GDT: Game 13: Sharks vs. Canucks 7:00pm NBCSCA

[RayMartyniukTotems]

Man, Ferraro is a boat anchor...Rutta and Ceci aren't great but it's pretty telling that their underlying #s flip flop the moment their partners are switched. Yikes...

All I want to know is where is Mukhamadullin?

 

[stickty111]

I mean, we have a video of the player literally pronouncing his name with the J not silent, but please people keep telling us how his name is really supposed to be pronounced

Hey no need to get so riled up. I apologize. I literally found out after my post that he wants it with the J not silent

 

[weastern bias]

Mario tries and is a good guy. He’s also effective at what he does.

He literally is not effective at what he does, both the numbers and the eye test refute this, but go off

 

[hohosaregood]

If Ferraro was like 3 inches taller and equivalent strong, he'd probably be neutrally effective. He's kinda too small to play the way he does.

 

[sampler]

Re: ferraro...

I'll admit I've always been a fan, but his play has declined. Not sure if its the physical toll of his style of play, but he is no longer reliable. Hes still better than Thrun and still an NHLer, but hes not a top 4 Dman anymore. He has too many turnovers and just doesnt contribute offensively anymore.

Personally, Id like to see much more of Thompson. He has looked good to me at both ends and the future of the sharks D is a few top NHL vets and a combo of Mukh (maybe?), Thompson, Cags, Dick, Pohlkamp... Thrun looks like a bust to me, so Id really love to see some kids step up.

In that theme, I'd also like to see continued looks for cardwell and Gush. Rewatching the goals against yesterday, it's not on cardwell. Walman turnover for goal 1. Smith and zetterlund have horrific change for goal 2, after Smiths poor dump. And walman leaves Suter on goal 3 (sharks are 3 on 4 and just leave suter alone as walman stays by the net and goodrow makes a poor read to the boards). Cardwell is the 5th defender and makes a last second dash to suter, but its not his guy. Tough luck -2 for cards, but he was excellent.

The future is bright. the way Cagnoni is playing. Pohlkamp crushing it. BDE destroying the OHL. Thompson looks like an NHLer. Cardwell is going to be a solid 3rd line NHLer (reminds me of torrey mitchell). Smith needs to improve dramatically, but we all expect that in time. Celebrini already proved himself a top 6 forward. Bystedt and graf look good with the cuda. Good development happening, so I wanna see that continue.

PS: I still feel smith is best served in the AHL. last night he could be considered one of the top 2 reasons the sharks lost, alongside walman. He doesnt get the minus, but the 2-1 goal against is on him but for the bad dump and the bad change to compound it. Unacceptable, especially the change. I dont want him to continue to cost the sharks games...

 

[OrrNumber4]

Smith's mistakes are the exact kind that will go away with time.

Ferraro has been very frustrating, but he is playing way above his head. Also, I don't see a path for him leaving this season.

 

[Cas]

He literally is not effective at what he does, both the numbers and the eye test refute this, but go off

That's exactly what I feel - he's not effective at anything except blocking shots, and he gets so many shots to block because he's horrendous at getting the puck out of the zone.

He doesn't block zone entries. He doesn't get the puck out of the zone. He doesn't have any offensive talent whatsoever - his passing and shooting and vision and pace are well below NHL average. He doesn't box guys out of the crease. He is willing to accept physical punishment in the form of shots and absorbing hits along the boards, but he's not good at moving the puck along or around the boards or getting it away from forecheck pressure. He's not good at playing solid positional hockey or using his stick.

He's a below-average defensive player with limited physicality and zero offense. He can handle an NHL role in limited capacity, provided he has a legitimately good partner, which means he can only contribute positively on a team that is so deep that they have a real top four defenseman on the bottom pair. I do not believe he's one of the 150 best defensemen in the NHL - he's just not good at all.

 

[matt trick]

I was at the game last night... Good overall... here are the thoughts:

(....)

All in all, a good game. Vancouver controlled much of the 1st. Sharks had the edge in the second. Third was close. Basically, it was a tie game against a real cup contender. Thats excellent.

