San Jose Sharks-Chicago Blackhawks: Chicago Captain Leads Team to Sweep

The youngest captain in the league, Jonathan Toews, showed the San Jose Sharks leadership their team lacked by performing at his best in virtually every game this postseason. He has scored a point in 13 straight games after getting an assist Sunday afternoon.

It did not have to be like this. The Sharks out-performed the Blackhawks in most statistics, but were out-scored 13-7.

There is a pattern of the Sharks being out-played in net, but only a simpleton blames Evgeni Nabokov. They never had more than two goals in a game against Chicago, something that happened in nine of their 15 playoff games in which they scored an average of just 2.73 goals.

The fact that they won two of those nine games and won every time they scored three or more says everything that needs to be said about what this team lacked. Why they cannot score is another matter .

It looked like they were going to overcome that problem early in Game Four. Just past the mid-point of the first period, Douglas Murray kept the puck in, and Devin Setoguchi fired it toward the net. It bounced off Duncan Keith to Logan Couture, who put a quick shot past Niemi.

They were not done. On a penalty kill less than eight minutes into the second, Joe Pavelski advanced the puck and dropped it off to Marc-Edouard Vlasic, who was pinching up on the play. Vlasic slid the puck over to Patrick Marleau who put it home.

And there it was: Two goals in 28 minutes on 10 shots. The Antti Niemi equation was finally solved, and the Sharks had their first two-goal lead of the series.

Less than six minutes later, a Nabokov save of a Brent Seabrook shot was overturned on video review, and it all started to unravel. With less than two minutes to go in the epriod, Keith chipped the puck deep, Ben Eager kept it alive, and Dave Bolland shot it off Kent Huskins (the sixth of 41 goals in this playoffs to go off a Sharks defenceman) to tie the score.

Finally in the third period, with seconds to go on the Sharks' fifth penalty, Dustin Byfuglien put home a Patrick Kane centering feed for his third game-winning goal in the four-game series. Kris Versteeg added an empty-netter in the final minute to give them a 4-2 win.

Now Sharks fans are once again left to wonder what will come in this offseason, when 14 Sharks players with NHL experience will have their contracts expire. But that is a discussion for another day.