What do the Sharks loss to the Wings and the victory against the Canucks have in common?

Pop Quiz: what do the sharks loss to the wings, and last night’s victory against the Canucks have in common?

The losing team in both cases had back to back games with travel involved.

Does the fact that the Canucks came out with dead legs and were blown out of the building in the first five minutes mean anything in the long run?

Not really. And really, the same can be said about the Wings game. the media turned it into a big “benchmark” game, because, well, they have to have things to talk about, but in reality, the series between detroit and san jose is 1-1, both losing teams having played back to back with travel the night before. Doesn’t really prove much yet, other than there’s a good chance they’ll meet each other deep in the playoffs, and advantage to the team with home ice advantage (maybe).

Ditto the Canucks last night. The game started with the Sharks grabbing the puck and basically putting on about a four minute cycle exposition where the Canucks were lucky to get the puck out of the zone, much less get it to center ice and change (they really didn’t get it into the Sharks zone, much less control the puck). It ended as it seemed inevitable with a Sharks goal at 4:22.

It was clear from the start the Canucks simply didn’t have skating legs. they looked tired. They tried — and couldn’t. Schneider could have been better, but he got no help.

After the Sharks went up 3-0, they went into lock down mode and backed off, playing that grey area between embarassing a team by scoring a zillion goals and embarassing a team by not pretending to play. Sometimes, the Sharks get in trouble doing this and let teams back in the game, and Vancouver kinda sorta tried, but San Jose was too dominating. The shot count was really misleading — San Jose went into “find the perfect shot” mode early and worried more about killing clock than running the score.

A perfect case in point was one time when the sharks were on penalty kill and the puck turned over. Patrick Marleau pursued, and he clearly shut it down in center ice and timed his arrival to get to the puck right after the Canuck did. With Marleau’s speed, he would have easily gotten to the puck first and created at least havoc and probably a shorthanded chance with a clean show at Sanford — and chose not to, but did it in a way that wouldn’t “show up” the team or be easily noticed unless you’re in arena and watching closely. Rather class act, IMHO.

What you need to know about how unbalanced the game was: Jody Shelley getting power play time, because McLellan started rolling four lines.

How do you coach a game like this? I have this vision of McLellan behind the bench saying “boys, if you cost Nabby this shutout, we’re bag skating tomorrow”. Which sounds silly, but if you’re trying to teach a team not to let up when they’re dominating, that’s the kind of mentality you need. And last night, they did.

Last night’s game was about 10 minutes of Sharks domination, followed by 50 minutes of Vancouver “when does the plane take off?”

Not something you can use to make broad pronouncements about the Canucks or their season. And that says something about the Wings game, also, I think.

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