As if I didn’t feel sore enough already after my beer-league game last night, this sobering news from San Jose (hat tip to AOL’s NHL FanHouse) got my attention. Two adult recreational players died Sunday night in separate incidents during their games at Sharks Ice.

Brian Kobata, 38. and Kelly Calabro (memorial at team’s website), 41, both collapsed on the ice just a few hours apart and rescue attempts failed to revive them.

via KuklasKorner : On the Forecheck : Two recreational hockey players die on same night, at same rink.

Ow. Damn. My sympathies go out to the families and friends of both of them, and the folks down at Sharks Ice.

This just hitting the wires — Gauthier gets two games for his hit on Patrick Marleau. Jamie Baker covered the hit well, and I agree with him. Fair suspension for a cheap hit, the kind we want removed from the game.

We really enjoyed the Sharks/Kings game. The Kings played well — and hard — and clearly felt they needed to rattle the Sharks cage to have a chance to beat them. Emotions got strong, but the Sharks didn’t back down, which was a great response and encouraging to see.

In a bit, we’ll head to the tank where the Thrashers come into town. It’ll be interesting to see what plays down, but the Sharks are seeing some of the hurt players coming back; Marcel Goc and Torrey Mitchell continue to be out, but the rest are coming back. Perhaps this “slump” is starting to end, the team’s gameplay is getting back towards what we saw early in the season.

Mark Emmon’s did a nice piece on Cheechoo and his struggles today. My feeling on Cheechoo, pretty much the only player not living up to expectations this year, is that he really needs to be both healthy and confident to play well — his skating is marginal enough that if he isn’t working at it every shift he struggles to play at the NHL level, so when he’s banged up, or when he’s not confident about his health, his production fades.

He’s trying, working hard. I have no complaints with his work this year, but we have to remember that his talent level is a lot closer to Jeff Odgers than it is Joe Thornton — and Jeff Odgers stayed in the league as long as he did not through raw talent, but by skating his butt off every night and getting his nose dirty, not by scoring lots of goals. Cheechoo has hands Odgers could only dream of, but the core of his game has to be the same: skate hard, work hard, play in the hard areas, and find the seams where his shot can get through.

As long as he keeps working at it, you’ll get no complaints from me. The Sharks have enough depth there’s no need to worry about this much.

We were talking at the last game about trade deadline deals, and Cheechoo’s name came up. He’s basically the only roster player I could see moving from the Sharks, and it’s not a priority to me that it happen (but I wouldn’t be shocked if it did). There was some feeling that Cheechoo would be perfect on the wing with Sydney Crosby. If that happens, I’d love it for Cheechoo’s sake, and it’d probably be fun to watch, because ultimately Cheechoo is Brett Hull’s hands on Jeff Odger’s baby brother’s body. I’m not convinced he’d return to his Rocket production in that situation, but having a setup guy like Crosby couldn’t hurt.

Me, I think I’d just leave this team alone. Hard to argue it needs much fixing.

Last night during the Sharks/Kings game I was checking headlines during a break in action, and ran across James Mirtle’s piece on the (at that time) breaking crisis in Montreal.

It got my attention, because it seemed to be a lot more than “gee, this kid likes to party”. Looking at the quotes from the French press, like Jaques Demers ” I swear to you, I thought about Mr. Beliveau tonight … and I just hope I’m dreaming.” or Michel Bergeron’s “it looks like the foundation is going to be shaken. Not just for the Quebecois but for anyone who wears the Canadiens sweater around the country” had me wondering just what was going down. (if you haven’t seen the details, Mirtle’s got a good overview, including how the information flowed out into the public eye, so you can get a sense of how this evolved over time).

My first speculation, honestly, was some kind of legal problem involving claims of non-consensual activities between the players and some “friends”. Maybe it’s unfair of me, but honestly, with the rumors of the partying and the history of complaints against pro athletes about unwanted companionship — whether it’s the players from Duke or Kobe Bryant or any number of quietly handled incidenents — it’s always something I worry is going to end up in the press.

Then word started to come out that a mobster was involved and the police were meeting the team at the airport. Invovled with drugs? Were the players playing mule with their gear bags? Oh, the mind wanders after a couple of coffee-and-Bailey’s… But I was expecting the worst here.

