With both the Colorado Avalanche and San Jose Sharks having two of the worst starts to the season that either side could have imagined, tonight represented a great opportunity for either team to get their campaign back on track.
Watching the game, you’d never have known it.
After a relatively even start, San Jose was hit with a penalty for too many men on the ice and instantly found themselves on the back foot, with Ross Colton drifting into a pocket of open space right in front of Vitek Vanecek and sniping a quick shot past him.
That began a sustained period of pressure for Colorado, made worse by a pointless penalty from Mikael Granlund. And while the Sharks had flashes of offense, with Will Smith and Granlund both showing flashes of brilliance in creating golden chances, it was Colorado who would strike, with Colton converting a beautiful pass from Rantanen and making it 2-0.
San Jose was able to pull one back on the power-play, with William Eklund doggedly picking up the rebound from a Granlund shot and hammering one past Justus Annunen right before the period ended. But any hope for carrying over momentum was thwarted by another pair of incredibly amateur penalties from the team, putting them a man down for several minutes (and two men down for a bit).
Against a team like Colorado, that would ordinarily have been the death knell, but the Avalanche failed to do anything of note on the man advantage and instead proceeded to take several penalties of their own, giving the Sharks a golden opportunity to get back in the game.
Not to be outdone by Colorado’s profligacy, San Jose was unable to do anything with the four minor penalties the Avalanche took, including a minute of a 5-on-3 advantage. And though the Sharks followed up with a period of sustained pressure in the third, it was the Avalanche who struck one final time, with Joel Kiviranta putting the Avalanche up 3-1 and giving them the cushion needed to comfortably close out the game, with Cale Makar adding an empty-netter for good measure.
San Jose will be frustrated by the result, because the team’s compete and effort were both markedly improved from the last game. But as both Will Smith and Mario Ferraro alluded to in their postgame interviews, the team’s finishing simply isn’t where it needs to be at the moment. And as Warsofsky stated in the tunnel after the game, the power play remains a serious weak point for the Sharks, who failed to even begin generating offense despite being handed a golden set of opportunities.
That makes it six straight winless games for the Sharks to start the season, and though the quality of the hockey being served up at SAP Center is undoubtedly above the miserable product given to fans last year, it serves as a reminder that the team is nowhere near what Mike Grier and Co. eventually envision them being.
Getting Macklin Celebrini and Shakir Mukhamadullin back in a couple weeks should significantly help with that, and Yaroslav Askarov, Luca Cagnoni, and Filip Bystedt have been dynamite for a red-hot Barracuda team. If things continue this way at both levels, it isn’t impossible to see them up with the big club in a few months.
For now, though, San Jose remains stuck in a rut.
