlates stronger than PK% to the number of points a team has, so that implies that it’s better to have a good power play than a good kill. But PP+PK has a higher correlation still. Also, if you rank the teams by their PP and PK, and have a rank for the best PP+PK, that’s an even better correlator than strictly PP%+PK% (but very close). Even though there are some outlier team in the PP+PK stat, it’s still the best correlator to points.

The rightmost column is a little experiement of mine called Pythagorean Points. Rob Neyer and others have used the Pythagorean theorem for years to try and predict the number of wins and losses a baseball team has based on their run scored and runs allowed. This is a similar thing that I modified to try and apply it to hockey. Ties make it hard. I calculated the average number of points a teams scores in each game (1.11), then times that by two, then that by the pythangorean percentage. It’s good to see which teams have been “lucky” this season. It stands to reason that if you score 200 goals and give up 200, your winning percentage should be about .500. If it’s not, that means you’ve been somewhat lucky. Philly is a good example. Scored 213, given up 212, and are 35-20-10. Ottawa is somewhat unlucky. They’ve scored 252, only given up 152, and have 91 points. According to my results, on average a team with that GF/GA ration should have over 100 points already.

Anyway, something to think about and comment on.

5-2 win over the Oilers? Sharks pull away in the third period instead of collapse? Sharks played physical hockey and bullied the finesse style Oilers?

Sounds like a dream, right? No Sharks fans – the boys had a new look tonight and it paid off as we pulled back to six points out of the final playoff spot. The Sharks sent out a physical line up with the return of Scott Parker, rookie Steve Bernier and new Finnish bruiser Ville Nimenen. Doug Wilson managed to get a third round draft pick for Dimitrakos – which means he basically swapped Niko for Nimenen, a deal I’d make any day in my sleep. Niko hadn’t scored a goal since December 2nd – yes, that’s right, December 2nd!! Mark Smith was the roster spot casualty tonight – the only notable healthy scratch. He could return if McCauley and Goc continue to sputter – although they had some jump playing along side Mr. Parker.

It was nice to see Doug Wilson not push the panic button and over pay for some mediocre deadline rental like Recchi or Mark Parrish. The Oilers gave up too much for Samsanov and Roloson laid a major egg in his first start for Edmonton. They gave up a first round pick for a guy who was 6-17-1 this year? Looks like Edmonton might have screwed the pooch here…

Nashville in town on Saturday. Huge game for the Sharkies. We have a huge homestand and if the boys can take four out of five – we’ll be right back in this thing. Can they play like they did tonight? I think so.

There are two Olympic sports I actually get excited about- biathalon and curling. I watched a 12.5km biathalon, and it was very exciting; I’m not kidding. The lead changed hands a bunch of times because if you miss shots you have to ski around a little penalty oval, which allows other people to catch you. If you choke and miss a bunch of shots, you’re pretty screwed. This particular race had a veteran from Norway take the lead after the last shooting stage despite starting 14th. A much younger guy from France caught him in the last 100m sprint. Great stuff.

And I like curling because it’s completely unlike any other Olympic sport- it has a very physical component, but is much more about strategy. Plus it has a whole world of jargon that is completely impenetrable to the average viewer. I spent the first hour or two just trying to figure out what the hell the announcers are saying.

I was reading Tom Benjamin’s blog, and he presented a definition of what a sport really is. I think it’s a good question, because when you think about it, most Olympic “sports” aren’t really sports.

My big thing is that a sport has to have an objective result. That is, using scientific or other measurement, the winner is determined. Tom calls it an “unambiguous result”. That means all the judging events are not sports. Figure skating, gymnastics, snowboarding, ballroom dancing- not sports. I’m not saying they aren’t worthwhile pursuits, or that they don’t take an incredible amount of skill and ability. I’m saying that when the results of the competition are determined by a judge, it ain’t a sport any more- it’s a pageant.

