The Steve Dangle Podcast - Ovescratch | March 26, 2025

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

Grab a discount on Sharks & Barracuda tickets here: https://linktr.ee/sdpn On this episode of The Steve Dangle Podcast, 1:18 We're Still In San Jose! 5:48 The Leafs Smoke Philly & Torts Is Mad About It! 29:18 William Nylander Scores 40 Again! 37:54 Interview Sharks President Jonathan Becher 1:10:32 Ovechkin's Goal Chase Continues & Jesse Wants To Bench Him 1:26:12 Interview With San Jose Sharks F William Eklund 1:38:27 Flames & Blues Fighting For Wild-Card Spot 1:40:00 Dylan Holloway Can't Be Stopped This episode's sponsors: 🌎 Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily data plans! Use code DANGLE at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/DANGLE McDonald’s Canada’s new Smoky Maple Breakfast Sandwiches are made with a smoky maple sauce that is made from real Canadian maple syrup. Get them before 11 a.m. on the breakfast menu in-restaurant or through McDelivery. Available until April 14th, 2025 at participating McDonald’s Canada locations while supplies last Subscribe to the sdpn YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@sdpn?sub_confirmation=1 Join SDP VIP: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0a0z05HiddEn7k6OGnDprg/join Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/thestevedanglepodcast Spotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sdpvip/subscribe Follow us on Twitter: @Steve_Dangle, @AdamWylde, & @JesseBlake Follow us on Instagram: @SteveDangle, @AdamWylde, & @Jesse.Blake Join us on Discord: https://discord.com/invite/MtTmw9rrz7 For general inquiries email: [e-mail] Reach out to https://www.sdpn.ca/sales to connect with our sales team and discuss the opportunity to integrate your brand within our content! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Let's start the show. Steve Dangle podcast with your host, Steve Dangle, Adam Wilde and Jesse Blake. Are we good? Can we start now? Steve, you can stop punching the air. It's okay. All right. Steve's excited.

We're back at Fireball Cove right here in the Tech CU Center. and listen the Barracuda are playing tonight we're doing a little watch party this evening which we're very very excited about

in this arena at Calder's isn't that so fun Texiu Arena Texiu Arena get it right Adam god more

sorry that's you know this is the important branding part but we're getting kicked out we're going to be at Calder's tonight

we're going to be watching the Barracuda and then we're going to see them a couple of times in person later this week and obviously tomorrow

the Toronto Maple Leafs are in town i don't know if you've heard of them uh they're playing the san jose sharks oh yeah that's gonna be pretty interesting given my new attire how do you feel in your new can you can you explain it for people listening it is a dangle 20 sharks jersey nice teal town baby sharks truther teal town i listen they asked me and it was between dangle and truther and i really strongly considered truther but then i thought about all the people who don't get that reference who might just think i'm a super weird person you're an aaron rogers type yeah yeah yeah i'm doing ayahuasca outside

the building and then having a great time jesse you want to show off your jersey uh yeah i have a celebrini 71 there you go boy i've got my i've got i'm wearing my adam's not supporting the team i am i'm wearing my sharks t-shirt and i brought a teal shirt from my own closet so it would kind to fit out of the whole get up listen you know you can fool the people listening but the people watching know damn well that's seafoam okay it's not true it's not true also i have foam is seafoam i have my i have my will smith uh big willie styles uh jersey over there too because the sharks hooked us up do people around here make will smith will smith jokes they should do you think they should it's annoyed by it yeah i feel like that'd be annoying they're probably way

different than they would have been yes at one point you know a lot of slap jokes now yeah yeah it used to used to be oh yeah he's really running the wild west or something now it's oh he slapped that one home he chris rocked him into the boards and yeah is that a verb how long you've been holding back on that yeah wow i came up with it five seconds well that's great yeah that's great yeah you actually did have um you did an interview yesterday steve with brody brazel who is obviously part of the sharks broadcast here and uh they asked you you know like you know obviously you're a leafs fan but like are you now a sharks fan and what would you were so proud of this line i was really proud of it he's like you can't even describe how excited steve was with himself

on this one what did you say you need blue to make teal which sorry that's a banger is that true I think so Look down at your jersey I don't know I'm not a colorologist That is blue and green That's what it is Blue and green

I don't know And maybe some white I don't work at Home Depot Here's how you do it Get the paint out Alright if you were Going to Home Depot And you wanted to paint

Your entire house teal Because you're a big Sharks fan You would buy teal paint Mix two parts blue paint With one part green paint Boom And a half part yellow paint And that is how you get teal

Awesome I would have thought of yellow. Where's the yellow in your little catchphrase? In the logo. In the logo. Oh, true. What? It's in the logo.

It's in the Sharks logo. It's like a light brown. It's like a yellowy brown. It's a hockey stick. It's a brown. It's more orange. So listen, speaking of almost yellow colors, orange, Sharks, not Sharks, Phillies. Y'all, you were right close.

I was picking it up. That was rough. Listen, we can talk about the Leafs last night, or we can talk about the real story, which is it's bad in Philadelphia. That's the second game in a row that the Flyers have allowed two or more goals. Sorry, seven goals or more goals, not two or more. Two or more was great. That would have been also true.

30 other teams have done this. You know what, Jesse? You're right. It's also true. They did allow two or more goals. You know what? You nailed it. And I want to start with this because John Tortorella is making the news this morning.

And it went off crazy in the group chat. And this is what he said after the game. He said, this falls on me. I'm not really interested in learning here. Oh, you can play it off there. I Did I can play you want to play you can just play it? Yeah, we won't be inserted into the show until drew Inserts it into the show. Yes, I will Jesse. Let's I will play it here Let's see if this works Okay, I'm gonna hit play

They had things button down pretty good and kept you guys from generally they all played us York only plays the three minutes to start here. Is this something that you and the coaching staff want to use as a learning experience? I'm not going to discuss that with you. Do you think this is a game, John, where the team just needs to maybe simplify things against a team like the Leafs, get pucks to the net, volleys to the net? It's my job to prepare this team in this type of situation. Haven't done a good enough job the past couple of games.

