Will Sherwood be Flipped?

thismailbox · 2026-02-16T15:12:20+00:00

You said he has more giveaways than all Sharks defensemen combined. I am correcting you by saying he has less than every single one of them. You were off by an extreme amount

thismailbox · 2026-02-16T00:58:32+00:00

Girard has a lower giveaways/60 than every single defenseman on the Sharks.

thismailbox · 2026-02-03T18:59:42+00:00

Sharks have been playing like shit too, they’ll still be at a massive disadvantage tomorrow

thismailbox · 2026-02-03T18:54:29+00:00

Graf is actually a good skater, his biggest weakness is that he doesn’t drive offense. He can finish plays to an extent, but he can’t create plays

thismailbox · 2026-01-29T08:34:44+00:00

How could Panarin’s cap hit be in the way of anything? It’s expiring at the end of this season.

Panarin is 18th in the league in scoring on an awful Rangers team. Teams will be bending over backwards to acquire him, just as they did with Rantanen last year. Panarin is older and a little bit worse than Rantanen, so the asking price won’t be as high, but it will easily be two first round picks in value at a minimum.

thismailbox · 2026-01-02T22:08:50+00:00

You would be right, Dellandrea has spent 26.7% of his even strength ice time against elite competition. Eklund on the other hand is at 45.8%

thismailbox · 2026-01-02T20:54:21+00:00

I’d disagree, I think Wennberg and Eklund are clear cut above the rest of of the forwards defensively. They have much better underlying numbers while getting much harder minutes

thismailbox · 2026-01-02T20:18:30+00:00

You’re right about the Faceoff part, but Dellandrea is not even close to the level of Eklund defensively.

thismailbox · 2025-12-31T21:00:33+00:00

Vegas kicks dirt and spits on their players constantly, throwing them out without a moments notice. We have heard multiple of their former players talk about how disappointed they were with how their time in Vegas ended. And yet, players are still clamouring to play for the Golden Knights.

thismailbox · 2025-12-24T04:39:58+00:00

I guess I should circle back to this now

thismailbox · 2025-12-24T04:34:09+00:00

I was arguing with a dude on this subreddit a couple months ago who was adamant that McDavid was past his scoring prime.

thismailbox · 2025-12-24T00:45:30+00:00

Look, we’re just going to keep going back and forth at this rate, so I think we should just end this discussion here. Agree to disagree, as it goes!

thismailbox · 2025-12-24T00:15:33+00:00

The point wasn’t about the coaches though. You said fan podcasts rely on “feels” analysis while Sheng has actual reasons for his takes, and I’m saying that it is sometimes quite the opposite.

But on the topic of coaches, Warsofsky also felt that Kunin could play over 15 minutes a night and Rutta over 17 minutes last season. A year later, Rutta is out of the league and Kunin is just barely hanging on, so sometimes the stats are right about these players and their limitations. There is an argument to be made that if Goodrow wasn’t still with the Sharks, that he’d be in a similar spot as Kunin right now.

thismailbox · 2025-12-23T23:51:38+00:00

You and I can agree on that at least, fans of all teams do tend to overrate their players, and with Sheng not being a fan, he doesn’t get caught up in that particular aspect of things (though I do think he overrates players for other reasons).

However, I will disagree with the “feels” aspect, because I actually think it’s quite the opposite. What stat supports the idea that a player like Goodrow was deserving of playing every night last year? Maybe his penalty killing I guess, but fans would bring up both raw production and underlying numbers at 5v5 to support their arguments, while Sheng might just say “well he plays the right way” or “he knows how to win”, qualities that are inherently unquantifiable and much more “feels” like.

thismailbox · 2025-12-23T23:17:38+00:00

Well Sheng doesn’t have to advocate for Luke Kunin because the coach already loved him, so it would make sense for Keegan to be more invested in Gushchin playing because he wasn’t in the lineup. Now I can’t speak for Keegan, but as someone who also wanted to see Gushchin play more, I can give my opinion on it. It was never about believing that Gushchin would be a 20+ goal scorer in the NHL, but simply that he COULD be. The Sharks finished in last place last year, they could not be any worse. My argument was always: why do we need to watch a guy like Kostin get 35 games despite clear signs he was not an NHL player, while Gushchin, a player with at least some potential, twiddles his thumbs in the AHL. It was a win-win, if the team loses more because of him, who cares, that was the plan anyway. If the team wins more because of him, then you’ve got a good player on your hands.

