One of the better "feel-good" stories of a Sharks season that at times didn't feel very good at all was Brad Winchester joining the team in training camp on a professional tryout without the guarantee of a contract before not only just earning a spot on the team but becoming one of the few Sharks to appear in each of the club's first 55 games, even enjoying a brief stint in the top six.

Winchester didn't contribute on special teams and really didn't have much use at even-strength during the limited minutes he played. Despite being extremely sheltered, as is typical of most fourth-liners, he was barely able to keep his head above water in raw Corsi and was quite a bit worse than his teammates at driving possession. Winchester also took twice as many minor penalties as he drew, regularly exposing the Sharks' weak penalty kill.

Rankings are among Sharks forwards who appeared in at least 40 games this season. 12 qualified.

FTF Grade: D. Ultimately, Winchester just wasn't a significant piece of the team, neither a net positive nor an overwhelmingly negative Ben Eager-like drag on the Sharks' fortunes. Which may have been passable considering he was entrenched in his role as a fourth-liner but his lack of impact combined with the failures of the Sharks' third line forced Doug Wilson's hand at the trade deadline to improve his team's bottom six with a myriad of moves that forced Winchester out of regular rotation and led to a vastly improved fourth line in terms of possession and outscoring. Winchester was an undisciplined player who didn't do much to help the team win and played himself out of the lineup. He shouldn't be brought back next season.

• Miroslav Satan scored twice as Team Slovakia defeated the Czech Republic 3-1 in the IIHF World Championship semifinals and will face Team Russia in the gold medal game tomorrow at 6PM PST on NBC Sports (tape delay). Zdeno Chara, who played nearly half the game, said after the win, "Obviously, since the tragedy that happened, we know it's not just for us, it's also for [Pavol Demitra]." Hard not to root for these guys, even if their success does force the IIHF official website into puns as cringe-inducing as any NHL.com headline. [IIHF]
  
• David Pollak (who, if you didn't already know was a swell guy, had some terrific and well-deserved praise for our departed heroes Jason and Matt) with a follow-up on the Elliotte Friedman report from earlier this week that stated Doug Wilson has already informed Todd McLellan he'll be back behind the bench next season, potentially with new assistants. Cryptic as always, Wilson stated, "You know I don't respond to rumors." Which of course means he also ignored our inquiries about that "RFA rights to Cam MacIntyre for Shea Weber" speculation that's been floating around. [Working the Corners]
• In which Mark Purdy refers to the Los Angeles Kings, whose 3.08 goals per game are higher than any playoff team this spring that didn't participate in that joke of a Penguins/Flyers series, as "obsessively [sticking] to a defense-obsessed game in front of a good goalie." But he only refers to the Sharks as Los Tiburones once in this column so that's progress, right? [San Jose Mercury News]
• Ellen Etchingham with an ode to the dominant performance we've seen this postseason from the Kings, who look to close up shop on the Coyotes and advance to the franchise's second ever Stanley Cup Final tomorrow afternoon. "The Rangers, as we all know, love to lie down. I can’t help but look forward to seeing LA run them over. It would be metaphorically perfect. And hockey perfect too." [Backhand Shelf]
• In something of a companion piece, Cam Charron pisses on everyone's parade by using "facts" and "evidence" to suggest we've seen this movie before and it's not likely to drag on as interminably as The Return of the King. [Backhand Shelf]

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After a 2010-11 season in which he led the Sharks defense in both relative and on-ice Corsi, even-strength +/- per 60 minutes and finished just behind Dan Boyle in even-strength points per 60 (Boyle scored at a 0.91 clip compared to Demers' 0.90) a lot was expected of Jason Demers coming into this year. He'd carried over his standout play into the 2011 postseason, once again finishing well in the black in possession despite the toughest zonestarts on the blueline, with a performance that resulted in Mike Babcock calling him the Sharks' best defenseman in the team's series against the Red Wings.

Unfortunately, much like Return of the Jedi, the third installment of Demers' career couldn't quite live up to the excellence of its predecessor. Instead of Ewoks and singing muppets, we witnessed poor positional play and decision-making by Demers in his own zone and the inexplicable deterioration of what was a consistently effective outlet pass the season prior into a neutral-zone turnover machine. Although Demers' surface stats were severely impacted by a 979 PDO that we should expect to regress next season, even league-average percentages couldn't have salvaged what was an abysmal season for Demers by the underlying numbers. Only Douglas Murray posted a lower Relative Corsi rating among Sharks defensemen than Demers' -7.9 and while Murray was playing tough minutes, Demers was starting in the offensive zone 55.2% of the time at even-strength and faced the weakest quality of competition (as measured by Corsi Rel QoC) of everyone on the blueline save for Jim Vandermeer.