These last two games, are you sensing frustration setting in? Maybe it's a cumulative effect from last week playing well. not getting results well when you're in this type of situation and you're losing all the time and there's nothing at the end of the tunnel for you there's certainly going to be some frustration but this falls on me i i'm not really interested in learning how to coach this type this in this type of season where we're at right now uh but i have to do a better job so this falls on me getting the team prepared to play so that quote uh was making the rounds in the words yeah and then you watch the press conference because it's important we always say this how did he say it how was it said

yeah in what context what was the lead question that that led to an answer like that it was pretty unforced error a lot i don't know about error it was unforced a lot of people said hey like that's akin to him going i give up and i don't get that sense from it what i get from it is hey i'm frustrated too as the coach i don't think like i think if you were to give the players truth serum they'd say hey listen every day in the nhl is a good day but looking at where the flyers yeah where the flyers are going i don't think they're particularly interested in playing uh on a team like this that's that and he said he said it at the beginning of the quote there's no light at the end of the tunnel is this john tortorella effectively stepping down like some have

suggested or is this john tortorella frustrated and perhaps saying something that's a little off like when he joined the flyers um where they were right it was a bit of a strange fit but we're like okay so he's essentially the face of the team right a little bit like when babcock joined the leafs like he was the face of the team because there was no one who was even sort of ready to step into that role because remember it was the 15 16 season not 16 17 when things started to turn around a little bit um but now it's been a few years like this is year three or four of uh of torts being in philly and what i think he meant was he's not interested in being a part of this developmental rebuild thing like he wants to be playing in competitive games meaningful games

down the stretch in the spring in march leading into the playoffs and it's important context with the flyers uh there's the now and the then the now is they've lost six straight uh they have won two out of 13 games in march despite having a huge homestand they only won one of those games um but the the big thing for me this is the second straight year the flyers have essentially died like the moment march began i don't remember what their record was from march 1st onward last year like i'm pretty confident it was one of the probably bottom five in the nhl because they were competing they were pretty comfortably in a playoff spot um maybe not comfortable enough i guess on account of they didn't make it they lost basically every

game and last year you're like all right well they lost their starting goaltender mid-season i guess like maybe that's something i mean this year is just completely uncompetitive and you finally get your goaltender of the future in fedotov and he's not he's not looked anywhere near what you signed him to neither is urson yeah but i don't think they saw him as the goaltender of the future no well or uh kolesov who was with them earlier in this season and but you know last night it was it was such a completely i'm glad the leafs dismantled them first of all they've lost a lot of those games right where they should win and then don't it was a statement game after the nashville game no question you know they they killed them because they should have but the

defense in front of the goaltending is so bad i'm like i'm gonna give the goaltending a break and then i watch other goals and i'm like god they're just not even sort of nhl quality uh that we we've talked about the difference between the sharks and the blackhawks and i think it's just how everyone's feeling and it's an attitude things are miserable in philly right now miserable no one's feeling good about how anything is going so i want to focus on john tortorella there because i think he's outstate is welcome and i think it's so embarrassing for him to say that about his own players where it's like i don't have the time to coach these guys in this losing scenario where everything's awful but that's what you signed up for torts like did you think that this team was

going to be the jets of this year or the capitals and just be steamrolling through the east or the league like this is what this team is they're a rebuilding team and it i liken it to a teacher who has a class of bad students and none of them are good and they can't learn anything and the teacher throwing up their hands be like i don't want to teach this class no this is your job you are here to educate these kids and get them to the level and try your best do your best and try and make them learn whether they can or not that's your job and as John Terrell is the coach of this team is to coach these young players you might not have a lot of stuff there it might just all be scraps but it's your job to be in there through thick and thin with this team else

you shouldn't be the coach and I don't think you should be the coach right now if he looks at a game like this and looks at the season says you know what I don't really want to be doing this yeah like shut like come on i don't want to shut i'm almost dead but like no that's how you feel yeah genuinely yeah there was a tweet i saw that was like listen i don't want to show up to my job either but i make 16 bucks an hour this guy makes four million i don't i don't publicly then go to my boss and say i don't want to be a part of this that's what he did in front of the whole world here's the thing it's a bad quote no the quote is i'm not interested that part interested that's the part that really grabs people because you never hear a coach go i'm not interested because

if the coach is saying it man what are the players saying like that's egregious i know what you're what you're dying to know how am i going to make this about the leafs please no well if if if brendan shanahan is to be believed like dubas may have come back after the 2023 season until he gave a press conference where he said some stuff where he was like all right we can't do this anymore like this can't continue yep it was it was he dubas said something along the lines like you know i gotta think about my family and i'm unsure if i want to continue with this role because the contract was up right so he was like i need to go think about it and what shanahan wanted in that moment was dubas to go up to the podium and say i'm here for this i'm

here for the crest i'm here for the lease i want a new contract all that and because dubas was wishy-washy on it shanahan drove on the gardener and said you know what fuck this guy like like and and towards being like i'm not interested in this it's the same thing you're so right do you think it was fucking this guy or i i picture just all right that's what i see he even let go the steering wheel just for a second went all right he wasn't moving anyways the gardener yeah exactly he just no he threw his hands up walk to him honestly yeah it would have been faster um like i john tortorella will not be the coach of the flyers next season he can't be you don't think so hey no see i think the flyers are stubborn enough to keep them and and here's

what i want to throw at you guys because this changes your perspective kevin kurz who is the athletic reporter uh for the philadelphia flyers uh well he's for the athletic but covers the philadelphia flyers said that he spoke to owen tippett earlier that morning and owen's been around who's so good so good we talk about how bad the flyers are that's a great player so he he at he said owen tippett admitted this morning how tough it's been on him emotionally since some of the changes and the changes were some major trades we forget about frost and farabee lawton eric johnson he said i'll tell you one thing it's easier to get traded than it is to be on the other end of it especially frost and farabee before i came in we were good friends

so that one was tough lawton and eric johnson they are big pieces of this locker room it took a while i think everyone in here felt a hole uh missing when those guys left they were big parts of our team so you know i wonder too you know scott lawton who torts had nothing but great things to say about uh when he came through toronto you know yesterday morning uh or sorry when he talked to the toronto media about scott lawton and obviously chris johnson wrote a really great article in the athletic about scott lawton leaving and danny briere mentioned that you know they both were emotional about it because briere and lawton were friends and they were teammates back in the day which i had forgotten like lawton's been around been around that long he's been around

