Game 2: "Holm Opener"

Well, the Sharks lost, but it was a big bounce-back game for the fans! Maybe it was because our seat arrangements were a little different or because everyone was primed from the first game, or maybe because the referees' wives weren't sitting directly in front of us (they didn't like their husbands' terrible calls criticized). Anyway, good show, Fans! I couldn't help but notice a lot more of the calls were going against the Jackets in Game 2. Also, way to get Mike Commodore benched for the third period! Of course there's no way to prove any connection, but that's the kind of self-important, fan-aggrandizing guy I am.

Speaking of fans, the attendance to the Saturday game was even worse than Friday's! There had to have been under 10,000 people in there! It looked like the United Center two years ago. Greg Jamison was at the game; I regret not asking him when I had the chance why it is that the NHL seems content to let so many seats go empty. One would think that to "grow the game" abroad it would be best to keep the seats cheap (like, maybe, have some available for under $100) and make a killing on merchandise. The SAP Arena in Mannheim was packed and I couldn't get a scarf because the last two were sold to the people directly in front of me in line. My family and I walked around the whole arena looking for another one, but the entire place was sold out of Sharks merchandise by the second intermission!

Having now seen a regular season game from each of our two new goalies, I am not feeling very strongly one way or another. Niemi definitely outperformed Niittymaki in this pair of games, but Niittymaki did have a number of strong saves and Niemi's play wasn't overly confidence-inspiring. Certainly not enough to make me forget about the thin team defense. The words "defense by committee" scare me. I can only cling to my confidence that Doug Wilson knows what is up and that he's only waiting for the right guy...

I apologize for the lateness of this post, but I've been without internet from the end of the game until now. My throat is still sore from screaming (these back-to-back games are brutal), so I feel like I can sneak in under the statute of limitations.

Last Night's Game: Season Opener

I am happy to be typing, rather than talking, because my voice is not happy with me today. But before I begin talking about last night's game I should mention the guided tour of the city and the queens' palace, Drottningholm. Our tour guide was the same who gives tours to the Nobel Laureates and she began by telling us that she had requested to do the Sharks tour group because her daughter is best friends with Douglas Murray's sister. She even called his mom to see if we could drop by. Awesome. Also before the game my family and I hit up a thrift store two blocks from the hotel. My aunt found a Tre Kroner jersey for under ten bucks and I got a Djurgardens IF beanie for five. Tre Kroner is the Swedish national team and Djurgardens is the local team that plays in the Globe. Dan Boyle played for Djurgardens and I hear that Douglas Murray's legendary grandfather, Lasse Bjorn, was the long-time captain of the team. Lasse Bjorn has won 9 Swedish ice hockey championships, more than any other man. Marcus Ragnarsson is the current captain of Djurgardens.

And Now The Game:

The NHL doesn't seem to be concerned much with filing the seats at the Globe for these games. The cheapest tickets available are over a hundred dollars, so they couldn't even sell out the 13,500 seats there.

The atmosphere couldn't have been more different from the game in Mannheim. That exhibition game in Mannheim was riotously loud and the packed house and the beating drum sent my heart racing. As I said before, I had been expecting to be the loudest fans in attendance and to make an impression on the German fan base. Instead I found we had to speak into each other's ears just to have a conversation. The Swedish fans were cool enough, as much as you can expect for a game with no local team playing, but the fans here make me sick for home. Here in Stockholm we've got almost a whole section of traveling fans sitting together and I still don't know what to do to get more than ten of them chanting and jeering. I screamed myself hoarse that whole game at the refs, Mason, and Mike Commodore in the third period after he almost killed Jamie McGinn, but alas, it was almost all calls and no response. The fans seemed content to listen and laugh. At least our seats were above the glass and the arena was quiet; I could hear the refs calling "two minutes for charging," so I'm pretty sure those Blue Jackets heard every word and when it came time for the Sharks to give their fan salute, Joe Thornton knew exactly where we were.

Who's that? That's Kent Huskins

Hej from Stockholm! The city has been awesome so far. It's beautiful, has good public transport, everybody speaks English (notable exception: cab drivers. We must have told ours to take us to the Hilton, not the Sheraton, half-a-dozen times and he still had us within a block of the Sheraton before we got through to him) and they're all really helpful. It helps that I like colder weather. The streets are cobblestone and the architecture is ancient. It's a hipster's wet dream; bicycles have their own roads, there are coffee shops all over town, and the weather means nobody looks stupid wearing a pea coat and a scarf. Our first night here my family and I visited the Vasa museum. The Vasa is a Swedish warship dating back to the era of shipwrighting before they figured out that new ships could be designed with mathematics instead of just trial and error. The ship sunk in the harbor on its maiden voyage in 1629, but since it was in the supercold harbor the whole ship has been remarkably well preserved. It was only brought to the surface again in the 1960's. Maybe not something that I would have chosen to do, but it was definitely worth a look.

