Category Archives: Sports

Primarily talk about the San Jose Sharks, San Francisco Giants, San Francisco 49ers and Oakland A’s. Occasionally some other random sports tidbits like the Olympics may find their way here.

Divisions by Design

I was reading the lamentably sparse postings on Websnark the other day when I saw this entry about how Palladium games is in big trouble. As in, if they don’t get some cash to pay their debts in a hurry they may be out of business.

I should clarify a bit here. Palladium games makes an eponymous fantasy role-playing game and back in the 80s/90s had licenses to Robotech and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which were both really big at the time. (As an aside, you might be tempted to think that a TMNT role-playing game would be really lame but in fact it was quite a lot of fun for one-off adventures and character creation was a hoot as you weren’t limited to turtles, you could be a mutant of pretty much any animal.) Palladium also had a superhero game, a horror-themed game and a pretty popular game which touched on some Alias-type themes long before Sydney Bristow was ever a gleam in J.J. Abrams’ eye called Ninjas and Superspies.

As the license agreement time began to expire, Palladium introduced the Rifts game which promised “Megaverse” settings where magic and technology were combined in a dystopian post-apocalyptic future where there were portals (the titular Rifts as it were) that granted players access to other dimensions. Ideally this meant that players could put their characters into pretty much any setting as you could simply write it off as a Riftworld. This more or less drew all the original Palladium games under one umbrella since they could claim that the TMNT setting was a particular Riftworld and so on. Plus Palladium games used a company-standard system so in theory all games were compatible with each other.

Now, Palladium games weren’t my first foray into role-playing. In fact my friends and I used to play a diceless variant of Dungeons and Dragons during recess (yes, we were total geeks waaaay back) and the first actual game system I owned was Mayfair Games’ DC Heroes. After that I think I picked up some Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Second Edition books before finding Robotech. Robotech was our preferred game for quite some time because for one thing we were total Robotech nerds and for another it felt like a more advanced game than DC Heroes in terms of mechanics. It sounds stupid to say it out loud now, but at the time the fact that it used more than just a couple of ten-sided dice (which were essentially used as percentage dice) made it seem like a more “mature” game.

Robotech begat some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games, we dabbled with Ninjas and Superspies a bit and got accustomed to the Palladium system enough that by the time Rifts was announced we were pretty hyped to check it out when it was released.

The problem with Rifts, in the end, is that it does neither of the two things that I feel a good role-playing game should strive for: It isn’t a really solid universal system nor is the setting detailed and unique enough to really act as the primary draw. If you recall this is my same general beef with Dungeons and Dragons although I at least concede that D&D is good in that it is the sort of baseline standard for role-playing gaming in general so it’s perfect for putting together a one-off adventure or as a starting point for a group of players who may be relative strangers since if you collect 100 role-playing gamers I’d put money down that 99 of those are familiar with D&D and at least 95 of them have played it at least once. Which is generally enough to get a game going.

Rifts’ problem is that it doesn’t even have that standard of familiarity going for it so in order to play and enjoy Rifts you have to put up with or modify the game mechanics or you may just really like the general direction the game designers decide to take the setting. I suppose there are people who like the Palladuim system and I admit that in my younger days I thought it was pretty cool but in retrospect I note that my Palladium campaigns tended to have a lot of pretty generic combat partially because I was unimaginative but also because generic combat is pretty much the only really fleshed-out part of the system.

These days I prefer a system more like Hero where the game mechanics are enjoyable even if the party never even finds any combat to get into. If nothing else I prefer a game like Shadowrun where the combat is among the weaker points of the system and the skill checks or character creation is better. Combat in role-playing games is easy since as the GM you can pretty much guide it whichever way you want anyhow (“Oh, these guys just got an order to disengage—miraculously saving your lives”).

But Rifts had some interesting ideas. Clever character classes like Juicers and Glitter Boys were inspired and the attempt to include a mechanism for combining Big Robots with spellcasting fantasy characters and modern combat type archetypes was admirably ambitious if nothing else. I think that generally speaking I would prefer to try to implement something like this in a GURPS-style system instead but you can’t casually disregard the inspiration they provided.

I guess part of what casued the company to have trouble was a poor licensing decision to grant the Rifts license to a developer making a game for the (snicker) N-Gage. Now I’ve heard the game is good, which may well be true. But no one cares because the N-Gage was a horrible platform from the very beginning. It wasn’t some big secret either. I think it must have been Nokia and Palladium that were the only people who though the N-Gage wasn’t DOA before it even shipped. And once the reports came back after the E3 where it debuted in all its battery-covering-cartridge glory, it was all but settled that the thing was going to tank.

My point is that I don’t think that poorly managed companies should be rewarded for their mistakes just because they have done some interesting things in the past and I don’t think I’ll be helping with the drive to help keep them afloat. However, I don’t like to see game companies die. I still sorta hope they pull through just because of that, but I have little hope.

Pity.

Quick Note

So the Sharks made it 3-1 despite making it way more tense in the third period than was strictly necessary. One thing people keep forgetting in their exaltation of Patrick Marleau’s hat trick (not that it isn’t worthy of praise) is Patrick Rissmiller’s initial goal. If there was ever a dude who earned a goal, it was that guy. He pushed for that to happen about three times on that shift, working hard, forechecking, staying with the puck and not giving up. It wasn’t as pretty as the Bernier to Marleau dish, but it was more impressive from a strictly work ethic perspective.

Also, after looking like they might pull the upset for a moment it seems likely that Edmonton won’t be able to hang on against Detroit anymore. Since Colorado all but has its series in the bag that means that Detroit will likely play the Avs in Round 2 leaving the Sharks (assuming they can finish the Predators off, which they certainly should—I’m predicting they do it in six back at the Tank) to play the winner of the Anaheim/Calgary series. At this point it’s probably closer than most people thought between those two teams but I’m pulling for Anaheim because playing them in Round 2 would make for an easier series and the Sharks would get home ice advantage.

All Teeth and Fins and Poor Demeanor

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.

Rebarbative Rally

I’m lazy today but I want to update. This sounds like a job for…

Bullet Points

  • I attended a corporate meeting in San Francisco today. It was an hour bus trip (one-way) with some company provided snacks of dubious quality as an incentive. Unlike the Microsoft company rallies you see in famous internet clips, this was less of a pep rally as a sort of drab, state-of-the-company report. Turns out, the state of our company is “pretty okay, probably.” Inspiring!
  • I’ll count it as acceptable that the Sharks managed to draw a tie from the opening road games in their series. That basically puts them in a best-of-five with home ice advanatge. What I don’t find acceptable is the officiating so far in the series. It’s not that they call too many penalties (although I’d prefer a lot fewer, thanks) it’s more that they are so mind-numbingly inconsistent with them. Both ways. Each team has alternated in the young series from penalty box parade to getting away with murder. The series is tied but I’d basically give both games to the refs had the Predators managed to make the game yesterday even remotely interesting. As it is I’d say the Sharks were robbed of any legitimate chance to win on Friday and the Preds had the wind sucked out of their sails by a bunch of really random calls on Sunday. Going forward with the series I really hope these refs can get out of the way and let the teams decide who wins.
  • I caught Silent Hill on Saturday with HB since both of us are pretty big fans of the game(s). The movie wasn’t preview screened for critics (bad sign) and got a lot of bad reviews from those who made the effort to give it a rating. I don’t necessarily disagree with some of the criticisms (bad dialogue, some questionable acting, too much/not enough exposition) but I think considering the source material games are basically incomprehensible as well and horror movies aren’t exactly the place to go to see fine Academy Award-worthy performances that it did what it was trying to do pretty admirably. At the very least I was entertained for a couple of hours. I can’t exactly recommend it, but I wasn’t sorry to have seen it. What I was sorry about was spending $4.00 for a small diet soda that tasted like regular soda that had been sitting in melted ice for about eight hours.
  • I went over to HB’s place on Friday to catch the game and while I was there I tried to do a bit more work on the network I messed up. I was able to determine that their net connection was fine by plugging the ethernet cable right into my laptop so with no other troubleshooting steps revealing any useful information I diagnosed the AirPort Express as having some sort of issue; possibly a faulty ethernet connector. After we caught the movie we headed over to the nearest Apple store for our appointment at the Genius Bar to have it looked at. The Genius plugged it in and it worked fine for him which left us back at square one. I had to take Nik out to Whimsy‘s place for some tea party/Mary Kay pusher meeting so I couldn’t follow through with the new info, but HB called and said that he got home and just unplugged everything and plugged it all back in and stuff started working again so the final diagnosis is: Who knows? Man I love computers.
  • We caught the end of The Next Food Network Star last night and Guy won, which is what I was hoping. The funny thing is, I don’t know that I’d actually watch his show or not because I get kind of tired of generic in-studio cooking shows, but at least that unpleasantly-shaped, uncomfortably effeminate goofball Reggie didn’t win. Seriously, dude, dry up the waterworks. Even the chicks weren’t as weepy as you.
  • I picked up Indigo Prophecy for the XBox over the weekend as well. It’s a very curious game that I knew only from a comment made by a friend and the description on the back of the box so I had very few preconceptions going in. It works like an adventure game, mostly, where you wander around and try to figure out what to do. Usually it isn’t too hard to determine and the story is cinematic and intriguing enough to keep you pushing along, trying not to get stuck up in the game so the story can fight its way out. The strange thing is that all the “gameplay” elements are very abstracted from the action on the screen, such that action sequences are handled via a series of rythym game-style follow-the-leader joystick movements. In this way it’s kind of like Dragon’s Lair, which is sort of unfortunate because it kinda pulls you out of the action and forces you to think about something other than what your avatar is actually doing. It works in certain cases like when playing a guitar (the rythym element makes logical sense there) but when fleeing from a horde of mutated insects or kickboxing a punching bag it feels divorced from what the character is actually doing. Also failing in certain tasks merely ends the game forcing a restart which, for a game that is trying really hard to be an interactive movie, feels forced and simply reminds the player that—despite the sheen of freedom—they really are still on a rail. What’s almost the most frustrating is that I’m really interested in the story but I feel like I’m being needlessly thrust into interaction where it doesn’t add to the enjoyment. I’d almost rather be watching Indigo Prophecy: The Movie than guiding these characters through their morning shower routines and whatever.
  • Nik and I stopped by the mall for a bit yesterday so I could look for a plain black zip-up sweatshirt now that the weather is finally threatening to get nicer. My agitation at being shut down in this endeavour has led me to a brilliant business idea: Normal Clothes. I’d sell plain T-shirts without any Socially Inexcusable If Spoken Aloud and Largely Offensive Statements Played For Laughs Because They Appear On a T-Shirt; clothing that doesn’t force one to become a walking billboard; jeans that don’t cost enough to dent the National Deficit and seasonal clothing available year-round because weather doesn’t really care about our human calendars. Okay so maybe as a business it isn’t brilliant, but if such an establishment existed, I’d be their #1 customer.
  • I did find a pair of sunglasses that were relatively cheap. Of course, they were broken and I had to take them back.
  • Whomever said that shopping was therapeutic does not own a dictionary and clearly mistook “therapeutic” to mean “capable of inducing suicide.”

