SJ enters midway point last place in the West
PITTSBURGH » Not once in the last 20 years have the Sharks hit the midpoint of the season in such a sorry state.
At 17-21-3, they are in last place in the Western Conference. They are 29th in the NHL in goals scored and 30th in goals allowed. Their power play, so often a source of organizational pride, is 2-for-49 over their last 20 games and entered 2020 third-last in the league at 14.3 percent.
A coaching change has done little to provide a spark. The Sharks fell to 2-5-1 under interim coach Bob Boughner with Tuesday’s 2-0 loss to the Detroit Red Wings, the worst team in the league by a wide margin.
Their 37 points at the midpoint is the lowest total since 1998-99 when they had 36. (Darryl Sutter was in his first months leading the Sharks out of the darkness of the one-season Al Sims era.) The last time it was close to this bad was in 200203, when they had 38 points at the midway point and went on to miss the playoffs. That season also included a coaching change, as the team transitioned from Sutter to Ron Wilson.
How much worse can it get now?
We’re about to find out.
The Sharks continue their five-game trip Thursday against the Pittsburgh Penguins who have won eight of their last 10. After a stop in Columbus, they play the last two Stanley Cup winners — the Washington Capitals on Sunday and the St. Louis Blues on Tuesday.
Of the Sharks’ next nine games, seven are against teams that currently hold a playoff position. The only exceptions are the two games against Columbus, which opened the new year five points out of a postseason position.
That’s what made Tuesday’s loss so tough to digest, as the Red Wings (10-28-3) were easily the most beatable opponent the Sharks
will have on this road trip.
Scoring the first goal against a fragile Wings team, which had lost six straight, probably would have gone long way Tuesday. Instead, the Sharks fell behind in the second period and were shut out for the first time this season as they couldn’t solve goalie Jonathan Bernier despite 34 shots on net.
The most disappointing part for the Sharks, though, was that they had established a blueprint for how they needed to play to have success just three days
earlier.
In their 6-1 win over the Philadelphia Flyers on Saturday, the Sharks were the more physical team, played with urgency and were direct in getting shots to the net.
It happened only in bits and pieces against the Wings.
They did not have a good start, managing only one shot on net through nearly the first seven minutes of the first period. When they did play in the Wings’ zone, there was a lot of one-anddone, a recurring theme
for a team that scored two goals or fewer in 10 of 13 games in December.
Boughner tweaked his lines for the third period, moving Stefan Noesen up to play with Logan Couture and Tomas Hertl, Kevin Labanc down with Joe Thornton and Marcus Sorensen and Patrick Marleau to the fourth line with Antti Suomela and Joel Kellman.
The Sharks outshot the Wings 14-3 in the third, not including Filip Hronek’s empty-net goal with 49 seconds left.
“You try not to get frustrated,
and you say the right things on the bench,” Boughner said. “Even going into the third period, we felt pretty good with where we were at. We weren’t giving up a lot, and we said ‘win a period, win a game.’”
The Sharks have been getting better goaltending of late. Since Dec. 12, Boughner’s first game as interim coach, Jones, who stopped 21 of 22 shots, has a .904 save percentage in four games. Aaron Dell has a .915 save percentage in four games.
That only goes so far,
though, considering how hard it has been all season to create offense. As they stumbled to a 2-9-2 through December, the Sharks managed just 27 goals, tied for fewest in the NHL with — you guessed it — Detroit.
“We didn’t get traffic in front of the net and make things hard on their goaltender,” said Couture, who added that goalie Martin Jones. “was great and we did some nice things on the penalty kill, but we’ve got to be better offensively if we are going to win games.”