San Jose Sharks Play-by-Play Announcer Randy Hahn Interview

The following is the second question I posed to Sharks play-by-play announcer Randy Hahn and his response. To see the first question and answer, please check out the article at Shark-Infested Blogger .

On a nearly daily basis, the next question (in italics) and his answer will be posted in its entirety, other than to omit conversational and pensive words like "uh."

Todd McLellan talks frequently about the process. How much do you think the loss in the first round of 2009 helped the Sharks in 2010?

Boy, that’s an interesting question as far as did it help the Sharks this season. Though I guess from every negative you have to draw all the positives you can out of it.

It forced the Sharks to take a hard look at the kind of team they had and make it a better playoff battle-ready team, and changing the bottom half of the roster significantly.

They didn’t change the top half that much: (Patrick) Marleau came back, (Joe) Thornton didn’t go anywhere, (Dan) Boyle didn’t go anywhere, (Evgeni) Nabokov didn’t go anywhere. They made changes on the third and fourth lines (that) were key, made a few changes on defence, and added (Dany) Heatley.

So, it did help in the sense that it took them past that plateau this year and past the second level and got them a little closer to their goal. Unfortunately it didn’t solve all the problems because they couldn’t (get past round) three.

I hesitate to say it was a good thing that it happened—if you’re the one-seed, getting knocked out by the eight seed is terrible, (but) something good came out of it.

Do you think, similarly being swept in the conference finals will be turned into a positive for the team?

I suppose that’s possible. I don’t know that we’ll see quite the sweeping changes that we did last year.

The Sharks were better than 26 other teams at the end of the day, and we were all very disappointed to get swept. I don’t know that it feels any different to get swept than to lose in Game Seven—once you’re out, you’re out—and I think that the reality is 29 teams feel terrible at the end of the season.

Every year, 29 teams are upset and only one team, only one team wins its last game. The Sharks were part of the 29, but they were also part of the four who got as far as they did.

Will it lead to change? Certainly. There’s always going to be change—even if you win the Stanley Cup there’s changes the next year, just as there would be if you finished 30^th and had the first overall pick, you’d have changes, too.

Will the fact that they were swept lead to more changes than if they lost in six or seven games? I don’t think so because if you look at the games, Game One’s a one-goal game, Game Two wasn’t as close as any of the others, and Game(s) Three and Four were close games with the empty-netter in Game Four, so three of the four games they were right there—within a goal.

I think with free agency and salary cap will necessitate as much change as anything this year, as opposed to last year when that wasn’t quite the issue.