No Gnus is Good Gnus

CALIFORNIA—Law enforcement officals noted today that a stolen 1997 Saturn SC2 was found only a few miles from the scene of the crime, parked near an elementary school. It is reportedly in rather good condition, parked with the doors locked. It has been towed to an undisclosed location for review by the owners’ insurance adjuster.

Short Attention Span Theat—Hey, Who Has Some Gum?

  • So I caught the Sharks game on Saturday with HB, which was a lot of fun. Afterward we convinced Nik and Gin to drive out and meet us at Lister and Whimsy’s pad with a cameo by RR for a fairly raucous but tasty trip to a local steakhouse.
  • So, Saturday was the second game I managed to attend this year. Jonathan Cheechoo scored a hat trick at the game I went to see for my birthday back in January. Cheechoo scored a hat trick on Saturday, too. I’m only saying.
  • Sadly after Saturday’s winning performance and eighth victory in a row, they basically rolled over on Monday for the Kings whom they most certainly could have beaten. Yeah, the game didn’t matter for much and no one wants to go out with an injury in a “pointless” game (anyone else get kind of jittery when Cheechoo went down from that collision?) but getting shut out? Not a good note to start the postseason on, I’m afraid.
  • So Thornton and Cheechoo managed, despite getting blanked by the Kings, to take home some league hardware for points and goals scored, respectively. Congrats to them both as I think they very much deserved to win. I doubt Thornton will be able to shine bright enough for the east coasters to have a legitimate shot at the Hart trophy for league MVP, but we can all rest assured that he is the most valuable player, trophy or no.
  • You know, ever since I saw Waking Life I’ve thought that animation-over-film is a very nifty effect. Check out the trailer for the upcoming film A Scanner Darkly and tell me that doesn’t look super rad.
  • I rented Tomb Raider: Legend over the weekend. Of course by weekend I mean “Monday I took off because I couldn’t stomach the thought of working another five days in a row,” but whatever. I beat the game in a day which suggests that the game is way too short (which it is) but does not suggest much about the quality of that brief experience. Overall I’d say Lara has her mojo back, although the combat needed more slow-mo effects than the one or two moves that provided it because those involved getting all up in some thug’s face (putting one scantily-clad adventurer in rather perilous circumstances). The story was a bit hard to follow since I haven’t completed a Tomb Raider game… uh… ever, I think. And I haven’t even picked one up since the Sega Dreamcast days so, you know, it’s been a couple of weeks. The fun factor of the puzzles and the visuals are quite nice but I really feel sorry for anyone who actually dropped the coin on the game. Ten hours. At most.
  • Beating TRL so quickly got me thinking about the sweet spot for game purchases. Basically it’s like this: Either you buy a game hoping you’ll play it for months and months and never really bother trading it in (lots of sports games fall into this category, as do really good multiplayer games like Counter-Strike and Halo 2) or you hope that you buy a popular game and manage to push through it in a reasonably short amount of time—but not so short that you would have been better served just renting it. For example, a $50 game will, within about a month of release, get you maybe $35 in trade-in value. Which means you take a $15 hit from buying the game. If you can make up that amount of gameplay in a shorter amount of time than it would take you to rack up $15 in rental fees, you come out on top. Since most rentals are about $1 per day, you’re looking at games that can be finished (without getting too stuck in one spot) in roughly 30 hours.
  • Finding 30 hours in a few weeks to devote to a video game… you’re on your own there.
  • The one bad thing about the car being found (okay, not bad per se, but sort of sad) is that the rental car we got from the insurance company, despite being a crummy Ford, is much nicer than the Saturn. It even has a CD player that understands MP3 discs. Mmmm…. 700MB commute goodness…
  • Public Service Annoucement: Roast Beef + Beano’s Horseradish Sauce = teh yum.
  • Also tasty: Woebler’s Spicy Mustard. Semi-related lameness: Woebler’s does not have a web presence to speak of.
  • Finally, Ryan points out that last week was the first time, at least since switching to the 888.net server, that I’ve updated five days in a row. Nice eye, Ryan. In other news, my buddy Ryan has no life. Film at 11.

On a Clear Day

So in case you didn’t quite catch the drift from the “More Stuff I Could Do Without” post a couple of days ago, my car got stolen. I had parked it in the train station lot, roughly as far from the one exit as you can get, underneath one of the “security” cameras’ lens. The car was locked and there was nothing except an ice scraper and my iPod’s $8.00 tape adapter visible inside the car. Come to think of it, ever since last year’s window-smashing burglary I haven’t kept much of anything in there so that was pretty much the extent of it.

There was no glass in the vacant space the Saturn had once occupied so they must have jimmied the lock. The responding officer said that they were having an 85% recovery rate in the city (but no guarantees on condition of recovered vehicles) and most cars were located within 24-72 hours. As of tonight at about 5:30 pm it will have been 72 hours.

I’ll be honest with you: Getting ripped off really sucks. But you know, it could be a lot worse. The insurance company contacted us and said that our insurance wouldn’t go up at all since it is a no-fault incident. They’re going to wait 15 days to see if the car can be recovered and if so, they’ll evaluate it for damage and do the payout on that or if it isn’t located they’ll pay “fair market price” (whatever that means) to replace it. Plus we owned the car outright. I’m not sure what would have happened if we were still making payments on it, but I can’t think it would have been all that great.

Besides, I was about ready to trade that car in anyway; the only thing holding me back was that we did own the Saturn and I wasn’t crazy about taking on another car payment just yet. As of right now we’re a bit unclear on how Nikki’s physical state will be once her eligibility for temporary disability runs out so there’s some question marks about what she’ll do for income. That impacted the choice to not trade in the car sooner but in this case it may also impact how we proceed from here. If Nik doesn’t get well enough to go to school (something she’s talked about) or get a regular-type job, she may have to find some kind of work-at-home plan which would actually mean we might not need a second car for a little while since I have clear access to work via the train/bus and it’s (hopefully) not a vile imposition on Nik to drop me off and pick me up from the station two blocks away.

Of course I’m a bit miffed at the train company at the moment. I really don’t understand why, considering how much they charge for fares, they can’t have some better security. In a twist of Murphy’s Law, I got one of those annoying fliers stuck under my windshield wiper at the end of last week saying they had been seeing a rash of break-ins and vandalisms in the park and ride lot lately and were planning a community access meeting for the 17th of this month. Yesterday they posted them on people’s windows again, this time mentioning car theft. I’m pretty sure I know what spurred that particular action. As expected, when I got the flier last week I threw it away, having no intention of wasting a weeknight at some boring safety meeting. Mea culpa (that’s latin for “my bad”).

So it goes.

Rain on the Parade

I’ve already apologized for not believing the Sharks would make the playoffs. But now that they are in there, I have expectations. Remember that we’re talking about the defending Pacific Division Champs who were within arms reach of going to the Stanley Cup Finals the last time we saw them actually, you know, play.

I’m not asking for a Cup victory this year. The team is still very young. However, we know that they can be a phenomenal team—when they want to be. So all I’m asking for is forward progress. They don’t have to win the Cup this year, but I want them to make it at least to the third round if not the Finals. Next year I’ll expect a Cup.