around long enough to have been teammates on philly with briere which is crazy you know that is that that might be part of it too is it's like if john's talking from that perspective because i'm trying to understand where he's coming from you know when he says that and he's an emotional guy is he like he's like not only do we have a team that's in a really tough way but i gotta rebuild a locker room culture again kind of because i've had these guys for a couple millions of dollars are for so i think all of adam's points are valid but that's your job that's that's that's your job that is in the job definition of why you are there on the flyers and daniel brayer is a smart guy i don't think he's going to look at this situation and be like we can continue with

this head coach who is not interested in doing the job title and let's use another example from that division you trade brock nelson you're selling you're a seller and the isles are still fighting tooth and nail for a playoff spot in the east they might just get one it's looking tough it's looking if the situation room wasn't the situation room the islanders would be in a playoff spot right now because they would have another point in the standings and they would win the tiebreaker in regulation wins uh against the canadians imagine you get a first round pick cal ritchie and make the playoffs in the same year i'm sorry lou lamorello all of a sudden goes from when is this old man gonna retire to like gm of the year stuff well he'd win his own

award right he would the lou lamorello gm of the year award goes to lou lamorello congrats to me um no you got a job to do yeah you got a job to do you got games to win like i i'm i'm looking down the east uh you know the rangers the rangers are a little tougher because they bought and sold and it was a little weird uh you can't quit on the season no and like the pittsburgh's gone on somewhat of a run that's cooled down right and the flyers are going to be in last place uh very soon because the buffalo sabers can just win one of the three games they have in hand and pass them in the standings and you look at the team it's not great like the players that are that played last night against the Leafs it is a collection of not the best collection of hockey players you

understand why this team is struggling so much we're getting a lot of chirps from the uh oh literally Mike Ricci that's a lot of fun we came into the arena yesterday first guy we see Joe Thornton yeah and he's gigantic biggest shit that's Mike Ricci that's amazing yeah so yeah I don't know. Just looking at the roster that played last night, it's not pretty. You understand why Torz is frustrated. You can't say it. You can't say that publicly. And listen, let me say this, you know, when you when you were the flyer. So so I'm looking at Kevin Kurz's article. So let's have a look at the remaining schedule. From what Kevin says, the only team left to play that's still in the playoffs for them in their nine remaining games is Montreal tomorrow.

and then after that you got the sabers the preds uh oh you get the montreal canadians again the rangers who are sort of in it the islanders who are sort of in it they're in the race and then you got some sends blue jackets sabers so there are winnable games where they can take this moment and go let's finish strong and feel good about ourselves going into the summer all right adam devil's advocate let me put i guess i think i'm being the devil's advocate here i don't big it's you no no well yeah yeah sorry well because you're you're saying hey there's some winnable games show me what you got counterpoint this is a huge couple weeks here for the flyers franchise because you lose out all of a sudden you're gonna get dude the top of this draft is

crazy yep schaefer uh misa porter martone martone i know there's another one i'm missing why can't i are you thinking of zane peric no no pa parentel huh pa parentel yeah that's right pa parentel you're right no man but great young player no well so listen the worst place to be is probably i don't know five points back of a playoff spot because like you can't even really hang your hat on oh yeah boy we were close yeah um you also didn't make it and you're also not really among the teams that are picking the highest unless you win the lottery you're probably picking i don't know eighth ninth tenth eleventh something like that flyers are gonna go top five here if they yep i was gonna say i was tweeting with flyers nation last night and because they

were tweeting about like they're in the the zone that we were in in 14 15 which is yes oh this is hilarious hopefully it lands us austin nation or 15 16 i think that's yeah tank nation yeah and and uh and it's last right now i think we both got what we wanted out of that game yeah no right what what's happening right now is the buffalo sabers continually have the worst tank job in the history of mankind and they're gonna play themselves out of the fourth worst record in the national hockey league the flyers because they suck so hard are gonna get more and more lottery balls this is a great thing if we're rooting for the future of the flyers there's only four teams beneath the Flyers in the standings and all

of them won their last game. Yeah, like the Flyers are doing great if the tanking is the goal. So be very happy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you shouldn't expect this team to win. Well, and you know, you should expect them to be in it though. That's the difference. You want them to be

a little in some of these games. That's the problem. It's like, do you want the Horacek Leafs or do you want the Mike Babcock, they still finished last place Leafs? Right. Right? I think the Leafs and Flyers had a handshake agreement you know what we figured out why the leafs were so good in the first period against nashville and then just fell off the flyers called them up frantically first intermission and

they said hey listen we are just gonna lay down yeah on tuesday let nashville get two points here yeah yeah there you don't want this we did you see us play chicago on sunday we don't want this that's funny just where we'll lay down our arms let us get the first goal so there's plausible deniability conspiracy theory truther steve that's right right here i i would love to get some truth serum and john tortorella and let him know his actual thoughts on what he expected but like what did you expect i think you got him he really i know like bobby brink on your second line noah kate's centering his line like bobby brink at the playoffs like that's no very far yeah but like you gotta look at the roster and be honest with yourself did he think he could coach uh

fedotov into being a great goaltender when we have all the evidence in the world that he's not really good right now urson urson's terrible he has no goaltending what is his expectation you know you know the saying like well you're just looking for darts and it's like they just did this just just covered their eyes and threw five darts at the same time we're doing cola fed it to urson we're doing i think they even had a fourth guy in there too probably yeah pull cal peterson out of retirement oh i think he did play uh i'm not totally sure um boy it's just a miserable time yeah i want any team in this league to try and win games with like an 890 say percentage day after day to the sabers you can't now you got to have one win against

the savers i don't know they they have better goaltending is that a dire you're so right like upl is way better yeah like is that a dire unfixable situation or do you look at them the way i now i feel stupid for even trying to say this okay do it no go for it well commit i'm committing to it all right stupid steve color go full stupid was like dude our goaltending sucks and this is why we're losing and the difference is they're able to score their way at a problem It's unlike the Flyers. But our goaltending sucks. This is why we're losing.

