SAN JOSE – One by one on Monday, the Sharks players filed in and out of the coaches office. Patrick Marleau was followed by Brent Burns, who was followed by Logan Couture, who was followed by Joel Ward, and so on and so forth.
It’s close enough to the midway point of the regular season that coach Pete DeBoer and the rest of his staff felt it was time for a review.
“Individually just kind of an update with guys on where they’re at, how I see them so far, and where I think they need to get to,” DeBoer said.
Stay in the game with the latest updates on your beloved Bay Area and California sports teams! Sign up here for our All Access Daily newsletter.
A good chunk of them needs to be better, as the Sharks now sit in fifth place in the Pacific Division with an 18-17-2 mark. They are 19th overall in the NHL with a .514 winning percentage.
Saturday’s 4-1 loss to Winnipeg was particularly dreadful, and after the head coach called it “an egg” on Saturday, DeBoer admitted on Monday that it was “maybe our poorest game of the year.”
[RECAP: Instant Replay: Jets sink Sharks behind big second period]
After many of the team’s 19 defeats, the coach hasn’t been overly displeased in his postgame media scrum. The effort has been there, even if the results were not positive.
San Jose Sharks
After Saturday’s loss, though, when it was evident that the Sharks got outworked by the Jets, who entered with just one win in their last 13 road games, DeBoer was ticked.
Monday started with a team meeting in which DeBoer recapped Saturday’s ugliness with the group.
“We didn’t play very well. Pretty disappointing,” Couture said. “We knew it was a big game and we knew we’d have to live with it for awhile, so it was tough to look back on it. We did today. Watched some video and learned some things that we didn’t do very well. We didn’t play hard enough, we didn’t compete, we didn’t battle. A lot of that is fixable.”
DeBoer emphasized that even though the Sharks were badly outplayed, there were points in the standings to be had. After all, when Burns cut the Jets’ lead to 2-1 with a second period power play goal, the Sharks came on hard after that. They just couldn’t find the tying marker before Winnipeg extended its cushion.
[KURZ: Rewind: Sharks lay perplexing 'egg' in latest home defeat]
“I think that was a game where we could have gotten some points had we kept the second or third goal out of the net,” DeBoer said. “I think that’s what the good teams do. On the nights they’re off, they still figure out a way to get points.”
“I think the one thing we’ve got is a pretty honest group here. They weren’t looking at that game kidding themselves thinking that they played an honest enough game, either. If the group is an honest group like we have here, I think it’s easier to move past it because they can recognize it and fix it.”
The Sharks will continue to practice this week, with time to fix areas of their game that need work before Thursday’s meeting with Detroit.
“I think we understand what we need to do, and we like some of our game,” Joe Pavelski said. “Just the effort and the battles the other day could have been a lot higher. That’s the biggest thing.
“To an individual, we’ll address that personally.”
And with a little push from the coaching staff, apparently.