Let’s talk about the Sharks for a second. Wait, what?

Oh. Yes, again. We’re talking about the most legitimate Cup-contending team San Jose has seen yet. What else are we going to talk about?

So I was fairly harsh a few weeks back on several Sharks players. I got into a discussion with Lister and HB about some of these players the other day after the Anaheim game HB and I attended. It was your typical guy/sports conversation in which guy A posits controversial theory 1 and guys B and C argue vehmently over theory 1, possibly suggesting counter-theory 2 and generally questioning guy A’s sanity at every turn.

In this case my beefs were with Scott Thornton, Nils Ekman and a general mistrust of the Sharks’ defense. I understand Lister’s indignation: He’s been a Scott Thornton fan since he turned some guy’s face into hamburger a few years ago. They made a fairly strong case for Ekman’s role on the top line as being all about skating away from the puck and opening up ice for Cheechoo and Joe Thornton. And they suggested that I was being too hard on the young D.

My approach to sports fandom is with great cynicism. I’ve been that Great Believer sports fan in my younger days only to watch teams stumble and fail, often spectacularly. My response has been to continue hoping for the best while building a careful protective layer of criticism so when my team finally does succumb to idiocy all I need to is point and say, “See? Called it.”

But I must admit that Scott Thornton has had a quietly impressive series thus far and Ekman—aside from business as usual taking the worst possible penalties—has looked pretty good as well. In fact, since the first game the Sharks as a whole have looked good. Tuesday night they essentially ran amok on Nashville, only rescued from a blowout by some early acrobatics by Chris Mason. You could point to the short handed goal as a sign of weakness on the Sharks part, and indeed it was a boneheaded play but a couple of things rang true about it to me. One is that the Preds executed that 3-on-1 rush flawlessly. They took the D-man out of the play and used the late attacker to simply burn Toskala with a shot he had no chance to get. Second was that it looked more like a case of exhuberance to get on the board in front of the home crowd than a seriously broken play. Had the pinch not been quite as deep or the bounce not come right at that moment and things might have gone down differently. I’m not saying they deserved commendations for the play in the least, but aside from that play and two, perhaps three slip-ups behind their own net on defense and I thought the Sharks looked pretty unstoppable the whole game.

A couple of additional notes:

• The Sharks cycle the puck like absolute madmen. But I feel like they haven’t quite figured out that the Preds have watched enough tape to realize that just possessing the puck won’t win games so they cover the passes and the Sharks control forever but only get a few halfhearted shots on net with no dynamite scoring chances for all the effort.
• Note where two of the Sharks four goals came from: Rushing players taking the shot. Outshooting the Predators 40-17 is good, but when 25 of those shots come after three or four minutes of cycling and funky passes and the end result is pretty much right into Mason’s breadbasket, I mean, they could have peppered him with 55+ shots if they’d stopped horsing around down there and just fired pucks in.
• Especially in need of more shooting: Power Play. I get so frustrated on 5-on-3 situations especially when they sit there and play catch. Hello!? You have two extra guys. Shoot.
• The Avalanche have a 3-0 lead over Dallas. Edmonton has a 2-1 lead on Detroit, with Yzerman improbable for game four. Assuming Calgary goes on to beat Anaheim and the Sharks can finish off Nashville, San Jose will have home ice for round two versus Colorado. Benediction!
• Of course, that would mean it was up to Edmonton to beat Calgary because while it would be a fun Western Conference finals rematch, I do not want to have to play the Flames at all this postseason. kthx.

More Hockey

Not had enough? Okay, check out this site with some of the year’s best goals. Note Jason Spezza’s slick move (and the utterly useless defense trailing the play) in the “October” clip.

So I was listening to the local sports talk station on the way to work the other day and they had this… “band” in there. It was pretty much two dudes with guitars and I think one of them was the co-host of the show. Anyway, they decided to do this cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Suzie Q” only they changed the lyrics to “Jon Cheechoo.” I was seriously embarrassed for them.

Misc Weirdness

I stumbled across an interesting comparison image showing the various iterations of Lara Croft from Tomb Raider. If nothing else it gives one a pretty good appreciation for the graphics advancements in modern games. I was also interested to note that Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation (IV) had the most unrealistic looking Lara of them all, in terms of her physical dimensions. Note how stupidly thin her waist is compared to her, uh, upper torso. I’m thinking spinal fracture city.

Here’s an article on the BBC (featuring dubious science) about cow farts. No, seriously.

Oh, and here’s a pretty nifty collection of links worthy of a bookmark featuring freeware to solve common computing problems. If you’re into the whole frugality thing.

Lastly, it seems that Nintendo has given the official name of their next-gen system: Wii. It’s pronounced “we.” I’m so not making any of this up.