If Liljgren can play a top 4 role and contribute offensively and celly can come back fully healthy, smith improve with easier depth matchups, the sharks could make a legit run. Not likely, but this is not just a tank year anymore. that's 4 straight solid games, and the kids are improving. Im getting optimistic again...

I love your enthusiasm, but a legit run to where?

Even if San Jose can string together a .500 record for the rest of the year (twice as good as last year's season average), that would put us on pace for 77 points. In addition to a 30 point improvement being near-historic, 77 points would put us 6th last year, 8th the year before, and 11th the year before that.

I wouldn't get your hopes up too much. It's still definitely a tank year, but it's a really good draft to be top 5. We're a single point behind 4 teams (each with a game in hand). That's a pretty significant difference to last year. However, the team remains lean. Our best- or given the way Granlund has played- second best player is hurt. Others will get hurt, SJ does not yet have the depth to predictable exceed with any injuries.

 

[weastern bias]

That's exactly what I feel - he's not effective at anything except blocking shots, and he gets so many shots to block because he's horrendous at getting the puck out of the zone.

He doesn't block zone entries. He doesn't get the puck out of the zone. He doesn't have any offensive talent whatsoever - his passing and shooting and vision and pace are well below NHL average. He doesn't box guys out of the crease. He is willing to accept physical punishment in the form of shots and absorbing hits along the boards, but he's not good at moving the puck along or around the boards or getting it away from forecheck pressure. He's not good at playing solid positional hockey or using his stick.

He's a below-average defensive player with limited physicality and zero offense. He can handle an NHL role in limited capacity, provided he has a legitimately good partner, which means he can only contribute positively on a team that is so deep that they have a real top four defenseman on the bottom pair. I do not believe he's one of the 150 best defensemen in the NHL - he's just not good at all.

I'm not quite so extreme on Ferraro, I think he can be a good bottom pair D on a good team, I just think he's horribly overexposed in the role he's played here for years and it's led to him developing bad habits in an attempt to overcompensate

I DO think the organization is on the verge of missing out on a big opportunity to trade him for good value while he still strong reputation around the league, he's still seen as a good young asset because no one actually watches the Sharks, now that we actually have real NHL options on the team and several promising prospects in the pipeline it would be a big mistake not to trade him now before people figure out that he just isn't that good, we could probably still get a 2nd for him from a contender at the deadline if we take a bad contract back to offset the cap and I think we need to jump on that

 

[Star Platinum]

No offense but your complaint is a bit odd to me.

So you think that when the Sharks were consistently one of the best teams in the league, always making the playoffs, and had their one Stanley Cup finals appearance they were doing something wrong by shooting too much?

Yet now that we are consistently one of the lowest shooting, lowest scoring, and worst teams in the league, Drew is annoying/wrong to call for more shots when players pass them up during the game?

Looking at last year alone the top 5 teams in GF/Game and their respective Shots/Game:

Avs- 3.68--33.0
Toronto- 3.63--32.6
Stars- 3.59--31.6
Oilers- 3.56--33.8
Lightning- 3.51--29.3

And the Bottom 5-

Capitals- 2.63--26.5
Kraken- 2.61--28.6
Ducks- 2.48--26.8
Sharks- 2.20--25.2
Chicago- 2.17--26.3

and just for good measure the Stanley cup winning Florida- 3.23--33.7

In the playoffs as well, both Edmonton and Florida were among the top 5 in scoring per game, and were 3rd and 6th in shots per game.

Now we could sit here and debate whether those teams generate more shots because they have better players, but it still doesn't change the fact that on average, since outliers always exist, being a team that shoots the puck a lot is more likely to also be a team that scores more goals. Scoring more goals usually correlates with winning more games. So I fail to see why you take such issue with Drew wanting the players to shoot more.

I totally agree with Drew, our players pass up on WAY too many shot opportunities and opt instead to look for really poor success rate passing plays that most of our players are not good enough to even attempt in the first place. Shooting a puck on net when you have a shot is the far better play when your team is lacking in skill, its far easier to predict, it allows our players, high and low skilled ones, to get in and create chaos around the net to hopefully lead to more ugly goals, or rebound opportunities that generally require less skill to put in the net.