Taking a closer look though reveals what most of us probably picked up on as the season wore on; the coaching staff's decision to finally give up on integrating either Colin White or Vandermeer into the lineup and instead pairing their two young right-handed puck-movers in Demers and Justin Braun on the team's third pairing worked wonders for both players' games. This chart shows Demers' possession numbers when paired with each Sharks defenseman at 5v5:

Demers was able to keep his head somewhat above water when paired with Burns, his most common partner, and he did well in limited minutes alongside Boyle but clearly the most success he had driving play this season was with Braun. As the Sharks proceed with their offseason, an important task will be finding an upgrade on Murray to play with Burns on the team's second pairing but I think they can be reasonably secure in knowing they have an excellent third defense pair for pennies on the dollar.

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It's been a while since we did an open thread on here but tonight's a big one with the Martin Hanzal-less Phoenix Coyotes traveling to Staples Center to take on the Kings in Game 3 of the conference finals with their season more or less on the line.

Corey of the excellent new NHL Numbers site has been tracking scoring chances for this series thus far and they've been every bit as lopsided as anyone who watched those two games would expect. The Kings have outchanced the Coyotes 35-25 at even-strength and 51-34 overall. Especially ridiculous has been Anze Kopitar's performance so far. The Kings star center, who should really be the Conn Smythe frontrunner at this point, is +11 in scoring chances through two games.

The puck drops shortly after 6PM PST on NBC Sports. Enjoy the game and, if the Kings win and you're hit by the crippling realization that the Sharks are very likely to be the only California team without a Stanley Cup after mid-June, please drink responsibly.

After a yearlong exile in Sweden, the Sharks' aggressive German netminder Thomas "Meth Squirrel" Greiss returned to the San Jose crease as a backup this season, his third year in that role (if you count his stunted stay in 07-08) and first behind Antti Niemi.

Greiss has long been one of the more energetic goaltenders you're likely to see manning an NHL crease. With a playing style similar to that of Winnipeg Jets starter Ondrej Pavelec, Greiss largely shuns conventional wisdom and the conservative technical play adopted by most of the NHL goaltending population to challenge shooters, position himself closer to the hashmarks than his own goal line and live (sometimes die) by the motto "when in doubt, pokecheck." In a lot of ways, he's the anti-Niemi (I'll be here all week) in that he relies heavily on his athleticism and lateral mobility to make saves. That's gotten him into trouble in the past, leaving him susceptible to some bad goals, but on the whole those types of tallies were largely diminished this season as Greiss posted some phenomenal numbers albeit over just a 19-game sample size.

San Jose's penalty kill left a lot of victims in its wake this year and unfortunately none of those were opposing power plays. The Sharks as a whole struggled due to their inability to keep pucks out of their net shorthanded with Greiss and Niemi both posting save percentages well below league-average on the PK. As we move forward in the offseason, an important thing to investigate will be the factors that resulted in those depressed save percentages. I'm firmly of the belief that team-to-team differences in shot quality are negligible at even-strength but the great JLikens of Objective NHL has shown that might not necessarily be the case on the penalty kill. PK SV% at the team level is reasonably repeatable and, perhaps more importantly, the league-wide spread in PK save percentages is actually wider than the spread in EV save percentages, strongly suggesting that there's more at work in creating the repeatability of those numbers than goaltending performance alone. But that's a discussion for another time - this is all just a long-winded way of saying that, even though Eric T. of Broad Street Hockey has demonstrated that with small sample sizes it's better to evaluate a goalie on overall SV% rather than EV SV% alone, I'll hold off on including penalty kill performance to highlight what was an incredible season at evens by Greiss. Here are the top ten goalies (min. 200 shots faced) in EV SV% during the 2011-12 season:

Not bad company at all. Especially impressive is that, although he only faced half as many shots, Greiss posted an identical EV SV% to Cory Schneider whose season is being held up across Vancouver as justification for trading arguably the best goaltender of the last decade in Roberto Luongo. As you can imagine, Greiss' season looks even better relative to his peer group of backup goalies. Bruce Peter of Eyes on the Prize recently looked at average save percentages over the past eight seasons for starters, platoon members, backups and replacement goalies. The average NHL backup in 2011-12 posted an EV SV% of .917 compared to Greiss' .931 and an overall SV% of .910 compared to Greiss' .915. Of course the main thing to keep in mind through all of this is that a 19-game sample size isn't particularly meaningful and we should probably expect Greiss' EV SV% to regress next season (although, by the same token, it's really unlikely his penalty kill SV% will once again be in the neighborhood of his abysmal 0.829). After the jump, we'll take a look at Greiss' updated career stats to gain a larger sample size by which to judge him.

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If we had to hand out a Least Valuable Player award this season (let's call it the Alexei Semenov Memorial Trophy), it's hard to imagine it going to anyone other than Michal Handzus. It was unfortunately a year of tragedy for the big Slovakian center, both on the ice and to a much greater extent off it. The death of his countryman, former teammate and extremely close friend Pavol Demitra in the horrific Lokomotiv Yaroslavl plane crash back in September cast a pall over the year and likely contributed to one of the worst seasons of Handzus' career.