So here’s what concerns me: I want this team to be legitimate contenders for the Stanley Cup, even if they may be a bit too green to actually take it home just yet, and there are a couple of parts of their game (as a team) that is going to have to get better in a hurry if they’re going to beat the Dallases and Detroits of the postseason.

First though, a couple of things that suggest the Sharks need to be thinking “Win this year” and not be as forgiving of themselves as I am prepared to be. One is that they are a remarkably healthy team. Where other teams are struggling with aging veterans fighting off nagging injuries (Hi, Hasek!), the Sharks have missed very few games due to injury and the ones they have missed have been from lower-priority role-players like Parker and Thornton (Scott). The other is that they have a psychological advantage right now, coming off a dramatic uphill climb into the playoffs, breaking franchise records right and left and generally having the right people hot at the right time.

Still, all is not roses. The Sharks won last night but I was very, very concerned by some of the stuff I saw there. Observe:

  • Evgeni Nabokov: Dude. Dude. The guy is listed as having 17 saves, but basically all those saves were little weakling “shots” or low percentage dinks on unlikely scoring chances. Basically, those were 17 easy saves. On the other hand, every time the Canucks got even a half-decent shot on net, it went in. Nabby has to make some key saves. He didn’t. He was spared because the Sharks played pretty good defense most of the night (at least in terms of limiting scoring chances) but when I start wishing Toskala was in the net because Nabokov is looking uncomfortable in comparison, something’s wrong with your number one guy.
  • Which brings up an interesting point: Toskala has been hot lately, there is no doubt. But is this Vesa’s push to be a marquee name, or is it a temporary insanity that will come crashing back down at the exact wrong time? I want to believe that he’s just come into his own enough that whether Nabby is on his game or not the Sharks could go all the way, but I find it difficult. If Toskala has a postseason meltdown, I’m not confident that Evgeni Nabokov is going to come to the rescue.
  • The Sharks played ugly. Coyotes ugly. I’m sorry but that Ekman goal was a kick. Whether he made the kicking motion before it went in or after it hit his skate, the replay was clear that he intended to kick that puck in, and to me that should not be a goal. Why look a gift horse in the mouth? Because hockey refs believe in karma, and if you think this won’t come back to bite the Sharks in the tailfin later, you’re wrong. Plus you have to imagine how differently this game might have gone if that goal doesn’t count. If that’s the case, then Carle’s third-period goal only draws the tie with 8:36 left and Vancouver doesn’t have to pull Auld out at all. Remember that Vancouver only needed a tie to maintain their playoff hopes. Without the empty net, Cheechoo doesn’t score and the game goes to overtime. I’m just saying.
  • Never mind the kick-in goal, the Sharks got away with murder out there. I saw Joe Thornton on I believe the empty net goal hook his man and drag himself up into better body position before even trying to move his feet. It was like he was water-skiing. No call, and San Jose gets a goal. Patrick Marleau got called for a penalty in this game and that’s only happened about 12 times all year. It was embarrassing to watch and if I’m a Canucks fan I’m livid right now at the officiating in a critical game. Admittedly, Vancouver didn’t exactly lose because of the refs (they lost because they couldn’t solve Joe Thornton) but it certainly would have been a different game with some tighter work from the refs.
  • I appreciate the fact that the power play has put up a lot of points for San Jose lately. It has certainly made their seven-game win streak possible. But the Sharks typically have four or more extra power play chances than their opponent because they (usually) play a much more disciplined game. Why are games being this close? I think it’s because the Sharks power play hasn’t been all that phenomenal, it’s just a matter of probability. Get enough man advantage time and eventually something will allow you to score. Compare that to the fact that while not often penalized, it seems like every time they are down a man, the Sharks get scored on unless their netminder comes up big. What happened to the dangerous short-handed team from last season?
  • Was it just me or did Joe seem like he really wanted to score an actual goal last night? Is he getting sick of playing the set-up man? I don’t think I’ve ever seen him shoot that much. Okay, I guess that’s not a concern but it did kind of make me think that the Sharks didn’t really take last night very seriously until it was getting late in the game. Kind of a “yeah, let Joe shoot. What difference does it make?”
  • The difference, of course, being whether or not the Sharks have to play Calgary (or, more specifically, Mikka Kiprusoff) whom they are 1-3 against this season, or Nashville (minus Tomas Vokoun) which they are a slightly better 2-2 against. That might not seem like much difference either way, but when you consider that San Jose has lost to Calgary twice since Joe Thornton’s arrival on the scene and they actually beat Nashville back in November (one of two wins that whole month) plus again last month and I’d say San Jose vs. Nashville would be a very good thing for the Sharks. Plus that would put them into a position where if they did have to meet Detroit in the playoffs, it wouldn’t be until the conference championships after that veteran team had gone through two rounds already. Given the Sharks’ relative youthfulness, that’s about as much as you can ask for. Well, except for having the Red Wings knocked out by an earlier opponent.

Are Pee Gee

I was thinking about Final Fantasy games earlier today. I’m… really not sure why. But then I noticed that Nintendo has released Final Fantasy IV Advance and I thought to myself, “You know, I never played through that one.” Of course it was originally released in the US for the Super Nintendo as Final Fantasy II and Final Fantasy VI was released here as FFIII until everyone came to their senses and skipped to naming them the same as they were in Japan upon Final Fantasy VII’s release. Since then it seems there has been a push to go back and re-name everything according to the Japanese numberings. All of which has done little except confuse the heck out of everyone.

But anyway, I was researching a bit and it looks like they have Final Fantasy I & II on one GBA cart; Final Fantasy III coming out for the DS soon; the previously mentioned IV for GBA and I noticed a page for Final Fantasy VI Advance but the only information I could find about it from some Googling was that it is projected for a Q2 2006 release… in Japan. So maybe it will be out around Christmas in the US?

Either way I think that I might see if I can find a used copy of FFIV Advance and/or I & II so that by the time the DS Lite comes out in the States next month I can have III on the backburner in case they delay the release of VI, which is what I really want to play on the GBA.

Here’s something else that struck me as odd: I don’t think I’ve ever finished a Final Fantasy game except for the very first one. I didn’t play the US FFII because my brother and I didn’t get a SNES until III was almost out (by that time FFII was so yesterday). I played the heck out of III, but I was competing with Scott, Dr. Mac and one of Scott’s friends for battery-save space and I think eventually my game got erased by “accident” when I was near the end. I didn’t have the patience to push back through.

Dr. Mac and I split the cost of VII and took turns playing it when we were roommates out in Texas, but during the game’s extended final sequence, I used my one save mechanism way too early in the proceedings and by the time I got to the final boss my supplies were tapped, my party was weakened and I worked into a three hour stalemate with the end guy. Facing the prospect of having to go back through roughly five hours of game to try again, I tossed in the towel instead. VIII, IX and X I tried and thought were so weak as to not warrant the effort. I didn’t even bother with X-2 or XI. I’ve also put in a stupid number of hours playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, but never bothered to get around to advancing the story toward the end: I just like levelling up my guys and looking for secret weapons to add new attacks.

Maybe they keep making the “Final” Fantasies because I never see the end! I guess it can’t be final if it’s never finished…

My Words: They Are Tasty

I predicted the Sharks wouldn’t make the playoffs this year. I’ve rarely been this happy to be wrong. As pennance for my doubt, I shall force myself to refrain from making further predictions about how those playoffs will turn out.

No, really. I’m not saying a thing.

I mean it.

Okay, okay, I’m not making predictions but I will make an observation: No matter what happens you have to recognize that this team is pretty dang good. You know, when they want to be. But once you recognize that and then you realize that the average age for the team is 26 years (and that would be less if they traded 35-year-old relative geezer Scott Thornton like I keep saying) it’s tough to see them not being legitimate Cup contenders for some time to come.

I’m not saying they’re necessarily Cup-bound now, I’m just saying they have the raw material there to make it happen.

That’s all I’m sayin’.

The Great Whiner

Can I be heretical for a moment? Cool, thanks.

I hate Wayne Gretzky.

Seriously, that guy bugs the heck out of me.

This isn’t a new development. He bugged me to death in the Sharks early years when they had to play him as a King all the time. If there was ever a player who lived off his superstar status, it was Wayne Gretzky. He would whine, he would moan, he would grumble and he would argue every little call, every minor mishap, every time anyone even looked at him funny. Finish a check against the “Great One”? Please, you’d grind the game to a halt for twenty minutes while ol’ whineypants took the refs to task for not ejecting the offending defenseman. That was, of course, if the refs didn’t give you a four minute hooking major for, like, brandishing the stick.

It would be nice if now that he’s all Mr. Face of Hockey that he seemed like a mellower kind of guy, humbled by his place in the pantheon of ice hockey.

Nope.

Now that he’s behind the bench he—I didn’t think this was actually possible—complains even more than he used to. Listen, the Sharks didn’t play magnificent hockey last night but they at least showed their usual discipline and managed to come out on top. The Coyotes played like their namesakes and cheated at just about every possible opportunity. The refs even let some calls go on them after a while because I’m sure they were tired of blowing their whistles (the game seemed to take forever). But you know who never got tired? Yep, The Great Crybaby never showed any signs of exhaustion as he screamed and griped and fired spittle on the backs of his players’ heads.