A sport also has to have generally physically fit or strong participants. Bass fishing is out. Bowling and pool are out. Poker is out. I think curling is on the edge here. I’m not saying all the participants have to necessarily be fit (see David Wells), but being in shape has to be considered a distinct advantage. You can be a fat guy with a strong right arm and still bowl 300.

Finally, the participants should break a sweat during the course of the activity, and not due to the elements or stress. Not sweating because it’s cold is the exception, so swimming, cross country skiing (although they sweat) and curling are in (barely). I think this means that auto racing is out, and maybe even golf.

I’m sure this will piss people off, because most of the sports that fail the first criterion are popular with women, but it is what it is. That’s why they should encourage sports where being nimble and light is a benefit, like rock climbing.

I didn’t post a single thing about Olympic hockey until now. Why? There’s no nice way to say it, so I’ll just come right out:

I don’t care.

Yep. Call me a unpatriotic anti-hockey moron, but it’s the truth. I watched precisely one game- the U.S. vs Slovakia, in which we lost 2-1. I don’t really see the point in NHL players playing in the Olympics. They arrive the day before the hockey games start, and leave the day after they’re done. They don’t walk in the opening or closing ceremonies. The players are pretty much guns for hire. And not even all the best players come- see Scott Niedermayer et al.

The idea that NHL players will bring more fans to the NHL didn’t work in 2002, and I’d be even more surprised if it worked this year, considering the Olympics got a ratings beatdown by both American Idol and Desperate Housewives.

And because they are guns for hire, the teams don’t have any flow, any continuity of play. Certain players seem to click because they play with each other in the NHL, or on past Olympic or World Cup teams, but for the most part the play is disjointed and difficult to watch. Even after watching one period of the U.S. game, I was frustrated. You see great players like Mike Modano skating around in their own little hockey system, a different system than all the other players’. After seeing that, I still thought Canada would win gold, but I could see how they could be beaten- simply by playing a team that’s all on the same page. And sure enough, they got shut out twice and didn’t medal.

Bring back the true amateur players, and coach ’em up for a few months. Maybe they won’t be the best players in the world, but at least they’ll have a vague idea as to what the other guys on the ice are trying to do. Sure, I won’t have heard of many of them, but how many non hockey fans could name more than 2 Olympians this year?

Switzerland? Finland? Slovakia? Has the world gone crazy? What happened to the Olympic powers, you may ask? Don’t worry…they’re going to show up starting tomorrow. Here’s a preview of the first round match-ups.

FINLAND vs. USA
Hmmm…I’m not sure what to make of this one. The way Finland has played stingy defense combined with the USA’s tendency to not score goals could spell doom for an upset – but I guarantee that Team Stars and Stripes is happier to see Finland than Canada in this spot. Color me crazy – but I smell an upset. USA 4 FINLAND 3

SWEDEN vs. SWITZERLAND
Three words to discribe the Swiss run to Gold. IT IS OVER. This game isn’t even worth breaking down. After two ties to Germany and Italy – Switzerland blew its load early. SWEDEN 5 SWITZERLAND 1

CANADA vs. RUSSIA
Oh man. I had picked this to be the Gold Medal game and in a way, I still think it’s true. Whoever wins this game could march all the way to gold. All signs point to Russia winning a wild one here – Nabby has been hot, Brodeur is banged up, Canada has been pushed around and the power play has been mortal. But….I think Team Canada will finally become interested and will not allow themselves to go home early. They looked bored and now with Gold on the line – they show up.
CANADA 5 RUSSIA 3

SLOVKIA vs. CZECH REPUBLIC
Great match-up. Slovakia is another team that surprised many in running the table in Round One. Will Vokoun get a chance to redeem himself or will the Czechs make a big mistake and play the rookie. I think they play the rookie….and they lose.
SLOVIA 6 CZECH REP 3

That would mean USA vs. SWEDEN and SLOVAKIA vs. CANADA in the Semis…