Karlsson sits out against Capitals
Team’s play hasn’t fallen off without defenseman
SAN JOSE » Erik Karlsson is “getting close.” He just isn’t close enough to rejoin the Sharks lineup yet.
Karlsson missed his ninth straight game with a groin injury when the Sharks played the Washington Capitals at SAP Center on Thursday night. For details on the game, go to www.mercurynews. com/Sharks.
The Sharks defenseman skated for roughly 20 minutes after the Sharks morning practice Thursday morning, practicing cuts, hard stops and a variety of turns.
The decision to keep Karlsson off the ice for another game isn’t entirely surprising.
Karlsson just returned to practice on Wednesday, his first full skate with the team since Jan. 14. By skipping Thursday’s game, Karlsson is receiving additional time to recover from the injury while getting re-acclimated to the ice before he gets thrown back into the fire of NHL action.
Regardless, head coach Pete DeBoer is convinced that Karlsson will get caught up to speed quickly once he rejoins the lineup.
“We’ve purposefully been extra cautious here to make sure that there’s no setbacks,” the Sharks coach said. “As a result, when he jumps back in, he’s going to be good to go. A player at that level doesn’t need a lot of time.”
The Sharks performance in Karlsson’s absence also gives the coaching staff the luxury of patience when it comes to setting a timetable for his return. The Sharks entered the night riding a six-game winning streak; they’re 7-2-1 on the season without Karlsson.
• Unless the Sharks swing a deal before the Feb. 25 trade deadline, Lukas Radil should be a fixture on the team’s fourth line down the stretch.
DeBoer provided some insight on why Radil served as a healthy scratch in three straight games during the Sharks Western Canadian road swing last week. It certainly wasn’t a condemnation of the 28-year-old rookie’s game.
“We wanted to get a look at Dylan Gambrell. He deserved a couple of games,” the Sharks coach said.
Let’s translate: the Sharks benched Radil because they needed to test Gambrell at the NHL level against playoff- caliber competition. In doing so, they received an opportunity to gauge whether Gambrell could potentially serve as the team’s fourth line center or move up to play on Joe Thornton’s right wing if Kevin Labanc’s game takes another dive.
The audition also allowed the Sharks to showcase Gambrell as a potential trade asset in the event that they decide to trade for a fourth line center or third line wingman before the deadline.
At this point, it seems unlikely that Gambrell will play a major role down the stretch unless the Sharks suffer an injury at forward. DeBoer tends to lean on experience as the winter turns into spring, so it’s hard to envision that he’ll experiment with a player who’s suited up for just eight NHL games at fourth line center even though Gambrell acquitted himself well in his audition.
Barring a deadline trade, the Sharks coach will likely stick with Radil, Barclay Goodrow and Melker Karlsson on his bottom line, a combination that gives him the blend of size, skill and responsibility that he wants.
Gambrell will serve as trade bait until the deadline, and if he sticks around, he’ll give the Sharks a quality-insurance policy against an injury or a slump from Labanc down the stretch.
“You’re splitting hairs when you’re making decisions with those guys,” DeBoer said, referring to Radil and Gambrell. “We like both of those guys.”
•The Sharks are hoping that Thursday’s rematch with the Capitals was less of an All-Star Game and more of a playoff game.
When the Sharks last met up with the Stanley Cup champions in the final game before All- Star Weekend, the teams played a game of river shinny, combining for 13 goals, including a tying mark from Evander Kane with less than a second to play in regulation and a winner from Tomas Hertl in overtime.
After the win, which kicked off the Sharks’ current six-game winning streak, DeBoer called the bout an “East Coast version of the All- Star Game.” The real game was played in San Jose four days later.
“That was a road hockey game,” the Sharks coach said. “Not atypical going into a break for teams to play or see games like that. But we’ve got to fix some things. We can’t have a track meet with this team and give them the type of time and space we gave them in Washington.”
That said, the game proved to be a rallying moment for a Sharks team that was searching for an identity after losing back-to-back games without Karlsson. Despite the loose defense, the Sharks clawed back from two twogoal deficits, erasing a 5-3 lead in the final 10:02 of the third.
“The last game before the break and we’re down a couple of goals in the third period on the road, it would have been easy for us to pack it in,” Logan Couture said. “But we found a way.”