San Jose defenseman will miss next game
Sharks defenseman Marc-Edouard Vlasic will miss Tuesday’s game with the Anaheim Ducks with an injury.
San Jose Sharks defenseman Marc-Edouard Vlasic will miss Tuesday’s game with the Anaheim Ducks with an upper-body injury and will likely be unavailable for the rest of the week, coach Bob Boughner said.
Vlasic was hurt in the first period of Saturday’s game with the Los Angeles Kings, with Boughner saying an awkward fall aggravated a prior injury. Vlasic did not play the final two periods of what became a 3-2 Sharks win, their fourth straight. Boughner said it was not a head injury.
Vlasic, 34, had appeared in all 37 Sharks games this season, is one of the team’s leading penalty killers, and was averaging just over 18 minutes of ice time per game before Saturday.
After Tuesday, the Sharks host the Los Angeles Kings on Friday and Saturday.
Vlasic played much of the first half of this season — and has spent almost all of his 15year NHL career — as a topfour defenseman. But Vlasic was moved to the third pair with Radim Simek earlier this season and the two have played together for most of the last five weeks.
“It is a tough loss because I thought that (Vlasic’s) game is coming and it’s better now than it was a month ago,” Boughner said. “I liked our unit of six. Everybody was sort of finding
chemistry together and feeding off each other. So, it’s another opportunity for someone else.”
In Vlasic’s place, Boughner said he will either dress Fredrik Claesson or Christian Jaros, both former Ottawa Senators. Claesson played four games for the Sharks in February when both Erik Karlsson and Simek were injured, but Boughner said he is leaning toward dressing Jaros, a right-shot defenseman who could pair more easily with the left-shot Simek.
The 6-foot-4, 220-pound Jaros, acquired in January from the Senators for Jack Kopacka and San Jose’s own seventh-round selection in the 2022 draft, has three assists in 11 games with the Barracuda this season.
Jaros, who turned 25 on Friday, spent time on the Sharks’ active roster last week and has played in 76 NHL games in his career, all with Ottawa.
Boughner got a scouting report from Senators coach D.J. Smith after Jaros was acquired, and said he was looking forward to seeing what Jaros can do at the NHL level at this stage of his career.
Jaros’ first NHL game came in Oct. 2017 when he was 21, playing twice for the Senators in his first year of North American professional hockey after he arrived from the Swedish Hockey League. His last NHL game came in March of last year.
“Maybe a guy that was rushed in a little too young. He played in the NHL right away as a young guy,” Boughner said. “A ton of ability, good skater, big and strong with a good shot. It’s just a guy that maybe came over and didn’t get a chance to find his game at the American League level enough.”