So they traded everybody and acquired everybody. Yeah. Are the Flyers a goaltender away from being somewhat – No, no. Give me a sec. No way. From being respectable. And now my answer is already no.

And here's how I know that. The team directly above the Flyers is Seattle, who have Joey Decord, who's legitimately good. Ryan, who works behind the scenes here and is helping us graciously throughout our time here at San Jose. Yeah, he's laughing at you right now. At this reach. Ryan has set all this up and made all this happen.

And Ryan's going, Steve, where are you going with this? No, I think perception is kind of funny sometimes because I think from the clips, these guys are just leaf homers and blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, we're not. No, I mean, we are. We definitely are. Are we homers though?

That's like sad and depressed. What we actually do, like, 80% of the time is try to solve problems. Right. Try to solve problems and go, well, maybe the Flyers, Steve, the Flyers. Yeah. I tried. No, your example of that is the Ducks, who have Dostal at a 9-0-7 and Gibson at a 9-13, and they are still 26th in the league.

So, yeah, decent goaltending doesn't make you a good team. That's it. Simply, but if they add some scoring to that, they might be. Yeah, there you go. There's some goals. Give me to the Flyers? No. Give me to the Flyers.

No, they're going to keep them now. What are you talking about? Listen, with the cap going up, that $6.4 million all of a sudden became a really great deal. Jesse, what happened to your boy? Hey, shh, shh, shh. We're not talking about that. Who are we talking about? Billy Hussle is 1-6.

No, no, no. Say the same percentage. He's got an 8-7-4 percentage. Not great. It's a good thing Jesse's not picking your goaltending. That's all I've got to say. Where did the 1 come from? when do we get to talk about steve's fantasy team oh oh wait a second oh man i'm cooked yeah so

steve steve you had a pretty good year in fantasy didn't you but you're gonna you're about to go out in the second round first round i'm definitely losing yeah okay what happened but what happened dry sidle is hurt hurdle is hurt wieger is hurt i think he's back but now petrangelo is hurt uh velarde is hurt and also yesterday i did i did i made this mistake once earlier this season and i haven't made it since i just did the start all the good players but no that's not what the button is nope it's not what is the button so on if you use yahoo for your fantasy hockey if anybody who doesn't play fantasy hockey there's a button you can use that says start all active players and if you have say a lineup of 12 guys but you have 13 players that night it'll just pick one random and

insert the 12 guys into your lineup and that one scratch will be in your bench so steve hit that button walked away dressed hurdle and hurdle who did not play was in his lineup and mitch marner who is mitch marner and played in a in a game where the leaf scored seven goals was on steve's bench because steve even though it's the playoffs you decided to have zero attention to detail i am on a work trip in california what do you get points for it you didn't get points for it you didn't look at your lineup once no and notice mitch marner on your bench for a guy who's not playing he's on the bench okay okay okay i'm suing you what do you get points what do you get points uh goals assists power play points um shots on goal plus minus no okay good i hate plus

blocks are are like surprisingly valuable okay well i can tell you he only had one assist last night yeah uh it's like two points uh he had no power play points he had a shot um yeah he actually played very very few minutes last night 1643 hurdle got from the press box can you tell us what he got from the press box i'm looking at a stat line zero zero zero zero zero do us a favor quit uh you know that you remember that press conference uh no sam the uh sam what was his name sam the sam mitchell sam mitchell yeah we got guys on the stat with the stat line zero zero he was great steve you're just your your fantasy is always just a giant ball of fun i am at the bottom of the toaster cooked now and it's what day is it wednesday we started off this show and

i didn't know this but we've got two great guests today so first off we're gonna have the president of the san jose sharks yes that's that's happening don't worry we're still gonna talk about the leafs here too also joining us and i just wanted to get this in as early as possible so people know is william ecklund oh what jesse and i just learned that we learned that with you cool audience yeah william ecklund is going to be joining us which is amazing uh we're so excited to be talking to him wow i just thought i'd throw that in there and now i'm going to segue to the leafs and then we're going to talk to uh jonathan becker who is the president of the san jose alternate governor and alternate governor said it was really important we get that in there and he said we could call

him jb if we wanted to yeah so and he's so we're like buddies he's awesome you're gonna love him but uh but first off we're talking to a president of an nhl franchise it's pretty darn cool universe very silly um kneelander gets 40th his 40th goal he is one of four leafs that have ever done three 40 goal seasons in a row i believe sittler and mcdonald and then obviously austin who's done it five years straight but i think this year that's that streak's over um kneelander said uh i'm just trying to do what i'm paid to do that's it he's the coolest guy in the world he is a one-liner machine oh yeah and like i don't know if he knows it oh i think he knows it what what is it the youths call it the kids aura yeah yeah tremendous aura kneelander this year has

been fascinating because before everybody would tell you that that went down to the leaf said he was a terrible quote this year he's been knocking them out of the park remember remember it was like oh it's three losses what's the big deal and then they won three straight he's like it's three wins what's the big deal perfect no he's still a terrible quote in that he won't say much like he's good at one-liners but if you want him to talk for more than two sentences like two sentences is the cutoff he's not expanding more on that no no not not in terms of the scrums with with us when we're there like outside of that he seems like he has more personality that is willing to show and we saw that a bit in the amazon doc when he was at at sugo sitting there with uh posh

cool hat just hanging out talking like oh you you can say more words william can you give us a little bit more of that when we're talking to you but he refuses to he's also allergic to shirts so yeah if i look like that yeah um weirdly enough we don't look like that no it's shocking i don't know i'm gonna speak to the man i'm gonna remind you of the really unfortunate mike and buffalo quote uh when william nylander was with the marlies we were talking about how quick his press conferences were he's like yeah that's why i call him 92nd willie oh and like right away i go Mike I don't think that nickname is gonna stick but I gotta say he is the perfect athlete to play in Toronto like he is exactly what you want out of a Toronto Maple Leaf nothing is ever gonna

