The game that mattered? The Sharks won that 2-1 over the
Edmonton Oilers at HP Pavilion on Tuesday night to string together
a third consecutive victory for only the second time this season.
The game within that game? That would be the
”
Battle of the Prized Rookies,
”
and the Sharks won it, too, as a four-minute stretch in the
second period alone gave Logan Couture the edge over Oiler forwards
Taylor Hall and Jordan Eberle.
SAN JOSE
The game that mattered? The Sharks won that 2-1 over the Edmonton Oilers at HP Pavilion on Tuesday night to string together a third consecutive victory for only the second time this season.
The game within that game? That would be the “Battle of the Prized Rookies,” and the Sharks won it, too, as a four-minute stretch in the second period alone gave Logan Couture the edge over Oiler forwards Taylor Hall and Jordan Eberle.
Couture got his team-high 18th goal of the season in that span to break a scoreless tie at 13:15. A little more than three minutes later with the Sharks on a power play, Dan Boyle beat Oilers goalie Nikolai Khabibulin, and the sellout crowd of 17,562 could breathe a little easier.
Goalie Antero Niittymaki made 26 saves in improving to 12-3-3, but Dustin Penner’s goal at 18:01 of the third period ruined Niittymaki’s bid for his first shutout as a Shark.
The contest featured three of the NHL’s top-scoring rookies, and it wasn’t as if Hall and Eberle didn’t have their moments. But Couture — less noticed than the two Oilers in the preseason buzz over Calder Trophy candidates — made the greater impact.
First, the Sharks had just finished killing a five-on-three but were still a man short when Couture stole the puck from Hall at the San Jose blue line. Couture raced ahead of Hall, drawing a holding penalty at 9:25 against the No. 1 pick of the 2010 NHL entry draft.
The Sharks didn’t score on the power play that followed, but on his next shift, Couture again stole the puck, this time from rookie Linus Ormak, and headed down the ice with Ryane Clowe on an odd-man rush.
After defenseman Kurtis Foster dropped to the ice while trying to break up the play, Clowe feathered the pass to Couture, who was driving the slot and chipped the puck over Khabibulin for a 1-0 lead at 13:15.
“He went down pretty quick,” Clowe said of Foster in a TV interview from the bench. “I had a pretty long stick and could get it around him.”
A holding-the-stick penalty on Oilers defenseman Ryan Whitney less than two minutes later put the Sharks on the power play, and Boyle showed patience, skating laterally after taking a pass from Patrick Marleau, finding a lane and firing the puck past Khabibulin, who had Dany Heatley parked in front of his face.
Neither team generated many scoring chances in the first period as each was limited to five shots on net, two by Eberle.
Niittymaki was tested early in the second period, however, as the Sharks had difficulty clearing the puck out of their own zone and Edmonton got off four shots in a 55-second sequence capped by pinching defenseman Tom Gilbert’s quick wrist shot from the slot.
The game came with built-in excuses if San Jose lost to the Oilers, who were on a 6-3-1 run but remained at the bottom of the Western Conference.
“It’s all there for us if we want to use it — coming home from a long road trip, Christmas around the corner, families in town,” coach Todd McLellan said after his team’s morning skate. “Any type of distraction you want to come up with, and they’re all there if we want to use them.”
McLellan, of course, also made it clear he wouldn’t be buying any of it.
“We can pull them out of a hat and use them as much as we want,” the coach said. “But that’s not what the plan is, and I’d be very disappointed if I hear anybody talk like that at the end of the night.”
Nobody in his locker room, of course, needed to talk like that this time.
— Story by David Pollak, San Jose Mercury News
