with sj, you have to look at nabokov’s season to really understand what happened. so nabby was in his fifth year and up to the lockout was generally regarded as a top third goalie in the league (at worst — in three of those years he finished top six in vezina voting). and then in 2006 he coughed up an absolute pile of a season.
something happened... it was as if kiprusoff’s success in 2004 broke his brain, or he had the olympics too much at the front of his mind, or the pressure of being in a contract year overwhelmed him, or he spent the lockout hanging out eating cheese fries and drinking beer for breakfast with tkachuk. but i think it was probably just a slow start compounded not long after by a shoulder injury, followed by a groin injury, and they hampered him all season — although tbf he was very good in the olympics.
so nabokov starts the season 3-2-1, plus a mop up in a game toskala got pulled in (toskala took the L) and the half game he got hurt in (a 1-1 game when nabby went down that toskala went on to lose 4-1). but despite the winning record, nabokov was expansion team-bad. 3.52 GAA, .862 SV%. among all goalies who had played a minute, he was 47th out of 61 in SV%. (but toskala was even worse: including the game nabby got hurt, the team was 3-4-1, 4.00 GAA.)
but i don’t think it was necessarily a case of the team sucking. so toskala goes on to lose the next game (a close one: 2-1), then in the next game, toskala gets hurt midway through the game and nolan schaefer spells him, coming in down 3-2 and going on to win it 5-4 in OT. and then schaefer goes on to start and win the next four games as well, before finally losing in his sixth NHL game (a respectable 3-1 loss, including an EN). if a guy who had never played in the NHL (and only ever played another 11 minutes, 20 seconds afterwards) could go 5-1-0, 1.94, .916, how bad could that team really be?
so then toskala comes back into the lineup, proceeds to give up five goals in 23 shots (lost of course), then nabokov also comes back and they let him play the entirety of the next eight games, in which he went 0-5-3, 3.19, .863.
then they trade for thornton.
so what everybody looks at is how the sharks were 8-12-4 before the trade and 36-15-7 after. and thornton didn’t do nothing, of course. in his first game, nabokov and schaefer share a shutout (nabokov gets hurt late in the third, schaefer plays his last NHL minutes). then toskala gets his first two wins of the season before nabokov comes back into the lineup. all in all, the sharks won their first six games with thornton (but then lost five of the following six). but what you really need to look at are the goalies’ respective records and stats after the thornton trade:
| record | GAA | SV% | SO |
nabokov | 13-12-3 | 2.97 | .895 | 1 |
toskala | 23-3-4 | 2.29 | .911 | 2 |
and to go even more granular, for whatever reason, coach ron wilson was really reluctant to play toskala. i mean, this is also a guy who had nolan schaefer sporting a 5-1 record and sub-2.00 GAA and he basically never played him again once his two goalies came off IR. between the thornton trade and march, the only real run of games toskala got was three straight before the olympic break and the one right after (4-0 record), likely only to mitigate against overworking nabokov, who was russia’s starter in the olympics. but then, after three straight losses (the last two by nabokov), toskala finally wins the net in early march and nabokov doesn’t get it back. from that game until the end of the regular season, san jose goes 16-4-2. nabokov plays five of those games, with a 2-3-0 record, 4.02, .852 (toskala's averaging stats are 2.14, .913). this is the big run where SJ went from eight pts out of a playoff spot to ending the season in the number five seed.
TL;DR: was it really thornton who saved SJ’s season, or was it that SJ was a good team but nabokov was destroying their season and when they finally turned the net to toskala they stopped losing?