phase him he's never gonna give too much to get him in trouble or if he says something that's like kind of oh he said that he knows what it what he said and his three losses what's the big deal exactly goes out yeah and he backs it up because he doesn't care like that's the thing he's going to perform at the same level every time and he's he's the perfect toronto maple leaf the great thing too is he's he's had three straight 40 goal seasons and looking at his stat page right now they're all even 40 goals it wasn't like 41 43 45 it's 40 40 40 he's gonna score more this year he is currently uh he's currently nine goals behind leon dry sidle he's second in league scoring in goal scoring so goal scoring totals are down a little bit this year yes uh leon dry

sidle uh is at 49 but he's going to be out for at least another week can willie get can willie catch him in the next week i say yes it's definitely possible but in the next week boy that's hard boy that's hard man not possible none of them against the sharks right no no he's going to zero and then uh just make it sure he's going to light up the kings light up the ducks no one's ever heard of either of those teams yeah he's gonna embarrass them embarrass embarrass them truly better question does he hit 50 well he needs 10 yeah he's got he hasn't missed a game this year has he no they have 11 games left man like that's what are you what are you taking you're gonna need you're gonna need a hattie and then you're gonna need this you're gonna need a lot

it's way more fun to say yes but no no all right i would really love it if he could yeah but he has been day in and day out and i think this is why like i wanted to kind of spotlight him is when the leafs guys have been down you know when austin and mitch were especially after the four nations really under the microscope for their play or their lack of production because they were strong defensively mitch was right you know like they were strong defensively and by the way throughout that entire time austin matthews was on like a 12 game point streak and people were like this guy sucks what's going on um william nylander was the best player on the ice for them and has continued to be what is that what other than he's really good at hockey like there seems to be there was

a there was a time when William Nylander of those three guys was like well you know he takes a shift off and he did yeah uh or he he drives coaches crazy and he did this year though he just seems to be it's like he's not a boy anymore that's a man out there yeah it's it's worth repeating that like and John Tavares is legitimately unreal this season and it's crazy they haven't re-signed him yet yeah the number's going up yeah that's what it looks like yeah legitimately unreal but there have been a few not a few there have been a lot of times this season where the leafs aren't generating anything and willie just has a shift where he goes okay here we go watch me cook and he had one the other day i think it was against the sends nothing was happening nothing and he

was just like all right i'm gonna keep going until it goes in i'm just gonna what's your name again is this michael amadio or i can't remember who the sen was he just made him look like a fool and the leafs end up losing that game obviously but the only reason that game was competitive is because willie decided to just take over and he had a few of those against the flyers he has a few of them every game now i know we haven't clenched the playoffs yet but we are already clenching uh because we're leaf fans and i want to i just want to say this of the guys you need going into the playoffs really he's the guy that consistently is the best of the three i think in the playoffs and he's going so that to me is like if you know because leaf fans around this time of

year everybody else is like oh the sun is shining uh the the snow is melting everything seems good hey and the leafs are going to the playoffs oh god i'm filled with existential dread the one thing you got to look for is some positives uh and they're in first place and william's going he's going here's a weirdly optimistic way to look at it the leafs have actually they're near the top of the division they're at the top of the division and they've got the they got the tie break jesse what's the tie break again regulation wins rws they are ahead of the they are the head of the panthers regulation the tie break switched yeah yeah yeah um but they're winning games kind of the way with with production sort of set up the way it often is in the playoffs if that makes

sense willie's the top guy out of the the three right uh matthews is playing well all around but he's not sniping like friggin last year like he didn't score at a 69 goal pace in the playoffs yeah that way well because he didn't play well that too um marner you know has he's tapered off a little a little but a career season he's still he's still really really good but um willie is the best of the three and that's the way they've won a lot of playoff games so you know we talk about getting hot at the right time what if there's still room for matthews to get hot oh i think there is of course oh yeah so this this is what i'm saying like if if you're looking for an optimistic way of looking at this that's what i would say and the thing about willie's game that

i think has really come into its own this year's goal scoring ability he's shooting the highest shooting percentage of his entire career he's shooting 17.2 percent that's high so far it's not like on this it's not that's not crazy but he's never shot that high in his career before and he's taking a crazy amount of shots as well so the more he's been shooting like the better the percentage scoring goals how funny is that okay well listen uh lots to be excited about um you know what let's get to our first interview here yeah we gotta cut sometimes life throws your curveballs and you don't have time to get to them and that's where task rabbit comes in and i think you should check this out because here's the deal one of the things one of the weird quirks about

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Register today at pmcfwalk.ca. Ourselves off here. San Jose Sharks president and alternate governor. Hey, Canada. McDonald's just dropped some brand new breakfast menu. items that you're going to love. The Smoky Maple Bacon and Egg McMuffin, which is what I have. Oh, you get to read it. Delish.

There's the Smoky Maple Sausage and Egg McGriddle, which Steve has. That's what I got. And Jesse's got in that bag the Smoky Maple Chicken Breakfast Sandwich, all made with real Canadian maple syrup, available for a limited time. And that limited time is mid-April, so you've got to get it done. And they're only available during

breakfast time. That's right, before 11. So whether you've worked a long overnight shift or you're early morning and you're constantly late, like we are, you might want to try. Stop. Give me a lick, Steve. No. Steve has the smoky, like I said, smoky maple sausage and egg McGriddle.

Sweet, smoky, delicious. Jesse, tell me about the taste of the smoky maple chicken breakfast. Oh, why don't I have a little lick, Steve? I'll hold the mic. Oh, I got it. It's got smoky Canadian maple syrup sauce. Stop licking it. Stop, stop.

Stop it. Stop it. I like licking my McDonald's. You can eat your McDonald's however you want. I like to lick mine. Okay, so, and there you have it. McDonald's new smoky maple breakfast sandwiches. There are three of them, and they're all winners.

Available until April 14th. Try one in restaurant or order in with delivery for a limited time. Jonathan Becker joining us. He is the president of the San Jose Sharks, president and alternate governor. But that's too serious of a title, right? Yes, I'm not that serious. I made the mistake of calling you Mr. Becker before it started and you're like, No, it's Jonathan.

