Sunday, May 22, 2011

Home-Ice Advantage to Continue in San Jose?


Tryst'n'GrantLangdon
River Dogs
SuperstarPucking
Luck
All She
Wrote
seaherwetHollywoods
Heroes
Granny
Smith
KalenabNeils
Corndogs!!
244 points-3 points-13-17-17-21-23-23-23-25
Dany Heatley (2)x
Patrick Marleau (3)xxx
Ryane Clowe (4)x
Joe Pavelski (5)xxxxxxxxx
Logan Couture (6)xxxxxxx
Torrey Mitchell (7)x
Dan Boyle (8)xxxx
Jason Demers (9)x
Marc-Edouard Vlasic (11)xxx
Antti Niemi (12)
Daniel Sedin (1)xxxxxxxxxx
Henrik Sedin (2)xxxxxxxx
Ryan Kesler (3)xxx
Alex Edler (9)
Roberto Luongo (12)xxxxxxxx

Okay, so we have a brand new looking top 10 in the hockey pool going into Sunday afternoon's action in San Jose.  We have a new leader and that leader is now running with a partner and they're opening up a lead on the rest of the pool.  Between Tryst'n'Grant and the Langdon River Dogs, they have secured themselves into some safe quarters with a 10-point gap between themselves and 3rd place.  Both of our leaders here have the exact same teams in this series, so there won't be any movement between the two in this series at all.

There is some potential for movement in the positions below, as Superstar continues to drop down, especially with out players like Henrik Sedin or Patrick Marleau on their side.

I don't think it's unfair to say that the Canucks have had most of the control of this series, but the real problem looks to be whether or not they want to exercise that sort of control every game.  The Canucks didn't look like they wanted any part of Game Three until the 3rd period rolled around and only then did they actually manage to piece together some serious offense.  So, the real key for the Canucks, if they want to win Game Four, will be to keep control of the tempo and play the way they know they can.

Of course, injuries will play a factor, as it doesn't look like Christian Ehrhoff will be good to go, nor Aaron Rome.  Changes are expected to be made on the Vancouver blueline, but as they have shown all season long, the blueline is incredibly deep and they have a number of players that can swing in and do the job right away.

For the Sharks, they will be trying to do the same thing that they did in Game Three, jump out to that early lead, draw some calls on the Canucks and keep the puck as much as they possibly can.  The Sharks have played well in this series already, but they might have to look to generate some more offense from their bottom six, places where the Canucks are not expecting to see much offense from.

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