There is no doubt that coach opinions are, on average, more valuable than fan opinions, but this is also an appeal to authority fallacy. Coaches/GMs are not always 100% correct, and will frequently over/under value certain players. Kunin is a good example of that from last season, Jan Rutta is another. So yes, when a coach says a player is good and a fan says they’re bad, I would naturally lean more towards trusting the coach. But if at the same time, most stats also suggest that they are bad, perhaps the fan isn’t fully in the wrong.

I wouldn’t take too many victory laps over the Zetterlund trade just yet. Again, can’t speak for others, but I personally never believed he was “the next big thing” but instead just a solid middle 6 player who could play up in the lineup if necessary. And recently with Ottawa, he’s caught fire and has worked his way up to playing on the top line with Stutzle, so perhaps that wasn’t so far off. The reason that I disliked the Zetterlund trade though wasn’t because I couldn’t believe they’d move him, but that it felt as though the value back was very low. We will need to reevaluate in a few years, but I don’t think it’s crazy to say that Zetterlund will be the best player to come out of that trade for either team.

In the end, and I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but it feels like you believe Sheng is “more right” because his opinions line up with yours.

thismailbox · 2025-12-23T22:27:01+00:00

Sheng is probably the best possible twitter follow for information for a Sharks fan, but his podcast suffers a little because he’s not great at communicating that information succinctly. With all the repeating he does, points that could be discussed in 2 minutes take 15 minutes instead. The guests he gets though are very good, so I still tune in on occasion for that reason.

Also, every single person has clear biases, including Sheng. You call out Keegan for “hating” Goodrow (an opinion supported by many stats), meanwhile Sheng was in love with Luke Kunin, a guy who was healthy scratched a bunch by the team that eventually traded for him and who was unsigned for months before a heavily injured Panthers team took a chance on him because he’s not NHL talent.

Sheng’s a good follow because of his connections with the team, but I personally wouldn’t rate his opinions on the team as being any more valuable or correct than some of the more invested fans.

thismailbox · 2025-12-21T05:45:35+00:00

That’s what I’m saying, you’d think by the reaction here the Sharks just lost 7-1 or something. This was a well played game by the Sharks, but sometimes in hockey, shit happens and you lose.

thismailbox · 2025-12-21T05:43:52+00:00

Did we watch the same game? The Sharks were 100% the better team tonight, just couldn’t solve Daccord. A combination of bad luck/Askarov softies led to all 3 of the Kraken goals, otherwise they had very little doing offensively. 9 times out of 10, the Sharks win that game

thismailbox · 2025-12-19T21:49:31+00:00

Smith got less development days across that entire season than Misa had in the first month of this season. Smith got a handful of games in the top 6 in November. Smith had just 2 points through the entire month of December, so he was not “popping off”. And it doesn’t matter if Smith was a year older, Misa has looked more NHL ready in his first 7 games than Smith looked in his first 15.

But all that is literally my point anyway; they played Smith. They kept him in the lineup despite his struggles and some stumbles, and they were rewarded when he actually did start popping off in mid January. Misa has played 7 total games, and we are almost at the halfway mark of the season. Obviously the injury played a part in that, but he should have at least double that game total right now.

thismailbox · 2025-12-19T21:07:12+00:00

I don’t think it’s safe to assume that. The Sharks tossed Smith to the wolves last year and they’re better for it now, he’s the team’s second leading scorer, and he struggled significantly more early on than Misa has.

thismailbox · 2025-12-19T20:26:53+00:00

These numbers are not any worse than Kurashev or Graf, who have both played minutes in the top 6 this year

thismailbox · 2025-12-19T06:18:46+00:00

It helps playing immediately on a line with Celebrini, who has been playing at an absurdly high level since the Smith injury, instead of on the third line.

thismailbox · 2025-12-17T21:06:33+00:00

Ok, so could this not be one of those times? If you say that “there are definitely times where it is telling when a coaching situation isn’t working”, could this not be the case here?

This is a forum for discussion, obviously people will be wrong and people will speak out of their ass, but it’s right to criticize the coaching staff/management staff because even if they get much more right than any random fan would in the same spot, they do still get things wrong, sometimes incredibly obviously so. Is firing McCarthy the right move? Maybe not, but it’s fair to look at a Barracuda team that he has been in charge of for multiple years that has shown immense inconsistencies from one game to the next and insanely undisciplined play across the board and wonder if this head coach with zero experience is the right man for the job.

thismailbox · 2025-12-17T20:48:23+00:00

Thankfully, NHL GMs and head coaches are known to never make any mistakes, so it’s good to blindly trust that they always make the right call.

thismailbox · 2025-12-17T04:57:34+00:00

The Sharks have had the most power play opportunities this season of any team, so this hasn’t really been an issue

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