The St. Louis Blues and San Jose Sharks meet Wednesday night for game six of the Western Conference Finals at the SAP Center.
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After years of agony, heartbreak and disappointment, the Sharks are one win away from advancing to the Stanley Cup finals for the first time in franchise history, which would rewrite the narrative surrounding the team’s core group, one of the best collections of players in league history to never reach hockey’s top showcase.
The Sharks then hit what they called rock bottom last year when they missed the playoffs for the first time since 2003 but rebounded this season under first-year coach Peter DeBoer and a core anchored by players like Thornton, Marleau, captain Joe Pavelski, Logan Couture and Marc-Edouard Vlasic that have spent years trying to bring a title to San Jose.
The Sharks can win the series tomorrow night in Game six at the Shark Tank. The Sharks added two empty-net goals in the final minute, from Chris Tierney and Joel Ward, his second goal of the game.
May 23, 2016; St. Louis, MO, USA; San Jose Sharks goalie Martin Jones (31) is congratulated by goalie James Reimer (34) after defeating the St. Louis Blues in game five of the Western Conference Final of the 2016 Stanley Cup Playoffs at Scottrade Center. “He’s struggled offensively. He hasn’t got the looks offensively that he normally gets”.
“We’ve been doing so good at staying in the moment, that’s what we’re going to do”, Thornton said.
“The power-play goals obviously were a big part of it”, Agnew said. Not only that, St. Louis has fallen back into their bad habits from earlier in the series that should have had them down 3-0 coming into Game 4 instead of 2-1. “I liked the way we played in the two previous ones, simplified”. When we do that, we give ourselves a good opportunity to win.
His 17 points this postseason ties his career high when he tallied 17 in 18 games in the 2010-11 campaign. “That’s just a little more motivation to come out for that game [Wednesday] and win”.
Twice, the Blues grabbed the lead.
None of this comes as a surprise, of course, and quite frankly I’d be lying if I said my irritation with this sort of coverage outweighs my happiness that Thornton is finally getting the love he’s gotten in the Bay Area since he was traded here.
More importantly, the Blues would like to get Tarasenko going.
“If we could have eliminated the errors, there was a tremendous amount of effort today, but we did make big errors”, Hitchcock said.
But the Sharks held the lead less than four minutes before Jaden Schwartz tied it at 7:04, skating around goalmouth traffic to locate a loose puck and chip it past Jones. “Once we scored that (fourth) goal, we knew he was going to shut the door”. Backes, meanwhile, had been off the scoreboard since his power play goal in Game 1, and the slump finally ended when he assisted on another first period goal in Game 5. “I know that’s a amusing thing to say, but he’s looking for the home run”.
“We’re not anywhere near where we want to get to yet, that’s a long ways away”, he said.
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“The main part is to stay on your game and just work hard”, Tarasenko, who has seven goals and 13 points in 19 playoff games, said after the morning skate.