So since no one else seems to want to say it, allow me: “Hey Wayne! Shut up.”

Moore Weirdness

I’ve been on a graphic novel kick lately; probably because the lull of a moving train is too much for the car-sleeper/book-sleeper in me to resist. Confronted by the combination of a novel and engine noise during commute times I tend to nod off, drool on the pages and miss my stop. So I read less intellectually demanding stuff like comics to keep myself entertained while also awake.

Also, I really like comic books (Gasp! Something geeky that Paul likes! Say it ain’t so!) but that they have ramped up to $2.50 per monthly book is way more than I’m happy spending. Besides, comic books are like soap operas: They don’t end. Graphic novels, however, are usually complete narratives and are, comparatively, much cheaper. So I buy those.

The last two I’ve read were Alan Moore’s Watchmen and V For Vendetta. Of course I picked up V For Vendetta because the movie just came out and I wanted to read the source material first before seeing the film, especially since Moore has been so critical of the result.

After having read the two works he’s most famous for and reading a bunch of his interviews, I can say that I feel Moore may be a gifted writer but the man is just a flat-out weirdo. I mean, V For Vendetta is a pretty politically challenging story and I’m fairly impressed that the thing made it to the screen at all. If he expected them to accurately portray V as the full on nutcase anarchist that he is the books, he apparently has never bothered to cast even the most casually critical eye toward Hollywood. I mean, that’s just not how they work.

I get the indignation, but I think that generally speaking the whole “artistic integrity” thing is being blown out of proportion here. It’s perhaps one thing to say “This isn’t what I meant, if you want the real story, buy my book and throw me a couple bucks in the process.” If nothing else you can look at the movie as a perhaps effective if maybe misguided marketing vessel for the graphic novel (which I note comes in a hardcover version now). It’s another to say, “This isn’t what I meant, so I want my name taken off the book, I want to be distanced from the whole thing and I want you to act like I had nothing to do with any of it because my feelings are hurt.”

Whether Moore was tricked into signing away the rights to the story or not, he still signed them away. I can feel sorry for him but it becomes less so when he comes across as such a baby about it. Buck up, kid, us wistful aspiring writers should have such problems. I mean, I might cry for ten whole seconds if someone wanted to convert my writings into a movie so bad that they didn’t care whether I wanted it to be done or not. Sniff.

Of course, it isn’t just the grumpy compromised-vision interviewee that makes me realize the guy is bizarre, his stories are strong enough testament to that on their own. Not that they aren’t good; thought-provoking stories in a comic book format is something of a nerd holy grail and Moore definitely delivers there. But Moore is unique in that he seems to try to defy convention so much that he seems to try to have us sympathize with really vile individuals. Even V is clearly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent people with his actions. His rationales are presented in abstract terms but Moore conveniently sidesteps any moral landmines by whitewashing over the fact that V’s bomb-happy master plot must logically involve substantial collateral damage.

Watchmen is a little different in that it is forced to deal openly with the problem of heroes (literal and literary in this case) who are merely human or even those who are anything but and therefore cannot sympathize with the human condition. This works on a level slightly above V For Vendetta but the examination needs some place to build to and when the curtain is lifted from the story bubbling beneath the intellectual and character examination it seems so farfetched and out from left field that it kind of feels like a grotesque kick in the head.

Which isn’t to say that either is ineffective: I enjoyed both very much. It’s a testament to the overall quality of the subplots that the major events are flawed but don’t make the ideas presented seem like foul-tasting medicine. Unlike watching Schindler’s List or Saving Private Ryan where the ideas and information presented are admirable but the exectution is so unpleasant as to prohibit any literal enjoyment or entertainment, Moore delicately walks the line and manages to stay just this side.

Still, I think my next graphic novel is going to be something even easier. Like a Plastic Man anthology or something.

The Good, the Bad and the Awesome

Good

Okay, I know the Intel Macs have gotten some negative press for various technical issues but it sounds like Apple is busting their humps to get them cleaned up, so I won’t really get into that right now. Basically I pretty much suspected that the first versions of the processor swapping hardware needed to be categorized under “Early adopters only; buyers beware.” I mean, it’s a first rev of an Apple product. Duh.

But dude. I mean, have you seen this Boot Camp business? Homina.

Bad

I flipped on the TV last night to check out the Sharks game only to catch the fade to commercial at the end of the first period. When the ads were over they switched over to the Giants game.

For clarity’s sake I want to point out that I’m a Giants fan and generally speaking I want Fox Sports Net to broadcast local teams’ games. But let’s think about this for a minute: On one hand we have the Sharks, nine games from the end of the regular season, on a comeback year after the lockout, locked in a tense and exciting playoff race. On the other hand we have the Giants vs. the Padres in a stadium that got rained out yesterday, playing the effectively meaningless third game of the year. Which of these two events should get top billing on FSN?

What really hacks me is that they moved the Sharks game to Fox Sports Net Plus, which our wonderful local Comcast affiliate pulled a couple of weeks ago.

Yeah, I was pretty flamed about it. I ended up listening to the Internet broadcast (barely maintaining my sanity despite the onslaught of ear-wrecking audio artifacts, pops, hisses and dropouts—hooray for Windows Media Player) but it wasn’t the same. I would have even begrudgingly admitted defeat if the game was at home, but this was in Colorado. Colorado.

There is no justice.

Awesome

Are you watching Lost? Because if you aren’t, you’re totally missing out. Totally.

Potential minor spoilers follow. Read at your own peril.

I probably don’t need to be enumerating the wonders of this show since it doesn’t seem like it has a really tough time finding viewers, but after last night’s episode I saw more than a little negative feedback around the Internets from people who felt that the “It’s all in Hurley’s head” meme of “Dave” was a set up for an eventual cop-out.

Maybe it’s just me but I took this episode as a direct dismissal of that explanation (or any other “It’s all just a dream” hooey). Put it this way, I can’t see how the writers, producers and directors who have spent the last year and a half building an intricate, layered mystery would choose now to reveal essentially the entire secret. I mean, if this is all it is—Hurley or someone else’s (Walt comes up a lot in these discussions) dream—and they’re telling us now, who’s going to keep watching? Who’s going to care what the hatch is all about or what the map means or who the Others are or where the smoke comes from? The answer would have to be “What difference does it make, it’s all in Hurley’s mind anyway?”

Presenting this as a possibility at this stage in the game suggests to me that the island is anything but a dream. And I don’t even think it’s a red herring, it’s just a way of saying “We wouldn’t do that to you… but wouldn’t it have been wicked if we did?”

I’m not saying this show won’t disappoint in the long run. J.J. Abrams didn’t exactly inspire confidence with Alias in his ability to develop effective exit strategies for his shows. But I read more than a few posts from people on message boards that said based on “Dave” they were done with the show. To those people I say, “C’mon! If this is all it takes for you to lose faith in the writers maybe you didn’t really like the show that much to begin with.” Which would be sort of sad because for my money there hasn’t been anything on TV this engaging and this generally high quality since… well… I dunno. Buffy, maybe. Even then Buffy had its share of filler or outright bad episodes; my complaint with any episode of Lost has only ever been that they didn’t move forward enough and that’s probably just a testament to how deep my appetite for the story this show is telling goes.

I meant to update my “Box in the Living Room” series for the mid-season but I’ll be honest and say that I watch a fraction of the shows I made sure were on my TiVo back in September/October. I’m only still watching Surface, Supernatural and How I Met Your Mother from the fall’s new shows (even then, Surface is over and Supernatural isn’t necessarily what I’d call a can’t-miss in my book) and most of last year’s staples have drifted from my immediate consciousness leaving me with basically Lost, Scrubs and Veronica Mars as weekly appointments.

I was a bit hard on Lost back in October but it has occurred to me that the pacing of the show is actually pretty good this season and as long as I’m having fun, the revelations and new mysteries are coming at a decent pace to keep me intrigued. I’m not sure what else I could be asking for, you know?

Tank Talk

My father responds to the dissection of this years’ Sharks with his usual wit and insight thusly:

First, regarding Patrick Marleau: I like a lot of what Marleau does on the ice, his work ethic, and, of course, his stats don’t lie. But I’ve come to the rather peculiar conclusion that, for all his overall hockey skills, he’s a below average puck handler/passer. Mind you, he can definitely shoot, no question about that, but (and I’m guessing no one keeps stats on this) I’d bet that easily 60% of his passing attempts are off the mark or directly onto the stick or skates of an opponent. He also gets his pocket picked far more often than, say, Cheechoo or even Michalek. This latter problem could be that he tries a bit too hard, attempting slick little dipsy-doodles slipping the puck around a defender to one side and trying to circle around him and retrieve it on the other or zipping it between the defenders skates. That works, like, one time out of every thirty or so attempts. Of course, when it works he’s on a breakaway but when it doesn’t he’s left coasting into the offensive zone without the puck which now belongs to the defender at the blue line. None of which changes my agreement with your bottom line which is that Marleau is a tremendous asset to the team. But it might help explain why such a prolific point-scorer is a -8.

