Perhaps it took the home schedule in this month to kick in the winter doldrums we’ve come accustomed to. One game of course does not signal anything. The Sharks, as cloudy and weird as their identity might be in a lot of places, were suffocating in their own zone. While the Hawks mustered up an acceptable number of shots, San Jose cordoned off any prime scoring areas for all 60 minutes. Their backchecking was ferocious. The Hawks love to beat a man to the outside and then hit the late man, but couldn’t do it at all tonight with the retreating Sharks’ forwards blanketing that option. Anything from the outside the pretty sizable Martin Jones is going to stop. Tonight’s shot chart tells something of a story. Hawks didn’t get much below the circles.
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