The San Jose Sharks were a big part of the 2010 Winter Olympics.
The San Jose Sharks were a big part of the 2010 Winter Olympics.
One of the best lines in hockey that season was Patrick Marleau, Joe Thornton, and Danny Heatley.
Not to mention, Dan Boyle and Marc-Edouard Vlasic were on that 2010 team as well.
The top line of the Sharks was a force to be reckoned with that year, and the world got a first-hand look at the Olympics.
RELENTLESS
Mar 1, 2010 / Vol. 63, Issue 19
By Ken Campbell
Sometimes the best opportunity to watch NHL players at work is at the end of a practice when they spend their time freelancing. That’s because it often provides a small glimpse into why they’re making millions of dollars playing hockey while the rest of us schmoes have to rent the ice at midnight and scramble to find two guys with goalie gear.
On this day at a rink in suburban Toronto, the San Jose Sharks are coming off one of their worst games of the year. But they have a spring in their step because they’ve chalked up their ninth straight road win in one of those terrible games that great teams find a way to play awful in and still win anyway.
Just as practice is winding down, Joe Thornton lines himself along the half boards on the right side, while Patrick Marleau goes to the goal line at the side of the net and Dany Heatley takes up residence about six feet north of the blue paint in front of the net. Assistant coach Trent Yawney fills the lane between Marleau and Heatley and his job is to stop the pass from getting to Heatley.
The hard pass goes from Thornton to Marleau. Heatley opens his stick for a split second and the puck is there, either with a bullet pass or a saucer over Yawney’s stick. Occasionally the pass goes into Heatley’s feet, but every one of them is drilled at the net. After a few minutes Thornton and Marleau change spots and they do it all over again with the same results.
It’s a scene that has been playing itself out many, many times this season. The Sharks’ top line of Thornton between Marleau and Heatley has been together since Nov. 20 and since that time, there hasn’t been a more physically imposing (they average 6-foot-3, 225 pounds), more offensively productive (52 goals and 130 points in 37 games) or highly paid (they earn a combined $21 million) line in the NHL. You won’t see these guys too often turning pucks around on the transition and creating oddman rushes, but their size, skill and strength allows them to work the puck down low until the other team gets tired of trying to defend them and gives them an opening.
Then they move in for the kill. And they have been deadly accurate this season.
“We’re not trying to beat people 1-on-1 with fancy toe drags and stuff like that,” Thornton said. “We’re not danglers by any stretch of the imagination.”
But they are all Olympians and put themselves in the unique position of helping each other get selected to Canada’s team. Going into this season, Heatley was the only one of the three who could have been considered a lock. Even then, his ignominious departure from the Ottawa Senators cast a black cloud over his head. Thornton and Marleau were coming off disastrous playoffs and had pretty much fallen off the world’s deepest depth chart. Marleau had been stripped of the Sharks captaincy and spent the summer as the subject of numerous trade rumors, some of them, ironically, involving Heatley.
But Marleau might be the Sharks’ best player game-in and game-out since the beginning of the season. Thornton has been brilliant and essentially took the spot everyone thought was going to Vincent Lecavalier. Heatley has emerged from the trade demand as productive and dangerous as ever. Individually, all three were impressive. Collectively, they were just too good for Hockey Canada to ignore.
And just so you know, an official name for the line is still up for grabs. That’s because the best anyone in San Jose has been able to come up with so far is ‘The Burger Line.’ Thornton is known by the nickname ‘Jumbo’ so together they’re a Jumbo-Heated-Patty. Get it?
When fellow Canadian Olympian Dan Boyle plays with them, they’re a Boiled Jumbo-Heated-Patty. Groan.
And when Marc-Edouard Vlasic joins the group, they’re a Boiled Jumbo-Heated-Patty with Pickles. Ugh.
By any name, though, the trio has been a dominant force on the ice for the Sharks, who are once again emerging as a Stanley Cup contender. The feeling in much of San Jose, though, is that this is the longest pre-season in the history of hockey because nothing any of the Sharks do will mean anything unless it translates into some kind of tangible playoff success. That has eluded this group in a very big way and, as is the case with all 30 teams in the NHL, the window of opportunity is a small one. Marleau and goalie Evgeni Nabokov couldn’t have picked a better season to be in the final year of their contracts and Thornton is due to become an unrestricted free agent in the summer of 2011.
“We’ll probably only go as far as these guys take us,” Boyle said.
Last spring, that was straight from a Presidents’ Trophy to first round roadkill at the hands of the Anaheim Ducks, who just sneaked into the playoffs. Thornton, a big lovable lug of a guy, has endured his share of criticism over the course of his career, but it had never been this pointed or this personal.
Jumbo Joe had once again become Average Joe/No-Show Joe in the playoffs. Hockey people, whoever the hell they are, were heartened by the fact Thornton dropped the gloves with Ryan Getzlaf off the opening faceoff in Game 6, but were appalled earlier in the series when he skated away from a scrum instead of throwing himself into the fray.