Second, regarding Kyle McLaren: There was a time that I considered him one of the Sharks’ best defenders, albeit one whose shots are far more likely to find the netting at the top of the glass than the netting in the goal—even with no goalie. However, while I still think he’s more good than bad, I’m surprised at how often he makes bonehead plays in his own zone, especially unforced turnovers. It sometimes seems his brain is on about a half-second delay from his actions. Nonetheless, he wouldn’t be my first choice to replace on defense.

Speaking of defense, though, I think this is the key weakness for the team. Their defensive corps is very young which translates to mistake-prone. While the speed of the NHL can suppress the scoring skills of many a phenom forward, they can still cope and often be reasonably effective. However, it appears to be almost overwhelming for rookie defensemen. Minor missteps or slight errors in positioning that were easily recovered-from at lower levels become devastating scoring chances in the NHL. Scott Hannan is a prime example. As good as he is now, he struggled a lot his first year. After Hannan and McLaren experience is almost nonexistent. Preissing, Davison, and Ehrhoff are, essentially, in their second seasons. Jorges, Murray, and Carle are rookies. Fahey is in his third season but, as you noted, is the least skilled. Add to that the number of very young front-liners who also may not be as astute as they should in covering their defensive responsibilities and the Sharks aren’t likely to bag a lot of shutouts. The last game they played against Detroit illustrated all too clearly the sizable gap between a top-notch defense and their own.

One final thought: What on earth is up with the Sharks’ ineptitude during shoot-outs? It’s not as if the goalies are making spectacular saves against them either. They regularly get stoned on mundane shots—that is, if they get a shot off at all. It’s embarrassing!

I’d agree with the criticisms of Marleau; his speed is remarkable and he’s got a spectacular shot, but if you notice he rarely does what some of the really top scorers like Ovechekin and Jagr do which is make that little stick deke or half shot fake, and I think that’s because he’s not that great with his hands. And for a Center, his passing is definitely sub-par.

McLaren I agree makes mistakes sometimes, but I sort of overlook it for a couple of reasons: One, he hardly ever does what a lot of the younger rookies do which is cough up a turnover high in the neutral zone which almost always leads to breakaways or short, transitional odd man rushes that are simply murder. If he does turn it over it is typically on a mistimed or poorly executed pass to the point which certainly isn’t something to praise, but isn’t a deadly mistake. Secondly some of his defensive zone gaffes come from his physical play. I mean, if you whiff on a six-stride hip check, you’re going to be out of position for several pivotal seconds. Still, I’d rather see him try the check and miss occasionally than not even try at all and just stand there swinging his stick back and forth.

You know, like Rathje used to do every shift, every game.

And there’s nothing I can say except to express full agreement that the weak point on the Sharks is their D. I’d say that a lot of Nabokov’s woes this season are due to the Shark’s defense struggling in the early part of the year and the offense being inconsistent which left Nabokov feeling like he had to win games on his own. When he wasn’t able to do that I think it may have shaken his confidence and left him struggling to get his game back.

Before I say anything myself about the Sharks in the shootout, I’d like to direct your attention to a San Francisco Chronicle article describing how the shootout has actively hurt the Sharks—and only the Sharks—this year. I’m not sure what the problem is. Obviously the Sharks have some great goal-scorers. They haven’t faced a Shark-killer like CuJo or Turco every time they’ve gotten to the tie-breaker and I’ve even seen San Jose goalies put on some impressive performances trying to keep the Sharks in the contest. But somehow they just can’t seem to get the job done.

What gives?

My only theory is that Ron Wilson simply didn’t think at the the beginning of the season that it was really going to matter that much. At the point of the shootout there’s already one point on your side and maybe he just thought, “We’ve got enough snipers on the team to pull us through and that will be enough” and didn’t practice it at all. Whereas you look at the Dallas Stars who’ve only lost one shootout this year, they told everyone that they had practiced the shootout like mad. You think the Sharks wish they had the 11 points Dallas earned from shootouts?

Exactly.

The Character of the Team

I feel like talking about the Sharks because Saturday’s overtime loss may have been overlooked as an insignificant event in light of the one point and Edmonton’s loss moving San Jose one point closer but not really being a huge move either way.

In case you missed it, San Jose played their second game against the Coyotes in three nights and after having been soundly beaten on Thursday they looked to be back in low form during a second period meltdown that put them down 0-3 going into the last twenty minutes of play. Randy Hahn and Drew Remenda, Sharks TV announcers, noted as the period began that that final period would be very telling as to what this Sharks team is really all about this year.

When all was said and done the Sharks lost during the 4-on-4 overtime which was certainly disappointing but when you consider that they were on the penalty kill when the winning goal was scored and you note that they had some very real chances of winning shorthanded (that is to say, they almost scored at least three times with only three men on the ice) plus they had just battled back from a deep deficit and the penalty called against Matt Carle was dubious at best (as were most of the calls, going both directions, all night long), well let’s just say if there is such a thing as a moral victory, this was one.

Here’s the thing about the Sharks: They’re a very good team on paper. Good enough that they really ought not to be struggling at this late stage in the game to make it into the playoffs; good enough that they should be fighting for Pacific Division Champions and not trying to elbow their way in a crowd of five or six other teams hoping for two or three low-seed playoff berths. Adding Joe Thornton has certainly improved the team, but that wasn’t really hard because the Sharks were basically atrocious in the early part of the year (remember December?).

It may be a bit early to be nitpicking each individual on this squad but I figure no one cares once the season is over (assuming the Sharks don’t make the playoffs as I predicted) and it won’t matter if the Sharks actually do hit the post-season since a year in which one finishes in the top eight can’t really be counted as a poor effort. So regardless of what happens from here on out, here’s my decidedly un-professional opinion about the team, player by player.