Mr. Becker's my dad. Okay. john even yeah you know yeah i don't like john no it's john jb if you need it oh all right jb so listen president of uh the team with the number one uh uh crop of young players in the nhl and that's not me saying that that's the guys at the athletic saying that uh this is a uh a brand and a city that's on the rise this is very exciting what's it like for you you've seen this team come off of its most successful run in history uh when you took over in 2018 then obviously we have covid and then you make the decisions to rebuild and now you're here does it feel like finally yes

like we're finally making good on this plan like it how is it feeling for you today right now there's like a couple different ways to answer this the first way to answer is the fan in me before i joined the franchise i was a season ticket member for a decade before that i was a partial plan trying to save up money and all that and so the fan part of me is like yes i can see this actually coming you can it's not just the prospects pools but the guys that are on the ice already etc so you can see it building back up back to that 20th year run where we only missed the playoffs for four years yeah had one of the highest percentage wins in the history of hockey let alone sports overall and so from that perspective it just feels gratifying from a

business perspective it's hard it's hard work because everyone always wants to say that you Now, we didn't even say it for years. We wouldn't want to say rebuild. We invented other words, retool, retinker. I think we went through the entire dictionary looking for words that started with a re that didn't mean rebuild. But at some point, you've got to admit to yourself what happened before, which was hugely successful, isn't going to get us where we wanted to go. And so we hit stop, traded away some franchise icons, re-looked at the roster and said, let's build in a different way. Let's build from the draft.

Let's build from prospects. Let's not do what worked for two decades, which is build in, bring in veterans on their second contract and try to push the window that way. And now you see that working as well. So both from a fan perspective and from a business perspective, it really feels good year to year. So this is dangerous. You're going to make me ask me a dangerous question. You warm up to that, Steve. Come on, man.

Three or four before they go to the top question. Because you're a season. You were a season ticket holder. I don't pay for them anymore. And I'm sure there were times when you were in the stands going, you know, what are these guys doing? I would never do what these clowns are doing. And then you got to be one of those clowns, right? So I always imagined what I would do as one of those clowns.

So how was that transition for you as a fan to the guy in charge of literally everything? You know, it's a lot harder on the inside than it looks like on the outside. When you're on the outside looking in, it's like, oh, why didn't you just play that guy rather than the other guy? Or why didn't you draft this person rather than the other? I mean, it's really easy to be an armchair quarterback. It's really easy to be an armchair GM. It's really easy to be an armchair in almost anything. Then the reality of the business on the inside shows up.

And I think my first year, I was, I guess I can say it now, I was pretty frustrated because the reality of what it takes to run a franchise is nothing what you think it's like as a fan. I mean, when you're a fan, you're like, how come the beer is not colder and how come it's not free? And I've always asked both those questions. Have you really asked both those questions? No. But there are a whole bunch of things that seem odd and maybe even just stupid to you when you're on the outside. And when you come back in, you go, oh, we didn't just make this up. There are other reasons.

And, you know, the other thing that's harder for me, because I was a tech guy for a long time, particularly here in Silicon Valley, where the tech mantra is let's just blow everything up and try something different. right it's very much so i came in i was like oh yeah we should try the same strategy here in sports that we try in technology which is reinvent yourself and and yet sport is deep in traditions right we like to tend to look backwards of a player that played back in 1926 and compare that player to somebody and you can't really do that and shifting the mental model from backwards looking to experimentation has been hard for me and i think hard for the organization if it's worked out really well yeah for me like this this trip i love traveling so as much as like the hockey side is fun just seeing the city of san jose is also fun but the the amount you guys have built

into this facility here that we're at right now and and putting the investment into the city of san jose along with the team and the hockey aspect how has that been because i know this here this place is the biggest ice hockey facility west of the mississippi uh in america which is pretty cool and uh yeah just seeing the growth of hockey has been awesome yeah so as a franchise we started in 1991 so 30 some years ago we opened in the building sap center in 93 a couple years later played in the cow palace which smells exactly like it sounds by the way from 91 and 92 but yeah ponds don't freeze over in the backyard here right so hockey isn't a sport you would just learn by going out in your backyard and picking up a stick maybe street hockey or ball hockey or one

of the variance but unless we invest in the community unless we invest to try to grow the sport it's not going to grow like it has to the point that you're right this facility that we're in right now sharks ice san jose and tech cu arena is roughly 370 000 square feet for those you don't square feet that's like 35 000 square meters thank you for the conversion no problem we can do fahrenheit to celsius too if that we need that yeah do you need that i get you toronto rights you don't come across the border that often don't really know how to do the conversion we adopt your canadian ways thank you by the way i think it's 27 outside for those you stuck back in toronto so yeah it is it's beautiful it's great um but uh what's really

interesting to me is the growth of the game we have like for the 200 000 adult hockey participants now wow back a decade ago it was only 100 000 if you go back 20 years ago it was like 5 000 and so that growth as well you come if you go actually wander around the building which hopefully you have a couple times yeah you'll see little kids from two years old skating and stuff like that that didn't exist three years ago that is not something you can do overnight that requires patient capital and one of my favorite things about this franchise which started before i got here is the willingness to think long term the willingness to invest in the future to now these days san jose is a hockey town it really is yeah walk around you'll see people in jerseys they'll

see you guys they think they may recognize the three of you i don't know we'll see and i know So like the 49ers are down the road and the Warriors are down the road. But here in San Jose, you guys are the pro sports team. You're literally a hockey town. That's it. We are the only team that was born here in San Jose, grew up in San Jose and stay committed. Yeah, it's really cool. It's interesting, too, because obviously, as we sit here in Tech CU, this is a relatively new facility.

And we've I mean, listen, you talk about the Cow Palace smelling. I mean, have you seen where the Marlies play? Yes, I have. It smells like that there, too. And I, you know, because the Toronto Police horse barn is next door. You know, why invest so much money in the AHL team and the AHL experience? Because they did used to play in the NHL rink from time to time, did they not? They did.

In fact, if you go back a decade, the San Jose Barracuda, as they're known, were called the Worcester Sharks. And they played actually outside of Boston. And so the very first thing we did, along with some of the other NHL teams, is bring our AHL franchises out here to the West Coast. Across the continent. Across the continent. To create the Pacific Division of the AHL, which didn't exist a decade ago. And that was a big commitment in hockey as well. Because frankly, it's one thing to get a professional hockey team at the top tier to get a fan base, which we've done.

