SAN JOSE – San Jose Sharks coach Ryan Warsofsky didn’t must remind his gamers about what occurred the final time they performed the Tampa Bay Lightning.
“Our guys aren’t stupid,” Warsofsky stated Wednesday of the 8-1 drubbing the Lightning handed the Sharks final month at Amalie Area. “They remember that game pretty vividly.”
Warsofsky obtained the response he was searching for Thursday as goalie Yaroslav Askarov completed with 24 saves to assist the Sharks beat the Lightning 2-1 earlier than an introduced crowd of 11,103 at SAP Heart, snapping an eight-game shedding streak.
Tyler Toffoli and Mario Ferraro scored within the win, San Jose’s first since a 4-3 victory over the St. Louis Blues on Dec. 12.
Askarov was particularly sharp within the late going, as he made 11 saves within the remaining interval to protect the house victory. Earlier than Thursday, the Sharks had misplaced a 3rd interval 5 occasions of their final seven video games.
Toffoli opened the scoring on the 13:52 mark of the primary interval.
After Jan Rutta despatched a shot from the purpose vast of the web, Marc-Edouard Vlasic pinched down, received a battle and picked up the unfastened puck alongside the wall. He then despatched a move to Toffoli, who stickhandled round Anthony Cirelli, dragged the puck round Ryan McDonagh, and fired a shot previous Andrei Vasilevskiy for his team-leading fifteenth aim of the season.
Vlasic was making his season debut after he missed coaching camp with an upper-body harm and spent the final a number of weeks build up his conditioning. Enjoying in his 1,297th profession NHL sport, Vlasic was paired with Rutta and was a part of the workforce’s penalty kill.
“I’m 100%. I’m ready to go,” Vlasic stated Thursday morning. “Just happy I’m in and excited for tonight.”
The Sharks had been searching for a big response after their lackluster efficiency Tuesday at residence towards the Philadelphia Flyers.
Enjoying with none sense of urgency or desperation regardless of being on a seven-game shedding streak, San Jose regarded flat on New 12 months’s Eve and fell behind by three objectives by the 13:44 mark of the second interval.
The Sharks lastly responded with some ardour late within the third interval, however the Flyers had already added one other aim by that point and walked away with a 4-0 win.
Warsofsky on Wednesday known as the loss “one of our worst games of the year. We just weren’t ready from the start. We weren’t physical. We were soft in the middle of the ice. We let them set the tone of where the game was going to go, and we never got up to the speed of where the game was going.”
Since their 2-1 win over the Washington Capitals on Dec. 3, the Sharks, in shedding 11 of 12 video games, had scored a median of simply 2.08 objectives per sport, tied with the New York Rangers for the bottom whole within the NHL. The Sharks have additionally allowed a median of 4.08 objectives per sport, tied with the Flyers for many within the league.
“We’ve got to get back to being a north-south team,” Warsofsky stated.
For added motivation, the Sharks had been enjoying a Lightning workforce that blasted them by seven objectives lower than 4 weeks earlier at Amalie Area.
The Sharks needed to be extra bodily on Thursday, particularly in gentle of the accidents to forwards William Eklund and Carl Grundstrom.
Eklund missed his fourth straight sport Thursday after he was leveled by a success from Vancouver Canucks defenseman Tyler Myers on Dec. 23. Carl Grundstrom, positioned on injured reserve on Thursday, was 5 days faraway from a giant hit he absorbed from Calgary Flames defenseman Brayden Pachal.
“It’s something we addressed and talked about: we need to be more physical,” Warsofsky stated. “We’ve got to be the team to initiate the contact, and we just haven’t done that lately. I thought earlier in the year, we were more physical, we were competitive, we were in on battles. For whatever reason, we’re a step behind everything.”