I'm a heterodox thinker by nature, so I'm always apt to question conventional thinking, even when other people don't.

The problem with the current Sharks on offense isn't really that they pass up too many shots, the problem is that they spend so little time in each game where they're actually controlling possession in the offensive zone that they have relatively few opportunities to ever shoot the puck to begin with and the shots that they do get tend to be more of the lower quality bad angle long-distance shots rather than the prime scoring chance shot opportunities that teams are burying on us with a high rate of success. If you look at shots on goal per game, the Sharks are below average but by no means at the bottom of the league like you might expect for a team that struggles to get out of their own defensive zone as much as they do. That tells me that they're actually shooting the puck quite a lot relative to the amount that they possess the puck.

The playoff Sharks from 2006-2019 are, in my own heterodox opinion, a bit of a unicorn squad compared to the rest of the NHL. The way that they were built was very conducive to physically dominating weaker teams and I think those teams were very good at piling up regular season wins against the weaker competition. And hopefully at some point our current Sharks will get to that point. But once you to get to playoff hockey where you don't have that physical advantage anymore (or at best, it starts to get a lot smaller), you have to start looking closer at where your deficiencies are to the rest of the league.

Putting aside the whole discussion about defense and goaltending (two areas where the Sharks were never a dominant team compared to other elite teams), the Sharks' biggest deficiencies every year offensively when they went up against other elite teams were that they were slower than the other team, their star player didn't like to shoot the puck and so it made him a bit predictable on how to defend him, and their scoring was very concentrated on one or two lines depending on the season with two other lines that often were passenger lines in the playoffs. If you go through the series where the Sharks got eliminated in the playoffs, the one recurring theme you see over and over again is that in most of them, the other team's shooting percentage was significantly higher than the Sharks. Some series the shot totals are close, a few of them the Sharks got badly outshot, and there's even a few where the Sharks outshot the other team significantly but lost anyway (the first round elimination series from Anaheim being the most extreme example).

I have no objection to Drew saying in a game that in a specific situation a guy should have shot on goal instead of looking for a pass. But the amount of time he spends talking about getting more shots on goal just reminds me of how those Sharks team would throw pucks at nets in the playoffs praying for a juicy rebound or a re-direct while other teams were using better speed and higher-level passing on a team level to eliminate us year after year.

If people don't agree, that's fine. I'm okay with not running with the herd sometimes.

 

[Star Platinum]

Hey no need to get so riled up. I apologize. I literally found out after my post that he wants it with the J not silent

It's not frustration with you personally and I apologize for that. I had read too many posts lately insisting that it was the other way and why is Randy mispronouncing his name when there was a video with him pronouncing his own name and I chose my words poorly.

 

[stickty111]

It's not frustration with you personally and I apologize for that. I had read too many posts lately insisting that it was the other way and why is Randy mispronouncing his name when there was a video with him pronouncing his own name and I chose my words poorly.

No worries man. All good. As a Leafs fan, I hope he is successful with you guys.

 

[PattyLafontaine]

All I want to know is where is Mukhamadullin?

Where in the world is Carmen San Mukhamadullin?

 

[Requin]

If we lose tonight and @Requin doesn't show up then I think we know what went wrong.


Meanwhile I'll be able to watch this one. Gave up my Giants tickets for tonight so It'll be a dual screen evening with Giants/Warriors on one and Canucks/Sharks on the other.

My humble apologies.

I can't use my powers every single game or they will become depleted!

 

[Alaskanice]

That's exactly what I feel - he's not effective at anything except blocking shots, and he gets so many shots to block because he's horrendous at getting the puck out of the zone.

He doesn't block zone entries. He doesn't get the puck out of the zone. He doesn't have any offensive talent whatsoever - his passing and shooting and vision and pace are well below NHL average. He doesn't box guys out of the crease. He is willing to accept physical punishment in the form of shots and absorbing hits along the boards, but he's not good at moving the puck along or around the boards or getting it away from forecheck pressure. He's not good at playing solid positional hockey or using his stick.

