What To Make Of These San Jose Sharks?
Follow Me @SharkCircle
In recent years, the San Jose Sharks have been one of the hardest teams in hockey to figure out and pin down. At times when you watch them play, they somehow appear to be both underachieving and overachieving at the same time. Many fans and hockey pundits alike are still trying to figure out which it is. Truth be told, it’s probably both. That doesn’t make sense, you say? Welcome to Sharks hockey. It’s just hard to know what to make of the Sharks, which leads to the same questions every year. How good are these Sharks, really? How should we feel about them? CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING FULL POST
SHARK CIRCLE 
Inverse fandom 5:43 pm on March 31, 2012 Permalink |
I like your liberal use of paragraphs, LOL. Seriously you have a great blog with stacks of facts, figures and figurin. Yes Captain Crosscheck here, and I would like to continue the discourse we began a few weeks ago. You obviously watch a ton of hockey, are knowledgeable and prolific. As a fan since the beginning I feel I’m qualified to say that they don’t have what it takes to win this year. I am NOT a basher, just pragmatic. I write what I see and with the parity in our division we don’t have the extra oomph to win the division or if we get in as a seven or eight we go nowhere. Blind loyalty is nice but doesn’t work for me. After watching the NO POINT roadtrip I can see the flaws even better. We got outworked against Phoenix after the first and seemed to give up and pout for the rest of the game. Against the Ducks, Hiller was in our heads circa 2009. How do we fix this talented but flawed team? I await your learned response…
LikeLike
SharkCircle 4:16 am on April 7, 2012 Permalink |
Hey, sorry it took awhile to respond to your comment. Captain Crosscheck? Have you commented here before or are you from twitter? I’ve been tweeting with a lot of people and I don’t always look at the name, I just hit reply, so that’s probably just why I’m blanking on it.
Haha yeah, I know the blogs go long sometimes. It’s just my style of, not necessarily writing, but when it comes to hockey, I just think about it in a way where every idea I’m talking about usually has “sub-ideas” attached to it, and I’m talking about a lot of related ideas all at once. So it’s difficult to write about ideas like that in clean, simple paragraphs when the ideas aren’t simple. I’m trying to look at things from all angles and give readers a full-pictured analysis, and sometimes that means long blogs. I believe the people reading my site are more hardcore hockey fans who want that type of thing than casual fans, although I welcome everybody and try to explain things for everyone.
As for your opinion, I agree to the extent that the Sharks are not the best team in the NHL, or their conference, or really even second best. I think if they play fair games against some of these teams, they will lose. But if it’s like the Detroit series two years ago, where the Sharks got like fifty powerplays per game, they have a good enough powerplay that if the referees decide to win the game for them, it will work more often than not.
I just never count out the Sharks anymore because they’re such a weird team. Clearly they’re not the best team at this whole “playing hockey” thing, but there are these games where they are winning every single faceoff, getting every single powerplay, and just sort of manipulating the game, if you know what I mean, to tilt the outcome in their favor. And if I were a Canucks fan or Blues fan or Blackhawks fan or Red Wings fan, whoever the Sharks are about to play here, that’s what would worry me the most about this team. What if they dive a lot, and the referees allow them and reward them? What if they draw all the powerplays? What if they win 65% of the faceoffs for the series? These are huge advantages that can allow even an inferior team to win the series.
LikeLike