FreshIce

"Fresh Ice in Teal Town -- San Jose Sharks talk"

Teal Town, CA • United States • 51 Years Old • Male

Big D and Music City Pile the Hurt on the Sharks

After the last two games – giving up 13 goals while scoring only a couple – there’s really not much to say about the Sharks right now. I half-joked about bringing the Barracuda up en masse in my last post, but now I say, what can it hurt?

I’ll be posting a piece on Marc Edouard Vlasic soon but I’m going to have to pre-empt myself by suggesting that if the Sharks are going to play like this, DeBoer might as well prioritize his rest now since he’s the team’s most critical player, as the 2014 playoffs demonstrated.

And as for the rest of the roster -- Marcus Sorensen, Timo Meier, Barclay Goodrow, Daniel O’Regan, Kevin Labanc, Ryan Carpenter, Tim Heed, and John McCarthy for starters would at least bring a passion and grit that is beyond sorely needed. Heck, maybe that would even awaken some interest among this veteran crew.

I don’t know where else you go at this point if you’re the Sharks’ coaching staff. Because here’s the harsh reality: it doesn’t necessarily matter if you’re hot, holding steady, or even a bit under .500 down the stretch, but history has shown that teams virtually never win by going in ice cold, or even chilly.

Tonight’s game in Nashville brought more humiliation in a string of debacles, and the previous game – a 2nd stop in “Big ‘D’” on the same road trip – spelled double-trouble from early on and double the shame of their visit a couple days earlier.

The take-away from this stretch of six losses is probably to raise the issue nobody wants to consider: we’ve seen teams in the past – the Ottawa Senators of 2007, the Buffalo Sabres of 1999, to name a couple – get better, finally making the Cup Final, only to drop back into obscurity as if it took all they had. And so we’re left to wonder, did the Sharks’ 2016 run drain the tank, leaving this veteran crew toothless and beached for the foreseeable future?

Thanks for reading and don’t trip over the blue line.

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