Steve Bernier
Bernier has been pretty impressive this year. I like putting a big strong guy on a line with the speedy Marleau and if nothing else Bernier will be remembered in San Jose for that sublime spin-o-rama goal a couple of weeks ago. For a guy with his size he doesn’t seem too thrilled about hanging out in front of the net which is a shame, but he’s definitely got potential as he continues to improve and learns how much his strength can be an asset.
Matt Carle
It’s tough to say if the late season pickup of this young collegiate star is a good thing or not since he’s been seen so little at this point. I can say that I like the guy’s slapshot (hard and on target, unlike—for example—Kyle McLaren who just shoots it hard at… who knows what) and offensive D-men are a welcome presence in this club so hopefully he’ll stop taking brain-dead penalties sooner than later and work on making sure that he doesn’t push the offensive side of the equation so far that he forgets his primary responsibility which we’ve seen him do a few times already. I appreciate that there is a learning curve in the NHL but a guy coming in with this much hype is going to have a hard time working through his growing pains in the middle of a playoff race so he’ll have to get good in a hurry or I bet fans’ patience with him will be very thin.
Jonathan Cheechoo
Fans knew Cheech was something special during the last season but if you think it was just the addition of Joe Thornton that turned him from an average goal scorer into a 50-goal threat behemoth you’re not looking at the whole line. Cheechoo impresses me not just because he can bury the puck but because he’s not a Selanne-like cherry picker who sits and waits for the feed outside of hot zones; the kid forechecks like a lunatic, crashes nets, smells opportunities and capitalizes on chances. Thornton may have made him complete by understanding what he was capable of and making Cheechoo’s efforts pay off, but I think Cheechoo would have had a 35 goal season even without big Joe on the dish. When you have a dynamic duo like this, don’t worry about where it comes from or why it happens, just keep enjoying while it lasts.
Rob Davison
A remarkably average defenseman, he does nothing special either for or against his team. The quintessential warm body on the ice, he’ll occasionally throw an impressive check or make a blue line play but I wouldn’t miss him if he were gone and I don’t mind him filling a roster spot while he’s here.
Christian Ehrhoff
Ehrhoff is one of those players who is either the hero or the goat. As often as he’ll make a brilliant play he’ll drop a massive egg out there which is why watching him is so frustrating. Streaky offensively, he has finally started finding the net from the point as opposed to being a threat primarily to the corner glass. Which doesn’t mean he scores a lot, just that hopefully he’ll start making those power play shots mean something other than a free zone clear for the defense. His inability to hold a blue line is probably his biggest detriment on that side of the ice. Defensively he makes some questionable decisions way more often than I’d like, Ehrhoff has at least youth going for him and if the organization decides to keep him around hopefully he’ll continue to improve bit by bit until he eventually develops the flashes of excellence he shows and stamps out the last vestiges of youthful idiocy to become a premier defender.
Nils Ekman
Give Nils credit where due: The dude gets more dynamite chances to score than anyone else on the team. I’ve never seen so many breakaways, hard work chances and pure skill based opportunities develop as a result of Nils Ekman’s play. It’s a shame that he can’t shoot the puck to save his life. For every brilliant scoring chance laid at his feet he seems to fail to capitalize 99.999% of the time. Compare and contrast him with Jonathan Cheechoo who both benefit from Joe Thornton on their line and where Cheechoo has let his natural scoring ability sparkle with the big passer’s skills at his disposal Ekman has continued to struggle with shot placement, second efforts and finishing plays. He’s also the worst offender of the bad penalty on the whole team, taking hooking calls deep in the attacking zone for no reason, making sloppy plays on defense and constantly putting his team in a bad position at the most inopportune times. Ekman has in him, somewhere, a very good hockey player but it doesn’t seem to be coming out in this line or perhaps in this system. Bottom line: Trade bait. Sorry, Ek.
Jim Fahey
Fahey hasn’t played a ton of games this year and seems to be in the process of being replaced by the young Matt Carle. Which isn’t a bad thing since in 21 games Fahey is operating at a -11 which puts him lowest on the team in plus/minus.
Marcel Goc
Another low plus/minus player on the Sharks is Goc which I attribute to the fact that he’s lazy on defense probably because he fancies himself a sniper which his performance doesn’t seem to validate. When lower line Centers have you beat in points production (Goc has 19 points in 72 games of which only 7 are actual goals) you have some work to do and I honestly don’t see Goc making a lot of progress. He looks far too contented and even bored on the ice and if the Sharks make it to the playoffs or hope to make a serious run to the Cup next year it’s guys like Goc who are going to have to defecate or vacate the toilet.
Josh Gorges
Gorges has quietly been putting together some nice work in the Sharks’ zone since coming up mid-season. He hits hard and plays aggressively which I like and while he hasn’t been much of a threat offensively, he at least seems to have the fundamental defensive skills to become a young Hannan-type player. One to keep an eye on.
Scott Hannan
The Sharks primary ice-time guy, Hannan has been a very good zone protector for several years now and he’s still improving as he goes along. I’m happy to see Scott rushing pucks into the offensive zone on occasion now and generally looking more comfortable taking the shot than always looking for the pass. He doesn’t play quite as much of a physical game as guys like Doug Murray or Kyle McLaren but he’ll play it when it’s smart and seems to try and outthink his opponents. He is great at playing the body position game and I’ve seen him break up more than a few odd man rushes or breakaways that shows you he’s a good player to pair with a younger guy like Carle or Gorges in case one of them makes a mistake. If Scott could put a 40-point season together, that would take the Sharks a long way toward being serious Cup contenders.
Patrick Marleau
The Sharks captain has finally shaken off the slumpy woes that plagued him through his first seven years as an NHL player and the resuts have been exactly what fans have been hoping for. You don’t argue with 80 points and 32 goals from your captain and the fact that most of the year has had him playing on a line with two rookies just makes his season all the more impressive. Giving Bernier and Michalek ample time to develop into their own skills will only make this second line stronger (on other teams a 130-point line could be their number one) and Marleau better. Which is kind of scary, really. Doug Wilson and crew need to do what they must to make sure Patty is a Shark for a long time.
Alyn McCauley
McCauley did great things for the Sharks during the previous season but has been quiet this year, playing out of position on a more physical line than normal (the Sharks have seven natural Centers so someone had to play elsewhere). You’d like to see McCauley be closer to 20 goals at this point in the season but not every year can be a career defining one. If the Sharks don’t make the playoffs this year expect to see McCauley traded in the off-season or on a very short leash for the 06-07 campaign.
Kyle McLaren
Kyle McLaren must love playing defense. He’s got that classic D-man insanity in his eyes and it seems to be his life’s wor to try and peg every swollen-head sniper the Sharks face with a big fat end-over-end hip check. And it’s a blast to watch. Nothing is sweeter as a fan than seeing Selanne, Iginla or Modano smeared all over the ice trying to sneak something tricky across the blue line. For that reason alone (and the fact that he’s not horrible on the other side of the rink) I think McLaren should remain a Shark for seasons to come.
Milan Michalek
Bernier and Marleau’s linemate has quietly had a pretty darn decent rookie year with 34 points and a +6. Unfortunately his offensive production seems to have the same sort of stutter-start, streaky issues that Marleau went through for the first few years of his career. Michalek is a fast skater with good instincts and some nice moves but it doesn’t seem like he works with his line yet; almost like he’s playing with Marleau but not Bernier. A bit more chemistry on that line and it could be really, really dangerous.
Doug Murray
It’s a shame that the new NHL rules have forced guys like Murray into a supporting role because he’s an absolute hoot to watch. The way he throws checks reminds me of watching hockey back when the Sharks first came into the league and the game was grittier and nastier and there was a reason that hockey players evoked images of toothless savages. Now the game is slicker, faster and I’ll grant you overall more exciting. Still, nothing sparks a stadium crowd like a thundering, bone-rattling, glass wobbling plaster into the boards. Maybe a bit more time in the minors developing some stick skills and a shot to go with that devil-may-care body tossing will create a real force to be reckoned with. Murray is everything we always wished Rathje would be, and that’s a compliment.
Evgeni Nabokov
It’s been a rough year for Nabby. He’s been hurt, he’s been bad and he’s been good. He seems to have finally settled into being “mediocre” which is at least something. And he has been playing okay since the Olympic break… I can’t help but wonder if he suffered during the lockout last year somehow. But Nabokov hasn’t been Mr. Brilliant since his first couple of years in the league and I think with Toskala playing well lately and an impressive if little-seen netminder waiting down in the minors for his second chance, Nabby is going to have to find a way to rise above. Contract or no contract.
Ville Nieminen
Nieminen is an odd player. A checking line guy that has some finesse; a winger that acts like a d-man; a brute that shows some surprising grace on occasion. It’s fairly obvious that the Wilsons got Nieminen to put some grit out there in case of a playoff berth but he seems to have had a positive impact in the race to get there as well. Surprisingly his career numbers aren’t much to look at, but he’s got a noticeable work ethic that shows up on the forecheck, backcheck and work down low that could make all the difference in a tough final nine games.
Scott Parker
Like Nieminen and Murray, The Sheriff is a relic of a game gone by. Sad or not, hockey has moved on and this isn’t Scott Parker’s game anymore. I don’t mind having Parker on the team but if you watched him take a miserable penalty on Saturday night and get moded into a one-sided roughing penalty for trying to pick a fight it’s hard not to think of him as a liability, especially down the stretch. The Sharks could have used his gut and heart-on-the-sleeve style early in the season when they were slumping badly but at this stage of the game they need clean play and solid skills, not goons. If Parker can learn to adapt and use his abilities to lead the charge in playing a physical game (the Sharks are 500 times better when they play tight, physical hockey) without taking a bunch of idiot penalties in the process he’s going to be a huge asset. If he can’t do it without constantly putting the Sharks down a man, he’s got to be out of a job.
Tom Preissing
The Sharks best offensive threat from the blue line has started to come into his own late in the season, finding the back of the net more regularly and (importantly) at opportune times. I’d still like to see the Sharks rely a bit less on the long shot from the point on the power play but if they have to go that route at least send it Preissing’s way. If the Sharks only got to keep two defensemen from this year’s team, I’d let them all loose save Priessing and Hannan.
Patrick Rissmiller
Yet another young offensive player who hasn’t had enough time to really get over the learning curve of the NHL transition. Time will tell if he’s got what it takes but so far I haven’t seen much to really complain about.
Mark Smith
It’s a crying shame that Mark Smith doesn’t have more skill than he does. If guys like Stevenson, Michalek and Goc worked half as hard as Smith does they’d all be 25+ goal scorers. I absolutely love watching Smith play. He tries so hard and you can just tell he’s only where he is in the league because he simply never gives up. Of course this means he’s got to do a lot of compensating for his lack of raw ability so he ends up in the penalty box a lot. But he plays with heart and mind so usually I don’t mind the penalty minutes. When you consider that comparable role players like Sean Avery have more than twice as many PIMs than Smith (the most penalized Shark), you realize that we’re lucky to have Smith doing what he does.
Grant Stevenson
I was hoping for a bit more from Stevenson this year. Maybe it was just that with so many rookies on the team I had to pick one that I thought might come out of nowhere and have a spectacular year. Well that didn’t happen and honestly Stevenson has quite underwhelmed me. I hope he gets better but even if he did so on some other team, I wouldn’t be all broken up about it.
Joe Thornton
The Sharks needed a superstar. Granted, it could have been Marleau. He’s got the stuff to put up 100 points. But Marleau isn’t there yet. You know the difference between Thornton and Marleau? Thornton was ready for the NHL faster. I guess that’s why he was picked first and Marleau was chosen second. So the Sharks got both. They had to give up some fan favorites like Sturm and Stuart, but look what they got in return. 57 assists. 16 goals. +21. My only concern about big Joe is that he’s so good that sometimes the other players look to him too much to bail them out of a jam. I’ve mentioned this before but Thornton is enough of a threat to other teams just being an option, if he becomes the Sharks’ only option, the team is going to be easy to beat. Also I’ve noticed during the last few games (in which the Sharks have been in something of a slump not coincidentally) that Thornton has started to almost have too much confidence, giving up odd man rushes or breakaways due to trying to do too much by himself. Maybe he’s buying into his own hype, maybe he’s just getting too much pressure from other teams that don’t want to fall victim to the Thornton/Cheechoo machine, whatever it is he’ll need to straighten it all out if the Sharks want to make the playoffs this year. And no matter what he’ll have to keep bringing it full on next year or the Sharks are (ahem) dead in the water.
Scott Thornton
I can’t believe this guy is still on the team. Repeat after me Mr. Wilson: “I must trade Scott Thornton. I must trade Scott Thornton.” 19 points in 63 games with a -10 and 75 PIM? Buh-bye.
Vesa Toskala
I’ve been down on Toskala in the past. I’m not here to repent or try to kiss up now. I’ll grant you that he’s been the guy during this last push for a playoff spot. But is that really that he’s been spectacular or that Nabokov has been stunningly so-so? Okay, Defensive Player of the Week is good, but Toskala still makes me nervous because he doesn’t make routine stops, he always seems to fight the puck. Honestly, I don’t care as long as he wins. At this point in the season he’s beating Nabokov in virtually every non-cumulative stat category and I guess that’s why he keeps getting the nod. I still think it wouldn’t be a crime to trade him off for some added depth in the offense or bundle him with Scott Thornton for a big name defender like a Visnovsky, but I’m not sad to see him still here. Competition is good, and hopefully it will make Nabokov rise above. Then again, we’ve gambled on him before and lost Kiprusoff in the process so maybe I’m suggesting we make the same mistakes again.
Ron Wilson
Whenever a team does poorly people look at the coach. Whenever a team does really, really well, the coach gets some credit. When a team could be great but is underachieving, it seems like no one really thinks about the coach. I think Wilson did a bang-up job when he first stepped in for Beaker Sutter. He cleaned up the penalty kill first thing. But what’s up now? The Sharks penalty kill has flat out sucked most of the year. Their power play is streaky at best and Wilson can’t seem to decide if having Marleau on the point is a good idea or not. They’ve lost so many opportunities on failed 5-on-3 advantages that it simply can’t be all the players’ fault. I suspect—and this is only speculation—that Wilson is too nice of a guy. He seems to only get heated at the refs. Where’s the fire for the players that act like turds on ice? I want to see him up in the grill of a guy like Goc when he’s out there fumbling around, staring at the hot dog vendor. I want him to flat out bench a guy like Fahey when he lets a winger draw him into a bad penalty. Instead he seems oddly indifferent to his own players and that concerns me. I’ll be the first to take it all back if the Sharks pull it together but as a team they’ve been inconsistent enough and slumped often enough in critical portions of the season that some of the blame has to be levelled at the coaching staff for not making these players aware of what they’re capable of and inspiring them to live up to those expectations. I’m certainly not suggesting it’s time to start thinking about a leadership change, but I think the talent is there or nearly there, the front office seems to have a clear picture of what they want to do and the only thing that’s lacking is the day-in-day-out execution on the ice. It’s something to keep in mind.

