Playoff hopes dashed, but a clearer identity
The Sharks just finished the most gut-wrenching week of their season.
The Sharks began the week with three straight one-goal losses, two of which came after they failed to hold third-period leads. Their fourth straight loss came Saturday against the St. Louis Blues, as the Sharks and Patrick Marleau were given a rare faceoff violation penalty in the third period of a tie game.
The Blues scored on the ensuing power play and added two more goals later in the period to hand the Sharks a 5-2 loss, leaving coach Bob Boughner
and his players fuming.
“Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous,” Boughner said Saturday. “I think everybody in the rink — their team, our team, the other linesman, the refs — I think everybody was shocked. It was a brutal, brutal call that in my mind cost us. It turned the whole game around.”
The 0-3-1 week effectively ended any chance the Sharks had of making the playoffs this season as they enter Monday 11 points back of fourth-place St. Louis in the West Division. The Sharks face the Los Angeles Kings today and Wednesday.
In terms of fixing the culture and finding an identity, the Sharks (11-144) feel they have made strides.
Their identity is clearer now than it was at the start of the season. They’re a forechecking team; one that wants to create scoring chances off turnovers in the offensive zone. When the opportunity to make a play at the blue line isn’t there, the Sharks have been better at chipping it in and trying to outwork the opposition’s defense to regain control below the dots. Although the Sharks haven’t
been able to finish enough around the net, they are one of the better teams in the NHL at creating chances off their forecheck.
“If you look at our last four or five weeks of work, I think you have to be pretty satisfied from a coaching perspective,” Boughner said Saturday morning. “We made some changes and made some adjustments afterourstarttotrytoplayto more to our strengths, and I think we have found that identity.”
The Sharks feel they’ve tightened things up at the defensive end, but their goaltending has taken a bigger step forward of late.
In seven games in March, Devan Dubnyk is 2-4-1 with a .907 save percentage, and in five games, Martin Jones is 2-1-1 with a .923 save percentage. Both goalies’ save percentages were below .895 for the first 18 games of the season.
In 11 games this month, the Sharks are 18th in the NHL in goals against per game (2.82). In 10 games in February, the Sharks were 31st and last in the league, allowing 3.90 goals per game.
In terms of culture, the biggest gains have been made in the last few weeks.
More players are buying into what Boughner and the Sharks’ coaching staff have been preaching. They’re standing up for one another more than they were at the start of the season, coming together when they’ve been faced with adversity instead of going their own ways like last season.
This was the foundation the Sharks needed to establish before they could take the next step as a team.
Boughner and his staff talked about these things when the team gathered for training camp in Scottsdale, Ariz. almost three months ago.
There were two messages, Boughner said. One was, “what kind of team we want to be off the ice. How we wanted to act with each other, how we wanted to uphold the code that we’ve brought in. The other part of it was: here’s our structure, here’s our tech pack and here’s how we’re going to play, and just working that every day without preseason games.
“It was almost like the first 10 games were our preseason. Things we liked we kept, there’s a couple of things that we tweaked and we identified areas that we needed to be better at analytically, and we brought those into our system. We really worked it out with practice and those next 10 games and we’re sitting here today as a much better team.”
The Sharks appear to have found two rookies that will help them going forward in John Leonard and Nikolai Knyzhov. Both have played significant roles this season, with Leonard in the team’s middle-six forward group and Knyzhov presently on the Sharks’ second defense pair with Erik Karlsson.
It’s fair to wonder, though, who else is coming in terms of the team’s prospect pool.
Ryan Merkley is playing big minutes with the Barracuda right now, but he did not come close to making the Sharks roster out of training camp as Boughner felt he still had a lot of work to do in the defensive end. Noah Gregor is back in the AHL after he started the season with the Sharks. Joachim Blichfeld has played two NHL games this year but wasn’t able to stick. Same with Sasha Chmelevski.
Goalies Alexei Melnichuk and Josef Korenar could play with the Sharks later this season, depending on whether Dubnyk is traded by the April 12 deadline.
But some of the Sharks’ other top prospects — forwards Thomas Bordeleau and Ozzy Wiesblatt and defenseman Artemi Kniazev — are at least two or three years away from making an impact in the NHL.
There is also the issue of salary cap space for next season, and how much flexibility general manager Doug Wilson will have in terms of adding free agents or making trades to upgrade the roster.
In the meantime, Boughner, his staff, and his team are trying to control what they can. They haven’t given up on making the playoffs, but even if they don’t make the postseason, they feel the steps they’re taking will help them reach that goal.
“It’s a team that maybe is not ready to attempt for a Stanley Cup, but it’s a team that’s getting better by the week,” Boughner said. “It’s a team that’s building on its culture. We’re a hard team to play against. I think if you asked anybody around the league and our side and we’re a hard team to play against right now, and that’s what we need.”