Takes and trash talk from both ALL sides of the NHL's most obscure PATHETIC* rivalry

* Thanks, Kevin Lowe!

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Sharks/Preds thoughts

Some random thoughts from last night's game:

-Despite his history with Joe Thornton, Bill Guerin looked a little uncomfortable out there. Not sure if that was the switch to left wing or just the travel/acclimation involved with getting traded.

-The Sharks have a surplus of #3/4 defensemen. In fact, basically all of their defensemen are either #3/4 guys (McLaren, Hannan, Rivet, Ehrhoff, Carle, Vlasic) or AHLers (Davison, Murray). When two of those guys are out, that causes a problem when you're trying to defend a power play with Peter Forsberg and Paul Kariya. The Predators goals were essentially caused by the Sharks defense not being able to handle movement in front.

-Speaking of the Preds power play, they certainly had better puck movement than the Sharks did last night. Forsberg looks like he's trying to do too much but he still fired off some nifty passes.

-At the tank last night, Evgeni Nabokov was audibly booed at the introduction. After his big save at the end of OT, the NAB-BY chants were rocking the whole arena.

-I REALLY don't like having a power play with Davison/Murray out there. I like it even less when they play on the PK.

-It's hard to judge the result of last night since the Sharks owned the first, the Preds owned the second, and the middle period was blah. I imagine things would be quite different with Patrick Marleau, Hannan, and Rivet in the lineup, so let's not use this as a measuring stick just yet.

-When Marleau comes back into the lineup, I'd be ok with tinkering the lines to try and get three scoring units:

Bell or Clowe/Thornton/Cheechoo
Grier/Marleau/Michalek
Bernier/Pavelski/Guerin

This isn't to single out any player as being good or bad, just an idea to create even more offensive depth.

2 comments:

Earl Sleek said...

Heh, I watched some of that last night, too. Just a couple comments:

Despite his history with Joe Thornton, Bill Guerin looked a little uncomfortable out there.

You know, I was thinking back on their time together in Boston, and I don't particularly recall that they spent that much time on the same line (maybe on PPs). Wasn't it always the GAS line (Guerin-Allison-Samsonov), while Thornton centered Murray and some lucky schmuck? I might be wrong, but that's my recollection.

My only other real comment was that even though they scored twice, I thought SJ's PP unit looked a little lost without Marleau (kind of like Anaheim's PP did without Scotty N. for a few games). Really, I'm just talking about gaining entry into the zone, but I guess when one guy is your main "puck carrier", when he's out of the lineup the rest of the guys aren't as sure how to get the puck down the ice.

Sharks with Marleau probably had last night's game won. Thanks for missing, Patty. :)

Mike said...

-The Sharks have a surplus of #3/4 defensemen. In fact, basically all of their defensemen are either #3/4 guys...

I like your posts Mike, but I have to take issue with this. I think you're a little misled by the surplus of superstar defensemen in the West (Lidstrom, Jovo, Pronger, Niedermayer, Zubov). Can you honestly name the 60 NHL defensemen that are better than McLaren, Carle, Hannan, and Ehrhoff, being legit #1/#2s? They are not quite in the same tier as the stars I named above, but Hannan and McLaren would be on top pairings on many teams in the league. I wouldn't say the same thing about Carle and Ehrhoff yet because of their age.