The San Jose Sharks will have extra motivation when they host the Calgary Flames on Saturday night.
Battling to stay out of the league basement, the Sharks lost their sixth consecutive game with a 6-3 defeat at the hands of the Vegas Golden Knights on Friday to kick off a six-game homestand.
San Jose held a 3-2 lead through two periods but surrendered a pair of short-handed goals in the first 86 seconds of the final frame.
“We stopped skating. We stopped hunting the puck, and it ended up in the back of our net,” Sharks coach Ryan Warsofsky said. “We’ve got to learn from this. It’s got to come from within the room. We have to understand and learn what it takes to win in this league, and we don’t know what it takes to win in this league.”
The Sharks haven’t finished higher than sixth place in the Pacific Division in the past six seasons, and the organization knows it will take time to crawl back to Stanley Cup-championship contention. However, the immediate quest is to build winning habits.
“It needs to start now. It can’t start in two, three years,” Warsofsky said. “The winning foundational habits you need to win, it’s pretty simple and pretty direct. If we don’t do that, this is going to be a long process and we don’t want it to be a long process.”
The best news from Friday’s clash was that 2020 first-round draft pick Shakir Mukhamadullin scored his first NHL goal in his ninth big-league game.
“I’m trying to not think about the points, but sometimes it stays in your head,” the big defenseman said. “I feel I play with more confidence, but feel I have things to do to play better.”
The Flames return to action for the first time since claiming a 6-4 victory over the visiting Chicago Blackhawks last Saturday.
Calgary, which has collected points in four consecutive games (2-0-2), sits two points out of a playoff spot as the league resumes from the holiday break.
Between now and the 4 Nations Face-Off tournament in February, the Flames play 22 games in a 43-day span.
“It’s important for the players to recognize what they’re going to see here over the next little while,” coach Ryan Huska said. “We have 11 on the road, 11 at home, so it’s split pretty nicely for us. We have five back-to-back. So there’s a lot of hockey that’s going to be played by our team. It’s important to recognize that we’re going to need everybody to be at their best during this stretch.”
As the Flames prepare for games against the Sharks and Golden Knights on consecutive nights, they know the importance of improving their paltry 4-7-4 road record at a time play around the league takes a step to a new level.
“Always around that New Year’s time, teams are 35, 40 games into the season, playoff picture’s kind of starting to form,” forward Nazem Kadri said. “I think those points, obviously down the stretch, are huge, of course it intensifies, but that’s kind of as expected, nothing out of the norm.
“We’ve really liked some of the things we were doing before the break, so it’s just a matter of continuing to do those.”
–Field Level Media