Oh, and One Other Thing

Dude, I totally do this all the time. Now I know what to call it!

Ear to the Ground

Today is Link Day, because it’s Friday and I am the official Foe of Boredom.

  • So first up I should point out that ironSoap.info will soon be a viable fourth option for accessing this here locale, as will irnsoap.info (note the purposeful mis-spelling which has a purpose I can’t reveal at this time). The reason for the .info extravaganza? 1 and 1 is offering up to five free .info domains. You do need a credit card to register, which they hit (according to a poster on Digg) with a $6.00 charge that is immediately refunded to verify the card. I used one of those Cingular temporary rebate debit cards to register my five.
  • Secondly, and this opens the Web 2.0 portion of our show, I don’t remember if I mentioned it already but I’ve been using Netvibes as my home page in place of My Yahoo! My Yahoo! has some decent features but is generally clunky and slow. I still use it on occasion because my fantasy sports teams are listed there, but the Olympic break in the hockey season seems to have freaked it out a little and now it just has a link to the main fantasy page so even that is no longer so great. Netvibes is very beta and some of the modules have some issues, but it does have some very nice features like a notes area, weather module, configurable search box (which is less of a compelling feature what with Firefox having a built-in Google search bar) and bookmarks module. Now that I bounce between three different computers regularly, having non-system based bookmarks is important. Even better is the way Netvibes integrates with existing Web 2.0 type sites: the Del.icio.us module is rather brilliant, the RSS feeds are very nicely done (and much easier to configure than My Yahoo! RSS feeds), plus it handles Flickr feeds with flair and even has (buggy) integration with Box.net, Writely, calendar files (.ics) and IMAP or POP3 email accounts. More on some of those in a second.
  • Web surfer extraordinaire Ryan points me to a very interesting piece on Writely and Google’s potential killer app that will finally herald the end of Microsoft Word. If you haven’t checked out Writely, it’s a very slick online Word Processor. I use it all the time now. Unfortunately Google just bought it and it seems that they’ve closed registrations for a little bit, but you can send in your email address and they’ll update you when they’re accepting new accounts. I suggest you do that because Writely is free, Word is expensive; Word sucks and Writely rules. My logic is didactic, I assure you.
  • Netvibes built-in modules even turned me on to a new site: Box.net, which offers free online storage space with a Web 2.0 kick including nice Ajax-powered interface and sharing features. The free account is 1GB and if you refer five people you get a free upgrade. Not sure about the business model there, but I’ll enjoy it while it lasts.
  • Also if you still haven’t checked out Flickr, do it now. I’ll wait.
  • Also I’m seriously considering moving my hosting to DreamHost, again from Ryan’s recommendation, as they have good prices and features that make me salivate. Not so good for my keyboard perhaps, but good for websites. If you’re looking for a host, you might check them out.
  • Finally, some Sharks talk. Yes, they won last night against a team they desperately needed to beat. I still think their playoff hopes are too remote though. I liked the addition of Ville Neminen (I especially liked the expulsion of Niko Dimitrakos) and it was good to see Scott Parker back in the lineup, too. Man were there some hits in that game… good grief, I though Neminen’s hit on Ryan Smyth was going to be accompanied by lightning strikes and rain of fire. If Ryan Smyth wasn’t religious before that hit, he is now, I guarantee. Anyway, hopefully things stay positive and if the Sharks miraculously win all six games on this home stand, I’ll be happy to admit I was wrong, but I worry about Nabokov being in questionable health status. Not that I’m not happy to see Schaeffer back, but we have Toskala as the starter now and he’s… nerve-wrenching. I’m not saying he’s no good, it’s just that even the easy saves… let’s just say Toskala never looks like he’s making an easy save.
  • Update: A late addition but it must be included because it involves so many things I love: Radiohead, Grafitti, London and Animation. The song is a cover of RH’s Just and while I’m not a huge fan of tagging nor do I particularly care for wanton distruction of property, I adore clever and creative street murals some of which contains art far more visually appealing that what you might find in a gallery somewhere. In this video grafitti is animated against the buildings of London (I so very much want to visit there) in a very convincing style. Brilliant.

Beginning of the End

Should you have happened by yesterday and noted a bizarre DNS error, rest assured that it was my fault for being a slacker. I forgot to renew my domain registration so ironSoap.org/.com/.net were free for the having for roughly five and a half hours. I did manage to get the situation worked out so you’re stuck with me for at least another year. Neener.

I worked from home yesterday in a sort of unofficial capacity as I’ve been battling against a potential Jury Duty stint in a city which is as far east from my apartment as work is west. Had I gone in yesterday and been told in my 11:00 check in that I needed to be there at noon, it would have been a very long drive.

Instead I set up two laptops at the kitchen table and worked on customer problems and did research via the corporate VPN all day, pausing only to wander through intermittent monsoons to have some lunch with Nik at one of our favorite breakfast/lunch haunts.

Speaking of, it mystifies me that our town is one of those rapid-growth bedroom communities for the Bay Area and while I worked for the City there was a constant sensation of pressure by citizens and administration alike to get as much of the day-to-day necessities which are widely available in the Bay Area transposed over to our humble village. I’m talking about shopping options, services, places to work and restaurants. Especially restaurants.

There are, aside from the bevy of fast food options which I don’t really count because you can find those in Blythe, California (Town Motto: “Kill Us, Please”), perhaps two dozen restaurants in our town. Of those, ten are Mexican or Tex-Mex places. Don’t get me wrong, I like Mexican food just fine, I just wonder how many possible variations there can be on a burrito. Note here that I’m lumping those little Taquerias into the fast food category. If you add them to the sit-down Mexican restaurants, we’re talking about maybe 38% of the City’s real estate consisting of eateries serving some variety of taco/enchilada/tamale as their primary menu item. It’s disturbing.

So if you take the remaining 14 restaurants you have a few franchised staples of varying quality from the poor (Applebee’s, Denny’s, Lyon’s) to the acceptable (IHOP, Chevy’s, Hometown Buffet) to the decent (if unexciting) options (Olive Garden, Mountain Mike’s). Which means that when you get down to it, our fair city of 70,000+ people has to choose between an over-franchised-find-’em-anywhere restraurant, Mexican food, fast food or one of five restaurants that are actually local-only. Of those two are fancy-dining only because the menus are pricey. So pricey that I have yet to try either of them (special occasions around our house are usually spent at one of Nikki’s favorites since “adventurous” dining usually leads to her being “hungry” later). One is possibly the only place I could call a real contender for local favorite, except I’ll never go back to The Great Plate because we got into the Guiness Book of World Records for being the customers that received the World’s Worst Service—and this was after several visits where the service was just bad enough to make us grumble everytime someone wanted to go there. Now we don’t even bring it up. It’s been removed as an option.

