SAN JOSE — After a quick trip through the Central Division, the Sharks are gearing up to play six games on home ice.
San Jose has spent 10 of the first 17 games of the season on the road, including a long five-game stint at the start of October and a back-to-back just this past week. The upcoming homestand will be the longest of the season.
“It’s always nice playing at home,” forward Tomas Hertl said, before adding: “We have to be ready, because the teams that are coming, they play really good hockey. They score a lot of goals.”
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He’s absolutely right. The Sharks host a tough crop of teams over the next two weeks, and four of them -– the Nashville Predators, Toronto Maple Leafs, Vancouver Canucks, and Calgary Flames — are in the NHL's top 10 in goals scored. That’s not exactly ideal for a team that’s unhappy with its defensive effort in back-to-back road losses.
[RELATED: Sharks' upcoming six-game homestand comes at critical, challenging time]
Instead of putting too much emphasis on the incoming competition, however, the Sharks are zeroing in on where they need to improve.
“We have a lot of things to fix in our game,” winger Joonas Donskoi said. “That’s what we’re really concentrating on.”
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Unsurprisingly, the lackluster defensive effort from Friday’s loss in St. Louis still was the big topic of conversation at Saturday’s practice back in the South Bay. With the travel in the rearview mirror, the Sharks are trying to take advantage of being back home as they improve their game, getting in the work they weren't able to on the quick roadie.
“Sometimes when you’re playing a lot of games in a small amount of time, like we do with the back-to-back, you don’t really get a lot of time talk about [issues] or have a full team practice to work on it,” defenseman Brenden Dillon explained.
Dillon agreed that the poor defense in Friday’s loss to the Blues was something the whole team was responsible for, and that the skaters in front of San Jose’s net aren’t doing enough to help their goalies.
“That shouldn’t be just one player, one goalie, one pair of D,” Dillon said. “I think it’s a five-man unit that’s going to be able to affect [the game] positively.”
Cutting down on giving the opposition grade-A chances is the first and foremost focus.
“The amount of odd-man rushes, whether that’s two-on-ones, breakaways … that’s just not us,” Dillon continued.
It’s a side of the Sharks they surely don’t want making an appearance Sunday when the Flames visit. While Calgary has won just five of its last 10 — just like San Jose -– the Flames' veterans have found an early season scoring groove, and are regularly scoring three or more goals per night. They’ve also mastered the late-game push, like when they scored five third-period goals against the Colorado Avalanche on Nov. 1 and rallied from a 4-1 deficit to win 6-5.
Nevertheless, the Sharks’ plan is to keep the focus on what they need to do better, and not what the visiting teams on this six-game homestand are necessarily doing.
“This is something want to take pride in, playing at home,” Dillon said. “I think even the last couple of games, like the Minnesota game, we got the two points but we could’ve played better in certain areas. I think that’s just focusing on things that make us successful, more so than what other teams are doing to us.”