He's a below-average defensive player with limited physicality and zero offense. He can handle an NHL role in limited capacity, provided he has a legitimately good partner, which means he can only contribute positively on a team that is so deep that they have a real top four defenseman on the bottom pair. I do not believe he's one of the 150 best defensemen in the NHL - he's just not good at all.

I get that you don’t like Ferraro. You go to great lengths to “ prove” your opinion.
The facts are that he came out of college and made the team and is in his 6th year in the NHL. He’s played 343 games and has never been sent to the AHL.
Many people who know more than you or me about hockey think he is more than “ below average.” That includes managers, coaches, staff and players.
It’s also a fact that last trade deadline, those who hear stuff that we are not privy to, said he was in demand. So, according to that, others think higher of him than you do.
Personally speaking, if I have a team, I want Mario putting on my teams sweater.

 

[weastern bias]

Personally speaking, if I have a team, I want Mario putting on my teams sweater.

Personally speaking, if I have a team, I want them to play against your team

 

[Cas]

I get that you don’t like Ferraro. You go to great lengths to “ prove” your opinion.
The facts are that he came out of college and made the team and is in his 6th year in the NHL. He’s played 343 games and has never been sent to the AHL.
Many people who know more than you or me about hockey think he is more than “ below average.” That includes managers, coaches, staff and players.
It’s also a fact that last trade deadline, those who hear stuff that we are not privy to, said he was in demand. So, according to that, others think higher of him than you do.
Personally speaking, if I have a team, I want Mario putting on my teams sweater.

He came out of college onto an awful team, and his competition consisted of Tim Heed, Radim Simek, and a bunch of prospects and replacement-level depth (only Jacob Middleton has turned into a legitimate NHL player - Knyzhov and Meloche got brief chances for awful Sharks teams and have since washed out). He has remained in the NHL, on one of the worst teams in the recent history of the sport. This is a team that has played a lot of guys in the NHL who don't belong in the NHL - Jayson Megna, Radim Simek, Nicholas Meloche. Ferraro is better than them, or the even weaker depth options like Christian Jaros, Brinson Pasichnuk, and Fredrik Claesson. That's not exactly high praise.

As for your appeal to authority, I just don't care. Professional athletes are often awful judges of the quality of other players, because they're too invested in the details of the game to see the big picture. Lots of coaches and managers and staff fall short here, too. How many teams have sought just awful hockey players (by NHL standards) because they mistakenly assume that so-and-so brings something useful to the table? How many teams picked up Micheal Haley, or Ryan Reaves?

I'm sure Ferraro is in demand. That does not mean he has on-ice value, or that he has a lot of on-ice value.

 

[Alaskanice]

He came out of college onto an awful team, and his competition consisted of Tim Heed, Radim Simek, and a bunch of prospects and replacement-level depth. He has remained in the NHL, on one of the worst teams in the recent history of the sport. This is a team that has played a lot of guys in the NHL who don't belong in the NHL - Jayson Megna, Radim Simek, Nicholas Meloche. Ferraro is better than them, or the even weaker depth options like Christian Jaros, Brinson Pasichnuk, and Fredrik Claesson. That's not exactly high praise.

As for your appeal to authority, I just don't care. Professional athletes are often awful judges of the quality of other players, because they're too invested in the details of the game to see the big picture. Lots of coaches and managers and staff fall short here, too. How many teams have sought just awful hockey players (by NHL standards) because they mistakenly assume that so-and-so brings something useful to the table? How many teams picked up Micheal Haley, or Ryan Reaves?

I'm sure Ferraro is in demand. That does not mean he has on-ice value, or that he has a lot of on-ice value.

Until that day when someone pays you for your hockey decisions, I’ll appeal to their authority.
It’s easy to make all the claims you do. It also helps that you use angry language. It means little. Mario Ferraro is still going to play and be paid well by those who you down. I will choose to think that they’ve forgotten more hockey than I’ll ever know.

 

[weastern bias]

Angry language pointing to numbers and facts bad

Sanctimonious language appealing to figures of authority good

I am very smart

 

[Cas]

Angry language pointing to numbers and facts bad

Sanctimonious language appealing to figures of authority good

I am very smart

There's a further point in that, in this case, we're appealing to the authorities who have led the Sharks to a cumulative 126-207-52 record during Mario Ferraro's NHL career (that's a .395 points percentage).