It's yet another thing to have a second tier to grow that fan base. And that's been a journey as well. There weren't a ton of people at that first couple of Barracuda games. I think we averaged like 500 or 700 the first couple of years. So back to your question, which is if you want to grow the game and we, and over the year, hopefully one day we'll have a women's team here. Hopefully one day we'll have a junior hockey team as well. Maybe ECHL.

And I hope this grows over the next 30 years to look so much different than it does now as well. Then you can't ask the AHL team to play in an NHL bar. And that's just not fair. You can't have 17,000 people show up. It's not going to happen that way. You need something that's appropriate to them. And we view this as a multi-use facility.

We actually have the Harlem Globetrotters in this building as well. Oh, that's so cool. We have Fight Nights in this building as well. We do mini concerts in this building. And so it becomes another thing for the San Jose to be proud of, not just the hockey team, but a 4,500-seat multi-purpose arena that we activate. It's called 100 Days a Year. That's pretty good. Yeah.

That's so good. And, you know, I think the thing is, too, like to get to know you a little bit better. first off for you why hockey why'd you get into hockey why'd you become a season ticket holder and then you know before that a half season guy and and all that yeah it's i mean you're from here are you not no i'm not i grew up in a really tiny town in virginia on the east coast okay so when i say really tiny town 13 people in my high school graduating class that's how tiny middle of nowhere uh yeah it's a long story and i don't love talking about myself okay and uh the answer to hockey is we had one rundown rink which i learned to skate on with potholes in the corner and broken boards

the whole thing and after i think by the time i was seven or something that rink closed because they just couldn't support it and so it was a 50 mile drive to the next rink and so i don't know about nine years old my mom said you can't this is too much of a mess we can't do it and so my parents are european they met in in new york we grew up in this tiny town so i played soccer and i was a decent soccer player because you know it doesn't cost nearly as much to play soccer sure play hockey which is one of the problems of our sport but i think i've always a bit of a contrarian i love things that are hard for me and i wasn't a great hockey player but i loved the fact that you had to have sort of the the presence of mind of of soccer to see where the puck was going

etc a bit of the brutality of the american football sport the speed of basketball etc and i'm an average athlete i'm not a great athlete and i was okay in all those things but i couldn't put them all together and i i think that that made me appreciate the sport that much more um i moved actually here to silicon valley in 1993 right as the big rink opened sap center and it turned out a random person i met offered me to go to a game and so i was at game four no five yeah game five in the building etc and i was like this is my team i'm no longer rooting for the washington capitals sorry guys uh because i grew up in virginia i'm rooting for this team and uh i was making no money back then i don't know twenty some thousand dollars a year and just

every time i could save up money i went to a couple more games etc and it i just loved the game and it loved me back and you you sit and i know i know this makes you uncomfortable but i think this is important because you know we got a lot of young people watching this and i think when when when we can talk to somebody like yourself who runs an nhl team who you know took a non-traditional path to get here yep right i want to talk so first off like i i went through your your linkedin and By the way, you're one of the, quote, top voices on LinkedIn, which I thought was amazing. That's only because I have a deep voice. Is that what it is?

Okay. All right. Well, listen, we'll work on that and try to get in our top voices. Face for radio, they tell me. Oh, I get told that all the time. Okay. Well, you I know. On the board of Churchill Club, Trintec, Koros, Pixley, you worked at Walmart in the 90s out here optimizing inventory, which is amazing.

but i want to know so you've you've done the tech sector what was your first job like your very very first job that you got a paycheck for uh would have been 14 years years old i got paid to painting roofs oh painting roofs yeah so oral corrugated tin uh storage sheds uh they tend to generate too much heat so if you paint them with a reflective style paint it's much better now 40 years later and i got paid i don't know like two bucks an hour uh in the 90 some degree heat to paint it It was a terrible job, but I needed the money. And you need a terrible job to enjoy the jobs that you're in. Exactly right.

So then you're here, you're here for 30 years. And how does this Anoze job come calling, I guess? So again, long answer. The short version is when I was at SAP, I was an analytics person by background. Most of the technology I've done has been analytics oriented. And yes, we have an analytics team here at Sharks as well. Um, I actually got, uh, through a series of odd circumstances, got moved into the chief marketing officer job when there was a switch from brand marketers to analytic marketers,

had a conversation with my then CEO said, help us figure out how to change the brand of what, uh, the, what, uh, SAP was. And three interesting things happened. One is HP was giving up naming rights for the SAP center. So I negotiated those naming rights become the SAP center. Very cool. So I was like, oh, this is my favorite team. I'm happy to do this as well.

So that was really good. Second is I built a analytics sponsorship group to help sports teams figure out how to use analytics. We did deals with the NBA, the NFL, the Yankees, women's tennis, et cetera. And the NHL taught me more about the business of sports. I don't know, over the span of five years, I think we did like 50 of these deals around the world as well. And then the third thing is because Hasso Plotner, the now sole owner, but then the majority owner of the Sharks, is one of the founders. I ended up getting to spend the time with him. He learned that I love the game of hockey.

