BY MARK SPECTOR
sportsnet.ca
VANCOUVER — The trend of losing in Round 2 graduated to losing in the first round last spring for the San Jose Sharks, and management decided it was time to make some changes. So they went out and got a swank new airplane to charter their players and coaches around the National Hockey League.
Nice.
Personally we’d have opted for goggles, scarves, and a crop duster.
“Our hurdle wasn’t the first round, it was the second round,” Joe Thornton was telling a couple of Canadian writers the other day. “So when we lost, our expectations in the locker room had been so high. Doug had to check who was going to be around and who wasn’t going to be around, and I think everyone was a little nervous for a little bit.”
So, what changed?
A new plane.
“No,” said Thornton, on whom the aircraft humour is not lost. “I think our third and fourth lines are going to be more scrappy — that’s been a knock on us — and more gritty. Definitely going to have some more bite to them. But you know, we’ve just got a lot to prove to a lot of people. We’re going to have a chip on our shoulders.”
Yes, it’s that time of year again, when Canadians will sit down at hockey drafts from coast to coast, look at a Sharks roster that now includes Dany Heatley, and say to themselves, “Well, I’ll take a few of these guys in the regular season pool, but they killed me in the playoff pool last year.”
Those of us who choose Stanley Cup champions at this time of year have been burned by and mostly moved on from San Jose, though writer Pierre Lebrun gains industry fame with his promise to pick the Sharks every year of his career until they actually win. Of course, he’s still holding his shares in Chrysler.
Sharks GM Doug Wilson called his review of the Sharks performance this past summer an 'autopsy', but in the end he left most of the major organs intact. He shipped Jonathan Cheechoo and Milan Michalek to Ottawa, Christian Ehrhoff to the Canucks, then brought in Heatley, undersized grinder Scott Nichol, journeyman Manny Malhotra, and Kent Huskins.
And then stripped the letter off of the captain, Patrick Marleau. Youch.
“There needs to be something [done] when you don’t get out of the playoffs. And it wasn’t a one-time thing,” said veteran Rob Blake, whom we would personally bestow the ‘C’ upon (though Dan Boyle would also be an astute choice). “If you look at their playoff history, they’ve won a lot of games. But they haven’t accomplished what they’ve wanted to do.”
Saying the Sharks “haven’t accomplished what they wanted to do,” is like saying the Chicago Cubs “haven’t won in a while.”
Last spring was the nadir for an excellent organization that has become the National Hockey League’s biggest head scratcher. They lost Games 1 and 2 at home to Anaheim, and were on the golf course a week later, a Presidents' Trophy winning, 53-victory Super Bust.
“We were down 2-0 before we even understood what was going on, and that was a problem,” Blake said. “We seemed to play the same way we played during the regular season, which was great. We won a Presidents' Trophy and everything. But other teams take it to another level. There has to be a different level.”
So the No. 1 question becomes: Do the terms “Dany Heatley” and “finding a different level” belong in the same sentence?
It seems Heatley’s whole premise on walking away from the Ottawa Senators — and then refusing to go to Edmonton — was to find a place to play where he could operate in anonymity away from the rink. He wants to play for Canada in 2010. Just not in Canada, that’s all.
But is that kind of attitude going to bring the urgency required to bring success to San Jose? Or is Heatley exactly the type of player the Sharks should have been trying to avoid?
“I don’t know what kind of expectations were in Ottawa after they went to the final that year,” Thornton said when asked about Heatley, “but I know our expectations the last four years — if you don’t win the Cup it’s a bust year. So he’ll probably have higher expectations coming out West than he did in the East. Because our goal isn’t just to be in the playoffs, it’s to win the whole thing.
“If you ask around the hockey world, there’s more expectations on us than on Ottawa.”
Sure, but what Heatley likes about San Jose is, only about 0.0001% of the hockey world exists in northern California. It’s simply a nice, sunny place surrounded by vineyards, where hockey moves — the odd time — from total obscurity on to the back burner.
“It is, when you get a mile away from the rink,” contends Blake. “But the expectations within there? Our team, Doug Wilson, holds those expectations very high.
“The tone is set. The standard is to win the Stanley Cup.”
It always is in San Jose.
Talk is cheap.