Silly me. I should have remembered that this was the Montreal French Press and stopped worrying. For all Quebec professes to love it’s Canadiens, there are far too many there who aren’t afraid to use them to grandstand and use as a target for their public rants (thereby making sure the journalists get plenty of attention, which they seem to crave). The press isn’t alone here — the police have been known to grandstand and time things to maximize the pain of the team, and let’s not forget the politicians that have been happy to jump on the Canadiens and hockey players when people aren’t paying enough attention to them (just ask Shane Doan).

So I guess I should have really expected that the real problem, the one that caused Bob Hartley to claim he was going back to Atlanta (he was kidding, but that’s the level of rhetoric here, folks) was that a couple of the Canadiens players liked to party and liked girls.

Oh, and one of their party pals happens to have organized crime connections, but there are no connections known by the police beyond partying, girls, and some bootleg vodka the guy brought in for them.

Oh, the horrors.

Yes, the French Press is at it again. We can all stand down and stop paying attention for now. Next time, we should maybe be smart enough to not pay attention to begin with.

Does anyone still wonder why the Canadiens have so much trouble keeping free agents or attracting them to the team? Who other than Saku Koivu is insane enough to want to play in a city with newspapers this hostile? And better, they’re hostile because they love the team. Ah, the irony. the bullshit, the insanity.

Now, am I saying that this is not an issue at all? No — there are some significant issues here. The players are associating with someone they should know better than be around. This kind of “not thinking clearly” seems endemic in Montreal — remember Jose Theodore? There’s a problem with players enjoying the joys of the city of Montreal a bit too much there.

That’s a tough nut to crack; you can only talk and lecture so much. Ultimately it comes down to knowing the personality of the players and only bringing in those that know how to handle the situation appropriately. Montreal has to find a way to help players learn to avoid these problems, but ultimately, this is up to the individual players themselves.

Especially in a town like Montreal, where the players not only live in a fishbowl, but one wher ethe fishbowl has a 24×7 webcam and paparazzi waiting for an unprotected moment, and writers and broadcasters who seem to want to make their names by putting these people up on pedestals and then using them for target practice.

In reality? There’s a whole lot of “nothing to see here”, other than a bunch of press and broadcasters taking a molehill and turning it into a ski resort. Here’s hoping that it stays a molehill and there aren’t more and dirtier details to be found out at the investigation continues, but right now, it seems like this whole “foundation is going to be shaken” disaster scenario is a figment of the overactive imaginations of the French Press (again) insisting on proving there’s nothing they can’t turn into front page headlines.

No wonder nobody wants to play in Montreal. With “friends” like these, would you want to?

I guess it’s official, the sharks are in a slump.

Of course, when we talk about slump, we’re talking about 5-1-4 in their last ten, or a mere (ahem) 14 points out of a possible 20.

Okay, in the playoffs, there are no shootouts, so should we really count those four shoot-out-loss points? Well, is it better or worse for the Sharks to continue overtime until someone scores? I’m betting that the Sharks are a better team if they go to sudden-death overtime, look at the third period onslaught tonight against buffalo. Sharks clearly would have momentum going in, last-minute goal by Buffalo or no.

So the worst possible case for the Sharks? 5-5. Best case? 9-1. split the difference? 7-3. heck, if 5-5 is a slump, I’ll be thrilled.

this is with Blake with the sore jaw, Boyle with his “upper body” injury (a wrist, I think, because he’s had little strength behind his shot, although it’s coming around). Tonight, both Boyle and Clowe were playing with the flu, also. And lukowich is out, Goc is out…

And a little glitch in the schedule is good, because it’l force them to focus and bear down on their play. If they continue with this into mid-March? I might worry. For now? this is just the dog days…

Ray Whitney.

Okay, I knew that he still played in the league, so it wasn’t a surprise to see him score a goal, but every time he lights the lamp, I’m reminded of this talented player, who has been around the league since, well, it seems time immortal.

In reality, Whitney has been in the NHL since the San Jose Sharks took him in the second round of the 1991 Entry Draft. Their first selection had been Pat Falloon, and the two young guns were held up as the future of the young Sharks.

via XM204 » Blog Archive » The Curious Case of Ray Whitney.