 

[Alaskanice]

There's a further point in that, in this case, we're appealing to the authorities who have led the Sharks to a cumulative 126-207-52 record during Mario Ferraro's NHL career (that's a .395 points percentage).

Could be the lowest percentage of this teams history. If you believe that is solely because of Ferraro, I can say that he is one of 20 players in each game.
Again, he’s been doing this for 6 seasons. That makes him better than “ below average. “

 

[coooldude]

If Ferraro were really, really in demand, he would have been moved by now.

He's going to be a solid option on a 3rd pairing for a competitive team, he's a passable option on a second pairing mediocre team if he's the #4 and his partner can move pucks and create some offense, and he's been overmatched since we traded Burns. By all evidence he's an incredible dude and well respected in the locker room and that does matter. He's not going to be a second pairing LD on our first playoff team unless we sign a RD who is absolutely legit, or Thompson or Lily become that.

 

[Alaskanice]

If Ferraro were really, really in demand, he would have been moved by now.

He's going to be a solid option on a 3rd pairing for a competitive team, he's a passable option on a second pairing mediocre team if he's the #4 and his partner can move pucks and create some offense, and he's been overmatched since we traded Burns. By all evidence he's an incredible dude and well respected in the locker room and that does matter. He's not going to be a second pairing LD on our first playoff team unless we sign a RD who is absolutely legit, or Thompson or Lily become that.

Unless he doesn’t want to go. Grier has shown that matters to him.

 

[Cas]

Could be the lowest percentage of this teams history. If you believe that is solely because of Ferraro, I can say that he is one of 20 players in each game.
Again, he’s been doing this for 6 seasons. That makes him better than “ below average. “

Ferraro is just a symptom, but his heavy minutes are indeed one of the reasons why this team has been so bad - because they're playing bad players like Ferraro for such a large share of their minutes.

No, playing in the NHL for six seasons doesn't make a player better than below average. It just means some team - some group of people - either thought a player was worth playing, might develop into someone worth playing, or that they just didn't have anyone better.

Ryan Reaves has had a 14+ year career. He has never once averaged higher than fourth-line minutes, so he is by definition "below average." Sticking around for a long time doesn't make you good or even average - it means someone, somewhere, thinks you have utility, whether you actually do or not.

Unless he doesn’t want to go. Grier has shown that matters to him.

If Grier is a worthwhile general manager, he will do what is best for the team. If we can get a positive asset for Ferraro, that is absolutely what is best for the team.

I wouldn't pay much for Ferraro - especially not given his contract - but I'm not an NHL GM getting suckered into paying premium costs for "grit."

 

[Alaskanice]

4 different NHL coaches have given him those minutes. Each one of them over an 82 game season thought he should be out there.
Until someone pays you to give him minutes or not, I’ll defer to them. I also understand why he gets those minutes. He’s not a PMD. He’s not going to score lots of goals. He does pretty much everything else. That is valuable. NHL history proves that.
As for Reaves, he’s a product of a bygone age. There are multitudes of people that like what he brings. You don’t and I don’t but I understand it.

Ferraro is just a symptom, but his heavy minutes are indeed one of the reasons why this team has been so bad - because they're playing bad players like Ferraro for such a large share of their minutes.

No, playing in the NHL for six seasons doesn't make a player better than below average. It just means some team - some group of people - either thought a player was worth playing, might develop into someone worth playing, or that they just didn't have anyone better.

Ryan Reaves has had a 14+ year career. He has never once averaged higher than fourth-line minutes, so he is by definition "below average." Sticking around for a long time doesn't make you good or even average - it means someone, somewhere, thinks you have utility, whether you actually do or not.


If Grier is a worthwhile general manager, he will do what is best for the team. If we can get a positive asset for Ferraro, that is absolutely what is best for the team.

I wouldn't pay much for Ferraro - especially not given his contract - but I'm not an NHL GM getting suckered into paying premium costs for "grit."

Bingo.

You’re not an NHL general manager.