“Collectively we didn’t succeed last year and individually it comes back to (Nos.) 12 and 19 and a little bit of 20,” said coach Todd McLellan. “Why isn’t it there all the time (with Thornton)? Because we’re not perfect human beings. There is no perfect player.”
Nobody is demanding perfection, but Thornton can’t hide from the fact that during the regular season, only Alex Ovechkin has been more productive than he has since the lockout. But his 485 points mean a whole lot of diddly-squat because of his 35 points in 41 playoff games and the fact the Sharks haven’t been beyond the second round of the playoffs since he arrived there.
For a lot of guys, it would be enough to wipe that big, goofy grin off his face. A lot of players would have been beaten down by now. They’d be resentful and walking around with a huge chip on their shoulder. Not Thornton.
In fact, Thornton, 30, believes more strongly than ever that he will win a Stanley Cup. He is as sure of that as he was that he was going to be on the Olympic team despite the projections of others. When it comes to a championship, he speaks about when, not if, and when it happens, there will be no bold ‘shove-it-up-your-rear-end’ proclamations.
“When I win,” Thornton said, “there won’t be any finger in the air. Just gracefully hoist the Cup. If you let that stuff get to you, it would kill you. It would just kill you.”
As is the case with many players, there’s something of a chasm between the perception of the player and the reality. Thornton has not been successful in the playoffs, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t play the game with passion. Thornton can often be found at practice hours before it starts. He loves being at the rink and just because he chooses to smile doesn’t mean he doesn’t care. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt when he loses. In truth, a lot of players would love to be in the position to have their game scrutinized as closely as Thornton’s has been.
“We know how driven he is,” said Sharks GM Doug Wilson. “This is a guy we couldn’t get off the ice when he had a broken toe and strep throat. He wouldn’t miss a practice.”
But Thornton will continue to be judged harshly until he wins a Stanley Cup or at least leads his team to a long playoff run. Sounds an awful lot like another player who wore No. 19 and went 13 seasons enduring the same kind of criticism before guiding the Detroit Red Wings to the Stanley Cup. Steve Yzerman was 32 when he won his first Cup and Thornton will turn 31 this summer. In fact, that came up when Yzerman informed Thornton he had made the Canadian Olympic team.
“He just said to me, ‘Some guys have the luxury of winning when they’re young players and guys like me and you, we just have to wait a little bit longer,’ ” Thornton relayed. “It was good to hear that.”
Thornton looks forward to the day when people focus on what he brings to his game rather than what is lacking. After getting married in Switzerland to longtime girlfriend Tabea Pfendsack – she used to manage the bar where Thornton and his Davos teammates hung out during the lockout – he showed up in San Jose a month early along with 16 teammates to prepare for the season.
And where other players see sticks and legs and big bodies between them and their target, Thornton manages to see openings. He has an uncanny ability to slow the world’s fastest game down to a crawl and anyone who plays with him has to have his stick ready.
“I don’t know why you get it or how you get it,” Thornton said, “but I know when you have a lot of confidence it seems everything is in slow motion and the openings seem to be the size of groundhog holes.”
Lest you buy into the notion that Marleau is the big beneficiary of playing with two superstars such as Heatley and Thornton, perish the thought. Because, actually, the opposite might be true. While Heatley and Thornton started more slowly and really caught fire once the line was formed, Marleau was slightly more productive (1.08 points per game) for the first 23 games of the season when he centered the second line than when he moved to the left side of Thornton’s line (1.05 points per game).
“Patty is so versatile and so consistent,” Thornton said. “He has probably been our best player all year long. And he’s the nicest guy in the world.”
A little too nice to be the captain of the Sharks? Perhaps, but whatever the reason, everyone in management felt the Sharks needed a change in leadership after last season and Marleau had the ‘C’ taken off his sweater. There is no way of sugarcoating the indignity that comes along with that. No matter what the Sharks think of Marleau, they didn’t see him as the person to lead them.
That was exacerbated by a summer of trade rumors that turned out to be the product of overactive imaginations, according to Wilson.
“He had a no-trade clause and he was never asked (to waive it) and he knew he was never going to get asked,” Wilson said. “If that was the case, I wouldn’t have taken the ‘C’ off him. I would have moved him before that. He was not going anywhere.”
Marleau speaks in soft tones, as he always does, about how there wasn’t really much he could do about the trade rumors and, by all accounts, he accepted Wilson’s and McLellan’s reasoning for the change in leadership. But how could it not have stung him? How would it not have stung anyone?
“He woke up the morning after and that was the day he made a decision he was going to go one way or the other,” McLellan said. “He went the way we all knew he was going to go. If there was friction there, I don’t think we would have had any chance for success. Now when we make a decision, I might go to Patty and say, ‘Are we travelling today or tomorrow?’ I’ll go to him and ask him that because that’s how important he is.”