Thursday was a fan-viewable practice and a player "meet and greet." I put that in quotes because was more like the players trickling through the gauntlet of a hundred fans on their way to the bus. Just a mad scramble for autographs and pictures. There wasn't any structure to speak of, and if it had been in San Jose it would have been intolerable, but as it was with the limited number of fans on the trip it was pretty exciting to say hi to all the players, to congratulate Jumbo Joe on his new child and Niemi on his Stanley Cup (I didn't know what I was saying; it just came out), and to tell Logan Couture that it's nice for somebody awesome to be wearing the number 39 again. I overheard some guy congratulating Boyle on becoming the captain. That must've rubbed a little salt in, given that Danny Boyle had heard only minutes before that Joe Thornton had been named captain. It's interesting to see the kind of fans that have come on this trip. Most of them seem to purchase the Sharks ten-game pack or split season tickets with several other people, some are season ticket holders. But there is one thing it appears everybody had in common: no one could recognize Kent Huskins.

Eagle vs. Shark

Score: San Jose Sharks-2, Adler Mannheim-2, Sharks win shootout 2-1

On Saturday night, the second of October, SAP Arena was packed with all kinds of NHL fans. It would be easier to list the NHL teams whose jerseys I did not see. But I won't. Many of these fans had traveled to be there. We met Sharks fans from the States, Germany, Switzerland, not to mention that almost half of the other guests we saw at the hotel were wearing Gretzky Oilers jerseys, Luongo and Crosby Olympic jerseys, or giant teal foam fingers. The Germans love sport and, I have to say, it was easily the most electric preseason game I have ever attended; that arena was LOUD. I had expected to be part of a strong Sharks contingent screaming and hollering over the rest of the crowd, the pride of the Sharks showing Central Europe what it means to have one of the most dominant teams in the world's most competitive league and why the Sharks have one of the loudest buildings in that league day-in day-out. As a member of a family which has long-held season tickets in sec. 208, I have to admit: they put us to shame. From the moment the puck hit the Eis, there was nonstop drumming and singing coming from the equivalent sections behind the away team's net. And I am not referring to the drunken droning one is occasionally embarrassed to hear wafting over from somewhere around sec 212 at the Tank. I am talking about a strong, sharp unison of voices singing a variety of songs to heavy, malletted drums, so well organized that it sounded like a Japanese Taiko drum performance. Their responses to the announcer's calls were intense and precise, even militaristic, conjuring images of courtyards full of disciplined men practicing Kung Fu (okay, I watched the new Karate Kid movie featuring Jackie Chan on the plane). Anyway, I couldn't sing the chants back to you weil ich verstehe nur ein bisschen Deutsch, but they were intense. Sections 420 and 216 of SAP Arena, I salute you.

Interesting to me was the fact that the Sharks brought with them the Shark Tank's announcer Danny Miller, a lot of the montages and short features which are used on the gondola at the Tank, and also that particular keyboard-recording of "rock and roll part two" for when they score. I have since learned that that is because they brought with them director of event presentation Steve Maroni. This is also the first game I've been to in which both the home and away teams had goal-celebration music. It was extremely refreshing to see a return to home-white uniforms for this game and it was super cool to see the Sharks play on international-sized ice, on which I had never seen a game played before, and also fun to see Sharkie in Lederhosen. The wider ice really seemed to favor Mannheim, which served as a reminder to me just how unfair it was for the Vancouver Olympics to be played on NHL ice (isn't one of the prerequisites of hosting the Olympics the possession of or the willingness to construct Olympic facilities?). The San Jose forwards lost the puck just about every time they rimmed it around the boards behind the net and the defensemen, who still seem to be working on their communication, played about the same positioning I expect to see on the smaller ice surface and thereby struggled to keep the puck in when it came along the far boards. The Sharks were also not their usual, physically dominant selves. My own lack of hockey-playing experience allows me only to speculate as to whether that is a case of a slower team not wanting to be caught out of position or whether it is because the Sharks were expecting a friendly exhibition. At any rate, one thing was clear from minute one: the Germans play fast. Much faster than what we are used to in the NHL.