Doug Wilson's decision to tender Handzus a contract on the first day of free agency in 2011 was a curious one to begin with. As we've covered extensively in the past, Todd McLellan has always opted to deploy his forwards in a power-versus-power line matching scheme, using Joe Thornton and Patrick Marleau against opposing top lines in the 2009-10 and 2010-11 seasons after utilizing Joe Pavelski in that role in McLellan's first year behind the Sharks bench, 2008-09. This has usually opened up the third line to some softer minutes, which Kyle Wellwood, Torrey Mitchell and Pavelski feasted upon last season to the tune of finishing 2nd, 4th and 10th, respectively, in Corsi/60 among forwards who appeared in at least 30 games that year. Handzus, a career-long defensive specialist, just never made much sense in that role. His acquisition presumably came either as a result of Wilson wanting to model the Sharks after the checking-line employing Canucks team they had just lost to in the Conference Finals (in which case, he should have probably discussed that with McLellan) or in the hopes that Handzus could provide a two-way presence similar to previous McLellan era third-line centers Manny Malhotra and Marcel Goc. It's safe to say that never came to fruition and the Handzus contract remains the biggest (and perhaps only) misstep by the Sharks' front office during the 2011 offseason.

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After four seasons filled with some of the best family-friendly fun that can be had on the internet, the time has come for us to hang up the keyboard and move on from our position as the Ambiguously Blogging Duo at Fear The Fin.

This decision doesn't come lightly, nor is it easy. Fear The Fin was a tremendous part of our lives for such a long time and the memories we made here are undoubtedly some of the best we'll ever have. It's not that cool to realize you've peaked in internet fame in your mid-20's, and we're certain we won't ever look at a Hamburger the same way ever again, but there comes a point in a man's life when he must decide between a bountiful harvest of hot pockets or dedicating his time to other pursuits of grandeur.

What we're trying to say is that we need more time with to re-enact famous Star Wars scenes in Matt's backyard while his mom tapes it and our significant others bake us brownies in the kitchen. Whether they fill those brownies with laxatives to try and shame us into submission is their prerogative, but rest assured we will carry on the good fight. It is our destiny.

As nerdy bloggin' types, the two of us have gotten the "It's not you, it's me" speech plenty of times over (if there's one piece of advice we can offer Derek on his way in: Never offer to show a classy lady the size of your blog. Not as suave as you think). So it feels extremely weird for us to be giving that speech to you, our wonderful community. But this has nothing to do with any of you. In fact, you're the reason that we stuck with it for so long. We've met a good number of you in person, but even the ones that we've never met we feel that we have a connection with. Even though the relationships we've built have been forged over a keyboard and worn down "z" buttons, they feel just as real to us that any that have been created in person.

The two of us barely knew each other when we started, but we can honestly say that we're great friends now and will continue to be that as we move on to other adventures. And we hope to maintain the friendships we've built with you along the way as well.

It's absolutely insane to think that this is the last time that we'll be pressing the "Publish" button on Fear the Fin. Between the two of us, we've written almost 2,000 articles and posted 20,000 comments. Not all of them were gold (anyone remember the short-lived "Acid-Induced Dreams" articles?), but we had fun with all of them. And while it became more of a job than a hobby as we grew, it was a job that we loved doing every step of the way.

We stayed up until 3 AM on weeknights podcasting and making commercials for ridiculous Sharks-themed products that we invented, much to Matt's wife's chagrin. It's not easy to record death-metal lines while keeping at a low decibel. Hell, we even got to go to and report from the NHL Draft, something that we'd dreamed about and were able to realize thanks to some great folks at SB Nation.

On that note, aside from thanking the great staff we have here, we'd also like to thank all that helped us along the way. From David Pollak giving us advice, to Brodie Brazil being a welcoming face in the dressing room, and the entire Sharks Media Relations department for looking past the blogger label, we thank you. To the guys at TFP for associating with us even when we couldn't write as much for them as either of us wanted... heck, they got us a consistent spot on national radio. There have been plenty along the way that helped to make FTF what it is now.

So even though we won't be using FTF as our personal manifesto anymore, we'll still be hanging around. And if the depths of the internet have learned anything over the last four years, it's how to goad us into a conversation that we never intended to be part of. So feel free to light the bat signal when a troll who just signed up suggests a Joe Thornton for a bag of pucks trade. Wherever there is comment board turmoil, we will be there. Like shining champions of unnecessary arguments, we will be there.

Rest assured Fear The Fin will continue to be in great hands moving forward. The Neutral has agreed to take over Managing Editor duties, and the phenomenal writing staff of mymclife, Jon Allred, Snark SD, idunno723, Ivan, and Jon W. will continue to deliver every ounce of Sharks coverage you deserve. Furthermore, we expect other writers will join the team in the coming months to help round out what is an already impressive writing lineup.

It is never easy to step away from a brand you worked so hard to build, and it is certainly never easy to say goodbye to something that was such a huge part of your life. But this decision was made much easier when we stepped back and realized that Fear The Fin will continue to be the best Sharks blog on the internet due to the talent of everyone on this writing staff.

We leave you in excellent hands.

Thank you so much for all of the memories over the last four seasons Fear The Fin. We couldn't have asked for a better group of colleagues, readers, and fans to share the ups and downs of Sharks hockey with.

Most importantly, we couldn't have asked for a better group of friends.