Of the three, Marleau is the only one who has been with the Sharks for his entire career, being selected second overall in 1997, one spot after Boston chose Thornton. Marleau has always had terrific speed and an ability to hang onto the puck. But the way he and his linemates can wear down opposing defensemen has made him even more valuable this season. He has been near the top of the race for the Rocket Richard Trophy all season, though as we spoke poolside at a Toronto hotel on a Sunday, Sidney Crosby and Ovechkin were going hammer-and-tong against each other and passing him in the Rocket race.
Technically, Thornton is the center and Heatley is the right winger, but once the puck drops, there is so much movement among the three that any one of them might be occupying any forward spot.
“The hockey sense helps,” Marleau said. “If you see a guy low, you take his spot and if another guy is in his spot, you don’t.”
Sounds reasonable enough.
When Heatley joined the Sharks, McLellan envisioned he would score most of his goals in two ways – ripping it from the high slot off the rush and getting passes from Thornton. But, in reality, Heatley has become less Mike Bossy and more Phil Esposito. The majority of his goals have had a fair bit of dirt and grease on them this season.
“I thought a great percentage of them would be rink-wide pass, one-timer, slapper to the top of the net, line up again,” McLellan said. “But he gets his nose dirty. He goes there and he’s not leaving. In probably 15 of his goals, the distance of his shot was no more than two feet.”
As is always the case with Heatley, the difference between perception and reality can be very blurry. He’s perceived as a petulant jerk for demanding a trade from Ottawa last summer, but those who play with him have nothing but praise for him as a teammate.
McLellan knew Heatley when he was GM of the Swift Current Broncos and Heatley was on his team’s protected list and worked with him when he was an assistant coach with the Canadian national junior team in 2000. Heatley played two seasons at Wisconsin instead.
“But then you hear things. You hear things,” McLellan said. “And I believe there’s a danger in always hearing and believing. He needed an opportunity to show us what he was and what he was willing to bring and I have zero complaints about him.”
Added Thornton: “When he got here, I just wanted to give him a hug and say, ‘It’s OK, bud. Everything is going to be OK.
“I tend to feel bad for guys…I just wanted to give him a big hug and tell him, ‘Hey, we love to have you out here.’ ”
The feeling is mutual for Heatley. We gave Heatley, once again, a chance to tell us exactly what went wrong with the Senators and state publicly why he wanted to leave Ottawa so badly. All he would say was it was very much for hockey reasons.
“I know it was right,” Heatley said. “I can only be myself and the people around me, they know me. I can’t change people’s opinions. At the end of the day, I’m happy.”
So we’ll just leave it at that. Let’s focus on Heatley as a player then. Combining with a player of Thornton’s ilk seemed like a natural when Heatley came onto the trade market because of their combined quick-strike ability. Thornton gets the puck, puts it on Heatley’s stick and it’s in the net. And although it hasn’t exactly worked out that way all the time, it has been a boon to the Sharks.
When Heatley played with Jason Spezza and Daniel Alfredsson in Ottawa, they were deadly on the transition and were downright scary on odd-man rushes. But they play a different brand of hockey in the Western Conference, one where the players make fewer turnovers in the neutral zone and tend not to give you much room to work. So, you have to create your room, something Heatley has managed to do this season by being a gritty player and feeding off his linemates. All three are left-handed shots, which means that as a right winger, Heatley is getting forehand passes from Thornton.
“The style we play, we know if we’re skating and getting the puck behind their defense, things can take over,” Heatley said. “All Jumbo has to do is make one pass and me or Patty make one shot and we can change the game.”
Sometimes, all it takes is a split second of eye contact. During that short time, Heatley and Thornton are communicating on an on-ice level that few elite players in the world can comprehend. But it’s not as though they’re speaking in tongues. It comes from working every day with each other at practice, learning each other’s tendencies and knowing exactly where the other is going to be and how he’s going to react to the game’s ebbs and flows.
“The first couple of games with Joe we hadn’t scored,” Heatley noted. “And he said to me, ‘Just let it happen. Just play and we’ll figure it out. It will come.’ And it has. We haven’t talked much, we’ve just gone out and played.”
The Sharks have 11 players on their team this season who weren’t there last year. With the addition of guys such as Manny Malhotra, Scott Nichol and Jed Ortmeyer, they’re much more difficult to play against, to be sure. And even though you can’t win a Stanley Cup without the contribution of the foot soldiers, it’s the stars who have to lead the way.
When the calendar turns to the middle of April, The Burger Line will be under the microscope once again. They have to find a way to avoid being shut down by their opponents when the game gets a lot dirtier and the officiating standard seems to sag a little. They welcome the scrutiny, they say, and they’re ready to make this year a special one.
“I’m not guaranteeing anything,” Thornton said. “A lot has to go right, but I like our chances. It’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of time.”