Welcome to Off The Board’s first official hockey article.

To put the San Jose Sharks into words, they are a mediocre minor league hockey team, and I say this not as an opinionated fan calling the Bruins trash. I say this as a statement. As a team, the Sharks have only put up a whopping seven points with a 3-13-1 record (Meaning three wins, 13 losses, and one overtime loss). Leading the league in the worst ways, the Sharks have only 26 goals, and 72 scored against them. 

This is the only Stanley Cup the Sharks are going to bring home:

Good thing they can get it monogrammed.

The Shark’s three wins were against the Philadelphia Flyers, Edmonton Oilers, and St. Louis Blues. To put into perspective how bad a loss to the San Jose Sharks is, it was one of the reasons that Edmonton Oilers head coach Jay Woodcroft was fired three days later, and the team hired Kris Knoblauch, the New York Rangers affiliate, Hartford Wolf Pack’s head coach.

If you are wondering how the Shark’s head coach, David Quinn, hasn’t been fired after one terrible season followed by an even worse one, I think it has to do with a multitude of reasons. The first being who would want that job. The second and main one is that there isn’t that much pressure to fire him– if the Sharks were a Canadian team, he’d have been gone after the first five losses.

Unpacking the problems that the San Jose Sharks are facing would read like a Christmas list, so I’m simply going to start with the basics; the defense has to be nonexistent or something because in two games, they had twenty goals scored against ten a piece, they also have allowed over thirty shots on net one EVERY. SINGLE. GAME. The Chicago Blackhawks (Arguably the second-worst team) have had two games under 30 shots. At this point, it is just comical, if I need to laugh at something,  all I have to do is think about the Shark’s defense.

To make matters worse, they’re putting all of their beliefs in their goalies, who, let’s just say, aren’t superstars. Mackenzie Blackwood has faced the second most shots in the league with 412– almost 50 less than Sergei Bobrovsky in twelve games. He gets an average of four goals against per game but somehow only has a .898 save percentage. For those who don’t understand, that means he’s facing at least 35 shots again, or that .898 would be way less.

To add to matters, their offense sucks too. They can’t score– their points leader, Tomáš Hertel, only has eleven and only three goals. None of the skaters have a positive plus/minus, and the only one with a zero, Daniil Gushchin, has only played 30 minutes through two games. Honestly, he might be the best player on the team– defense; he has one assist and an even plus/minus, meaning he couldn’t have been on for too many goals. 

To sum everything up, the Sharks Offence AND defense sucks. 

How could they improve this problem [The whole team]?

Get a new team. 

What would you do if you were David Quinn?

Change my identity and hop on a plane to anywhere else.

How did the Flyers lose to the team?

It’s a Philadelphia team– they can’t win anything.