rollsteady

Sharks drop Game 1 to the Ducks

// April 17th, 2009 // Blog

Well that was a disappointing game. I was fired up all day long. I decided yesterday afternoon that my goal was to get the whole crowd to eerie-chant “Hiiiiilller” to try to rattle the Ducks rookie netminder. I got my section doing it a bit but the Sharks just couldn’t sustain enough pressure to make it pay off. Sure they outshot them by a 2:1 margin, but something like only 9 out of the 35 were from within 6 feet. From my vantage point (and our seats are on the end the Sharks attack twice) Hiller sure wasn’t standing on his head. He had a clear view of almost every shot he faced. They also never got their PP going in part due to the sheer dominance of Todd Marchant in the faceoff circle. So if the Sharks want to win Game 2 (which is statistically the much more important game than #1) they must do two things: 1) Get more traffic directly in front of the net — use their SIZE! and 2) Win the faceoff battle — They were #2 in the league in FO% after all and Anaheim was in the bottom half of the league in that stat.