The Sharks are winning little races to pucks, taking away time and space from St. Louis’s elite forwards, and supporting one another in all three zones. Watch for more fearless play in Game 3 on Thursday night, especially given the Blues got shut out in Game 2. “That’s when we’re really effective is when we’re quick in the neutral zone”.
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Speed. The Sharks looked a step ahead most of Tuesday night.
In Game 2, the Sharks had a game plan, went out, and executed it to near perfection.
“When you’re playing such good teams at this point, you know you can’t afford to look past the game in front of you”, said Crosby, who’s scored the past two games after going eight straight without a goal.
In his first postseason as a No. 1 goalie, Jones has been ultra cool and remarkably stingy, with back-to-back shutouts of the Blues that lowered his postseason goals-against average to 1.89. Gerry and Wyatt Nelson of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, appeared on a “Discover Card Day with the Cup” video and the pair were invited to the radio broadcast booth and some of Wyatt’s play-by-play was aired during a break in the second period….
St. Louis’ power play generated exactly two quality chances during its four-minute advantage and Jones stopped them both – an open 30-footer by Vladimir Tarasenko and a sharp one-timer from the hashmarks by Brouwer.
“They’re also pretty good off the rush, they’re better off the rush than people give them credit for”, Couture said. “Whenever we’ve played well on the road, when we go home, we play even better”. We said it after the Nashville series: If you got a Game 7, you would rather play at home. With that said, the Blues’ 4-0 loss to San Jose was alarming, and they’ll have to pick up their intensity level if they want to have any chance at competing with a highly-skilled and driven Sharks team. We’ve made adjustments all playoffs and every one of them has worked.
“That’s the stuff we talked about”.
“You put the numbers up on the board and guys haven’t gotten all shook up because they’re on different lines because they’ve played on those lines before….” “They’re just another case – and plus they’re feeling it, too”.
It won’t be easy, though. They were short-handed five times in Game 2, including a slash behind the play by Troy Brouwer that led to the Sharks’ second goal of the game and an interference call on Steve Ott for hitting Pavelski from behind when the puck was not in the area.
“When you’re not scoring you have two choices, either be diligent and stay the program or sometimes you get forcing offense”, said Ken Hitchcock. “For whatever reason we can not control the play even though we start 200 feet from our net”. I mean, it’s a 1-1 series, probably where it deserves to be.
“It’s not something where we’re sitting here saying: ‘Oh, we can’t beat this team.’ We couldn’t beat them in the last two games, and that’s the way we’re looking at it”, Cooper said. This is familiar ground for us. “We had a lot of clean exits we could have gone with and we went the other way, got hemmed in quite a bit”. His 18 points in the playoffs are most ever by a Sharks defenseman. We were good early, not good in the second again.
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Hitchcock said the Blues this season actually have benefited from having a rash of significant, long-term injuries because it allowed the team to use all the players on the roster and use them in multiple positions.