Pat Falloon — great prospect, tore up his shoulder and was never quite the same after. Part of that was that the development environment within the Sharks wasn’t the best early on, part of it was that Falloon rode his talent instead of worked to improve it.

Whitney always had to work his butt off to succeed and never stopped. Even after the Sharks dumped him into the IHL after Al Sims declared him not an NHL player (and we all know how Al Sims was the key to the Sharks success!), he kept at it. After the NHL changed the rules to make smaller skill players more effective in the league, Whitney didn’t just survive in the NHL, he thrived.

Whitney was always one of my favorite early Sharks. And he has one quet thing he can be proud of: he is the last first-year Shark to still be playing in the NHL Long after everyone else who started out in San Jose and played in the Cow Palace years, he’s still proving himself a key cog in the NHL. congrats, Ray.

Who was the second to last first-year Shark to play in the NHL? it was Sandis Ozolinsh, which when he was drafted probably wouldn’t have surprised anyone, but he had his struggles as his career went on and some off-ice challenges, but he ended up with a long, successful career. We got to meet Sandis a couple of times, and he is an amazingly nice, shy, intelligent person.

But here’s a bit of trivia I doubt anyone will get. After Ray Whitney and Sandis, who was the next first-season Shark to be left standing in the NHL? you could possibly guess Whitney, and maybe ozolinsh, but #3 is off the charts and will be hard to figure out. it’s not an obvious one on the face of it.

It’s — Wade Flaherty — former Sharks goalie and a guy who made a long and successful career as a team’s 3rd goalie and usually found a way to be brought up for a few games every year. Flaherty finally hung them up and in 2008 worked with the Sharks on their Shanghai china sharks team, and this year was named by the Blackhawks ot be their goaltending coach. Well done, and it shows you that longevity in the league isn’t necessarily about talent, but about attitude and work ethic. (jeff jilson, take note. Oh, wait. sorry, too late).

Several Sabres players live in Clarence Center, the suburban-rural area where the commuter flight from Newark crashed and they talked about the experience. Defenseman Teppo Numminen heard both the sound of the plane coming down and the noise from the impact. He and his wife opened the shade on the bedroom window and could see the flames and the red sky. Goalie Patrick Lalime lived even closer. Former Shark Craig Rivet lived nearby, but far enough away that he and his family weren’t aware of the 10:20 p.m. crash until they woke up this morning.

Some of the Sharks, too, reflected on their own flight difficulties in getting out of Pittsburgh, but they expressed confidence in their charter pilot, stating that the plane would not have taken off if conditions were a serious threat. The landing in Buffalo, while buffeted a little bit by high winds and with limited visibility, wasn’t that rough — though it came less than five hours ahead of the plane that crashed.

via Hockey takes backseat to tragedy in Buffalo, but game is on — minus ailing Clowe and (probably) Boyle | Working the Corners.

There’s a subset of fans that like to think that NHL players should be robots, simply because they get paid a lot of money. You know the time: “With the money they make, they better show up every night!” — which is nice in theory, but given these are humans (well paid or no) with human limitations and frailties, it’s going to happen.

and then once in a while something happens that reminds you how human they are. My thoughts go out to all of the Sabres players and staff and the communities they live in for what they’re going through now. The show does go on, and should — but I’ll bet it’s going to be a tough night for some of them.

If you lived close enough t the crash to realize than 10 seconds difference in how the plane came down could have landed it on your house, how would YOU feel at work the next few days?

Remember that the next time some thoughtless fan rips a player for not playing 82 “A” games because they don’t care that the guy is playing through a case of flu that’d have most of us in the hospital for a week….

According to Tampa Tribune beat writer Erik Erlendsson, San Jose’s John Ferguson has been scouting the Lightning for a few games and there is a rumored Sharks interest in center Jeff Halpern. The 9-year veteran and former Washington Capitals captain has 3 goals and 5 assists in 25 games played for Tampa Bay this season.

via Sharkspage – San Jose Sharks, Hockey, NHL sports blog.

If this is true, and in ways it makes sense, it probably means that Torrey Mitchell’s setback is more serious than the sharks have admitted. Given that Mitchell hasn’t been skating since he tweaked things during his stint in Worcester, I’ve been expecting to hear he’s done for the year. this might be the indication that’s true.