The other two? One is a Chinese restaurant (I grant you it is a good one and sadly is probably the best restaurant in town that I’ve visited which is only sad because outside the restaurant-repelling forcefield that surrounds our hometown I’ve had Chinese food that is twice as good) and the other is a sushi bar which I don’t go to because sushi isn’t my favorite thing to eat (my official stance is that it’s “okay”).

That leaves only one place to go if you want a decent, different sit-down meal… and they’re only open from 7:00 am to 2:00 pm, with no dinner at all.

Anyway, that wasn’t what I was talking about.

So I worked from home yesterday and finally they told me I was dismissed so I’m not going to have to worry about dealing with Jury Duty for at least another year. What really struck me was how much I was able to get done from home. I worked from home for about a year a while back after getting laid off around the time people were coming to their senses from the whole dotcom thing so I knew I could do it, but back then I was working on a contract basis where the amount of time I put in was directly proportional to the amount of money I earned. The punishment for slacking or procrastinating or getting distracted was very plain. In this case I’m salaried so if I sit at home and watch TV instead of working, it sort of doesn’t matter—at least in terms of immediate compensation. Eventually I’m sure I’d be in hot water since you can’t hide a complete absence of productivity for long, but I didn’t expect to get almost more done at home than I do at the office.

Curious, that.

The TiVo Trial

So with the new Windows laptop lying around, I figured there were worse things I could do than try to get TiVo2Go working. I mean—hello.

The good news is that getting TV shows from a TiVo to a computer is easy. The bad news, at least in my situation, is that I switched over the wireless network from being handled by the ISP-provided router to the AirPort Express. It was a good move, and worked just shy of flawlessly except that I still have two wired devices: The XBox and the TiVo in the front room. The problem I think is that the wireless devices all see each other just fine but anything on the wired network (which is just a four-port hub in the living room hanging off the router) is invisible. So where I used to be able to transfer shows from one TiVo to another, now they act like they’re on different networks.

The easy (but relatively expensive) solution is to put the TiVo on the wireless connection with a wireless adapter (identical to the one we have in the back room). Barring that, I just have to live with not having both TiVos on the same network, which makes getting shows from the front TiVo into TiVo2Go more or less impossible.

But the whole experiment started because the back TiVo has some shows Nik has been hoarding for quite literally years but is reluctant to get rid of, despite being in need of the space she could free up by dumping them. The solution seemed obvious: Transfer them to the computer with TiVo2Go and burn them to DVD. This is where the cracks start to show.

The problem is that she doesn’t just want a DVD with some random video files on it that are only useful on a computer. She wants a DVD, and rightly so. To me, TiVo’s strategy here is bizarre: You can buy a TiVo box with a built-in DVD burner and burn your saved TV shows to DVD right there on the system. Yet, when you transfer the show to your computer via TiVo2Go, it slaps some silly DRM on there and—this is what I most don’t understand—the TiVo Desktop Software doesn’t come with an option to burn the show to disc. Why not?

Granted, TiVo isn’t exactly the most productive creator of software. Their software (on the TiVo boxes) is pretty remarkable, but their development time is dog-slow (still waiting on that OS X version of TiVo2Go) so I guess trying to compete with Nero or whatever is a little counter-productive. But I’m thinking, “Why not form some sort of strategic partnership with Nero or whomever is already doing DVD authoring/burning software and bundle parts of their suite into the TiVo Desktop so I don’t have to jump through hoops to get what I could have from TiVo themselves if I didn’t use their wonderful special TiVo2Go feature?”

Regardless, it took me a long while before I stumbled across VideoReDo, which isn’t freeware (man how I loathe Windows and it’s pay-for-standard-features model: OS X comes with the ability to burn DVDs at the system level by default and it works like a charm; most new Mac purchases also come with the iDVD and DVD Player software… what’s wrong with Microsoft? I mean, seriously) but at least gives the option to clumsily remove ads and strip off the DRM so I can get a plain MPEG that I could burn to DVD… if I had authoring software.

I tried several versions of Nero, but those didn’t work. I tried a couple of other suites but I got sick of downloading useless piles of trash again and again so eventually I came on the idea to copy the stripped MPEG over to the Mac mini and try using iDVD. It might have worked too, but it took 419 minutes to transfer a 40-minute show from one machine to the other over the network. So I still haven’t tried this experiment, but if it doesn’t work I’m not sure what my other options are: I only have a few days on the VideoReDo software trial and I certainly am not willing to fork over $50 for that and another $50 for some cheesy Windows authoring trash. Grumble.

So Long, Farewell

What I really meant to talk about today was the Sharks. I got a little distracted, it seems. Anyway: I think the Sharks are deluding themselves if they think they have a legitimate shot at the playoffs. I read an article today in which coach Ron Wilson was quoted as saying, “There’s still plenty of time left.” I laughed, out loud.

Plenty of time, huh? That might be true if the Sharks were playing well, but they’re not. They’re playing sorta okay at best. Things have cooled way off from the blistering post-Thornton trade era in December. Here’s some things I’ve noticed (I haven’t seen last night’s game so this is based only on watching other games since the Olympic break and to an extent just before):

  • They don’t play hard. Remember a month ago or whenever when I said the Sharks looked like a possible contender? I knew as I wrote that I was jinxing them, but sure enough ever since they’ve skated like they had concrete in their boots and they’ve hit like the opposing fowards have a contagious rash or something. Once in a while during the stretch they’ve kicked it up temporarily, but they haven’t played a 60 minute game since late January. It shows in the standings.
  • Their special teams are pathetic. They haven’t been too hip all year, despite kind of turning it around during their brief hot streak, but even then I’ve seen them have more 5-on-3 chances than I can remember in the previous three seasons combined. They haven’t scored on a lot of those (as an aside, if anyone can actually find some solid numbers on how many 2-man advantages they’ve had this season compared with previous years and what their production has been when they’re up by two men, I’d love to see them).
  • They’re still relying on a handful of guys to get it done. Remember the last season they played? They had five guys with 20 goals plus Korolyuk who had 19. This year they have two 20-goal scorers and they have two others who might squeak out five more goals before the end of the year and hit the mark.
  • They keep getting stumped by goalies. It seems like they either score 0-1 goals in a game after peppering a goalie (and this isn’t just against great goalies, this happens against people you go “who?” when they’re called) with dozens of shots or they score like six goals. I don’t know what Ekman’s problem is but that guy seems to get the best chances of anyone in the universe and he can’t bury the easy ones. It jumps over his stick, he doesn’t get good wood on it, he hits the post… whatever. It’s like he hates San Jose fans or something.
  • Have these D-men ever actually held a blue line? Ever? Anyone?

So unless some dramatic last-minute push comes together for the Sharks and the Oilers have a meltdown of historic proportions, I don’t see the Sharks making the playoffs. So let’s talk next year.

We know Cheechoo and Nabby will be around. Marleau is here for a while and I’d be shocked if they dealt Thornton so soon. Who’s left?

Of the old guard I think you have to give Ekman at least one more year: The guy can be exciting if nothing else but I’d have him on a short leash. He’s there to score goals and if he’s not pushing 20 by mid-season, he can fetch a decent price on the market. Alyn McCauley, Mark Smith, Scott Hannan and Kyle McLaren ought to hang around if the management knows what’s what. But I’d be looking to deal Scott Thornton right away, maybe even this season (has the trade deadline passed already? I forget). I mean, the guy doesn’t even have twenty points yet. He’s a non-presence on the ice and that’s useless.

The newbies: There are a lot of these younger guys, but then again the Sharks are a young team. The key is to weed out the ones that have potential and let someone else deal with the ones that just aren’t going to make it. I say hang onto Milan Michalek, Grant Stevenson and Steve Bernier. They show a lot of promise, or in the case of Michalek, they’re already doing quite well for young guys. Doug Murray is a great hitter and a pretty effective defenseman.. I haven’t seen anything offensive from him but sometimes you just gotta have those guys that no one gets past. Jorges looks pretty good most of the time, too, although I suspect he (and some of the other younger players) could stand to have a really talented grizzled vet around to sharpen some of the edges on their games that coaches can’t always reach.

My primary trade bait would be Toskala (aka “The Flopper”), Scott Thornton, Ryane Clowe and Niko Dimitrakos. Clowe is just going to be one of those guys who has potential that is never quite realized and Dimitrakos… well, I thought for a while he might be another Marleau who was too streaky to be really great until he figured out the nuances, but now I just think he sucks. Toskala is a decent goalie but with the Sharks giving Nabby the long contract nod, I’d rather see Schaefer get the backup role and take what we could get for Toskala. There are a lot of teams out there with much worse goalie situations than the Sharks have and maybe they can spare an offensive-minded defender or a veteran third line winger.

Sigh. See you next year.