SAN JOSE – The San Jose Sharks feel they’re playing a much better brand of hockey now than they were during the first few weeks of the season.
The end results of late, though, have looked awfully familiar.
The Sharks will carry a nine-game losing streak into Thursday when they play the Winnipeg Jets, the team they last beat before they started a nearly three-week skid in which they’ve been outscored 41-14.
It’s not quite as bad as it was from mid-October to early November when the Sharks were outscored 55-12 on a 0-10-1 stretch to start the year. The Sharks right now are creating a few more scoring opportunities each game and doing a better job of preventing goals, at least at even strength.
It just hasn’t translated into any victories, and no one knows when it will. After Thursday, the Sharks (9-26-3) host the Toronto Maple Leafs, then begin a five-game road trip.
“It’s not quite 60 minutes yet for us,” Sharks coach David Quinn said. “It’s certainly a lot better but I’m tired of being just better. That doesn’t matter. You want to win hockey games and right now we’re not.”
“It’s really tough. We’ve got to find a way to get through it,” Sharks winger William Eklund said. “Everybody here is going to dig in deep.”
After losing six straight games by three goals or more, the Sharks are in a situation now where they can’t score that extra goal, make that extra save, or as was the case in Tuesday’s 5-3 loss to the Detroit Red Wings, prevent one or two glaring, game-changing mistakes.
Killing a penalty while leading by one midway through the third period, San Jose allowed a Daniel Sprong seam pass to get to a wide-open David Perron, who one-timed it past goalie Kaapo Kahkonen to tie the game 3-3. Fabian Zetterlund, on the penalty kill, lost track of where Perron was, leaving an open lane for the pass to get through.
Then with under two minutes left in regulation time, defenseman Kyle Burroughs sent the puck to the neutral zone that was collected by Perron, who sent a backhand pass to Lucas Raymond to quickly start a transition play.
Raymond then fed it back to Perron inside the Sharks’ zone, and his shot toward the net went off Burroughs’ skate and past Kahkonen for the game-winner. Burroughs was checking Dylan Larkin at the time.
The Sharks have lost games in all manners on this streak, but that was the first time they had held a third-period lead since that 2-1 win over the Jets on Dec. 12.
Which made it all the more frustrating.
“We’ve got to play winning hockey, and I’ve said this before: We just completely, at the wrong time, turn it over, fall asleep on the penalty kill,” Quinn said. “It’s clear as day what our responsibilities are and we fall asleep.”
Perron’s second goal represented another breakdown, only exasperated by a less-than-ideal line change.
“Just completely mishandled a simple breakout,” Quinn said. “We gave them the puck in the neutral zone, they throw from the corner, it goes off a skate and in, and that’s what happened. … We had complete control, the change shouldn’t have really mattered. We just gave it to them and that’s what happened.”
The loss mirrored what happened Sunday against the Colorado Avalanche, as the Sharks allowed the game-winning goal late in the third period on a delayed penalty call.
“It’s frustrating, you want to win those games when we give ourselves a chance,” Kahkonen said. “It’s been a couple of games in a row now and we couldn’t get the job done.”
Special teams have been a killer. On this losing streak, the Sharks are 4-for-22 with the man advantage and after a couple of Red Wings power-play goals, are 23-for-31 on the penalty kill.
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“We’ve got to be a little bit quicker mentally and we’ve got to be ready to shoot pucks when we get them in shooting areas. We’re not there yet,” Quinn said of the power play. “Just not crisp enough. We get some looks but not enough.
“If you’re going to have a good power play, you’ve got to be moving around constantly and have a pace and tempo to it and we’re not. We’re inconsistent with it. It’s really a microcosm of our game right now.”
The job now for Quinn is to keep everyone on the same page. After that 0-10-1 stretch to start the season, the Sharks bounced back by playing above-.500 hockey for more than a month.
How will they respond now?
“It’s frustrating. We’re losing for different reasons it seems every night,” Quinn said, “But. we’ll get out of it.”
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