San Jose Sharks Get No Jumbo Joe

During my last article, with regard to the San Jose Sharks post-season, I referenced the famous Glengarry Glen Ross line, "Coffee's for closers only."

As we all know, another name for coffee is "Joe," and it often comes in jumbo sizes in a country that is always looking for artificial stimulation. As we all know, Jumbo Joe is the nickname for the Western Conference's best regular season centre, playing for the Western Conference's best regular season team.

Unfortunately for Sharks fans, we also know that neither Joe nor the Sharks carry that regular season success into the playoffs.

In 383 regular season games with San Jose, Joe is plus-106 with 116 goals and 361 assists and the Sharks have the second-best record in the league. In 45 post-season games with the team, he is minus-five with six goals and 31 assists, and the Sharks are only 22-23 and have never won more than two second round games.

In other words, as Joe goes, so goes the San Jose. In this series, he has two assists and is a minus-three, and only two teams in the league are scoring fewer goals per game than his Sharks this year.

This is not to say there are not other players to blame. When you have scored just nine goals in almost 13 periods of play, the entire offence is failing—well, except the second line—for more on the right way to play, see my companion piece entitled "Order Up: a Little Joe all San Jose Needs to Keep Them Going!"

The performance of the rest of the first line is perhaps more alarming: Dany Heatley and Patrick Marleau combined for a goal a game during the regular season, and both have yet to score one in four games. They also have just one assist a piece, and both missed wide on great scoring chances in Game Four.

“Obviously, we’d like to contribute offensively,” Marleau said. “That’s what everybody looks for, but if we’re doing things defensively and we get scoring from other areas, that’s good too." The problem is they are not stopping people, either: Heater and Patty are minus-2 and Joe is minus-3.

But Heater has been to the Stanley Cup Finals before. Patty has led this team to the Western Conference Finals. Joe has only gotten out of the first round four times in 13 playoff appearances before this season.

Thornton was asked if it’s hard to stay patient when the results haven’t been coming.
“Not at all,” he said. “I’m going to play the same way if I scored six points the last game or I didn’t score any. I’m going to play the same way and eventually it’ll come to us.”

In other words, do the same things and expect different results, a mindset I cornered Joe on during last year's State of the Sharks event. All three need to change their game, or there will be something very different—their uniforms next year.

In the meantime, it is clear they are not producing on the same line, and there is a more minor change that can take place: It is time to split them up as I had suggested before the playoffs started, and the suggestion can also be found in the aforementioned companion piece.