Donuts: Sharks 1-0 Red Wings (SO)

It was a 0-0 game, I don’t have any damn jokes tonight.

Impressive effort though, holding the high-flying Sharks to zero goals while the two best defenders weren’t dressed. Pretty neat trick.

Read some paragraph fragments below.

• You know, the East is great and all, but I miss our old Western Conference friends, the Sharks in particular. So many great games between these two teams. The grass is always tealer on the other side, I guess.
• This was a big promotional night at Joe Louis Arena as the first 5,000 empty seats got free upholstery.
• Detroit’s top pair was missing as Niklas Kronwall is still looking for the rest of his face and Jonathan Ericsson’s wife was having a baby. No really, that’s exactly what E was scratched for, says ESPN. “Wife having baby”. It just looks funny, I don’t know. I would have put “Family”. Or, if you’re going to list something that awkward-sounding anyway, why not just go all out and say, “PEOPLE COMIN OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE THIS SHIT IS NUTS”
• The Sharks were missing Dan Boyle and Brent Burns, and I think these four guys being out contributed to a fairly boring game. Without those guys, there was a lot of careful puck-moving and a lack of creativity from the back end. This summed up the first 40 minutes nicely.
• Boring or not (and it got steadily less boring as the game progressed), there’s no way you can’t be happy with the defensive effort through 65 minutes against the #1 offense in the NHL. (Of course you can. You’re the Internet.)
• During the second intermission, Darren Eliot was talking and my wife opened a bag of chips. She said, “whoops, sorry, were you listening to this?” and I laughed for five straight minutes.
• Xavier Ouellet looked alright in his NHL debut. The big picture out of this one: nobody looked bad. Against the Sharks, who are very good. That’s a plus.
• At the 10:00 mark of the 2nd peirod, the Wings had taken 16 defensive zone draws against only 5 offensive zone draws, according to the FSD broadcast. From that point forward, the ice was tilted in Detroit’s favor. They ended up with three fewer shots on goal (27-24), but were the stronger team 5-on-5 (+15 Corsi.)
• With about five minutes to play, Henrik Zetterberg served up a gorgeous pass to a pinching Brendan Smith, who hit the post on what was the Wings best scoring chance of the game to that point. I’ll be the lone human walking the planet who defends Smith here — he showed great instincts there jumping into a scoring area, and didn’t have much of a target to shoot at. Trouble is, when you’ve earned the reputation Smith has of late, nobody really gives you the benefit of the doubt.
• Antti Niemi made an absurd save to nab the extra point for San Jose. They’re in that other conference though so who cares.

Let’s talk about a 0-0 game at length in the comments below, whadya say?

Go Wings.

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