I learned a lot of it as well. And so when I left the Sharks, sorry, when I left SAP seven and a half years ago now, he called me six months later and said, I have an idea. And I said yes before he finished this. Oh, man. That's cool. Yes. When was the last time you were starstruck in a hockey context? when was the last time i was star when i met you

um that's a you know what no one's ever asked me a question like that before i don't think i have an answer i would say uh i have worked hard i had a little kid grew up in a no town so i've been starstruck my whole life i think i'm still starstruck because if you went back and told the 10 year old me that i'd have this job there's zero chance i believe it and i easily once awake i wake up and still go really how did i get this journey so starstruck is not quite the right thing but it'd be amazed that i've made it this far but almost every week one thing we keep talking about is the amount of alumni the starstruck people that just walk around here and are with the team like almost on a daily basis just with their practices and it was the first guy we ran into

joe thornton just like walking this morning we saw him hopefully a first ballot hall of famer for your voters so there you go yeah it speaks so much to the organization that these guys they come here they play here and then they stick around the city they want to live here and then they also want to work for the team and it's so cool to have them just around hanging out with the team it means so much i think to the young guys so i think there's there's lots of reasons and you can ask some of them as you talk to them one is it's not a bad place to live we i mean it's pretty great we're falling in love yeah we could move here i mean culturally food wise i think you guys are starting to figure out that this is a foodie destination as well but here's

the other thing i think players maybe underestimate early in their playing career is because silicon valley is very much a be whoever you want um you don't spend your entire career in the media spotlight you can actually raise your family you can be a real person you can go to a restaurant and fans will mostly leave you alone as opposed to how etc and so you can you're beloved right but you can actually have a regular normal life and it's not true in every city toronto yeah no kidding and uh that means a lot to a fair number of people and i think that digs deep into people's hearts and even if they get traded or leave they they leave here with i guess the other thing is this franchise has always allowed people to have big personalities yeah which is not always true

in every professional sports team as well and jumbo was not a small personality when he was here as well well known for his beloved antics etc and because that's deep in our dna i think you're attracted back you know one of the things that you mentioned earlier on and this is something that i've heard by the way for the record they're now looking for homes to live in yeah yeah sharks sharks a fan reaction i guess he's gonna do yeah sure steve actually made a really good point last night he's like i don't know how you could even even if there was a bad loss or something i don't know how you could be upset here like it's easier to be pissed off in the cold yeah oh trust me fans are annoyed when i i hear from them so i i see you guys on social media

one of the things that we've heard about behind the scenes here is your your it's a strategy pioneering strategy you mentioned it earlier where silicon valley is very much about breaking something and and trying to do something new reinventing you guys seem to be completely unafraid of trying things and we come from the most traditional stuffy market i think there is Like the Leafs are, they're a first class organization. We work with them on the, on the, on the press side, obviously, but they are, they are, it is, it's, this is the way we've done it. That's the way we do it. You guys don't seem to operate that way. Look, I don't want to comment about any. No, I'm not talking about only yours, only yours. An organization often reflects who's around them. So if you think about who's around us, the extended Bay Area, San Jose in particular, it's filled with experimenters. They're,

I don't know, 10,000 tech companies within a few square miles of where we are. Each of them are trying to reinvent the world in their own way as well. And so they're comfortable with reinvention, right? So we were, I think the first in the Bay Area and only like the sixth or seventh in sports to go to digital ticketing it seems like no big deal now what team doesn't have digital ticketing but when you do it earlier you catch a bunch of crap right yeah which we did and we probably didn't communicate well enough when we started and stuff like that and a host of friends said oh we don't have smartphones yet now now that's a silly thing to say as well and so the question is is how early on the eventuality train do you go

and we're willing to go earlier than most people which means we stub our toe all the time and we make mistakes. But one of the mental models we have is hard on the issue and not on the person. So when you make a mistake, I'm not going to beat you up. I'm going to say, great, what did we learn from that? Help other people not make that mistake as well. And that experimental mindset, we actually tell our friends about as well. We say, this is not a new thing that we always are going to do. This is a new experiment we're running. And if you guys hate it, we probably won't ever do this again. And if it works out well, we'll do more of it. Another example is we have something called teal tokens which are a reward-based system when you buy tickets or food

and beverage or merchandise etc that go into your account which then you can use for discounts on etc the first year we had lots of technology problems as you often do with right and we caught a bunch of crap and when i go separate this do you like the idea of getting rewarded that the more yes okay so then and now it works pretty flawlessly nothing ever works flawlessly but in the 98 90 of the time when we're probably 50 of the time when we started right so back to your question, which is you have to be willing to shake things up because what got you where you get here won't get you to where you want to go. And so that what we often say is we want to pioneer the future of sports and entertainment. I have no idea what our industry is going to look like

in 20 years, other than I can guarantee you, it doesn't look like what it is now. So we can sit back and wait for somebody else to figure it out, or we can experiment and try to figure it out ourselves. We might be a part of that experiment, a very small part. If you had a guess, what are, What are some of the things you think could foundationally change about the sport or all sports landscape in the next 20 years? I'm certainly going to make some people annoyed by if I answer this question, but I'll give you a couple that I've speculated on, which is hockey in particular. We all know that we are very opinionated of the best place to watch a hockey game. Some people like to watch on the glass. Personally, I don't like to watch on the glass, but it's some people do. Some people like to watch it center ice 12 to 14 rows up. Some people like to watch over the goalie.

Some people like the overhead view, et cetera. It's a very personalized decision. And fans often spend a decade or more each year moving their tickets around until they find their favorite view. And then they want to stay in those seats for their entire career. Right. So that's something we know about hockey. It's less true in American football or baseball, et cetera. On the other hand, if you think about the way we televise the sport currently, there are five or six fixed cameras.

Yes. And somebody else is picking the way you watch the game. yet we all walk into the arena with their 10,000 17,000 20,000 people with high definition cameras in their hands maybe we no offense to all you that might be in broadcasting maybe there should be alternate casts for every game all the time with thousands of subcasts by people in there i know their rights fees and all these kinds of things to work out i get all that and i should be able to choose how i want to watch the game based on thousands of cameras that are in the building as opposed to just the five or six or ten main cameras that's one example and maybe it's

like the manning old cast in there you guys are on one joking around and someone else some ex-athletes on another breaking down and i want to be able to watch them all simultaneously etc i don't have that now it's it's right now it's a broadcast if we all remember where that word came from that means everyone broadly sees the same thing i want a very narrow cast maybe even down to just what jonathan wants yeah so we got a vr headset at our office back in toronto we it's the meta quest 2 i think it is and they have the feature to watch nba games courtside in the vr so cool and i was like this is the next evolution of watching sports you throw on the headset and like you're there if you want to watch it from whatever angle of the arena you want you can you can jump around

you can be courtside if you can i put a camera on the top of my goalie's head and watch it the slap a hundred mile an hour slap shot come at him i would love real yeah right i don't know either but but but maybe if the camera so mean if i asked you 10 years ago we're gonna chips in the jerseys you would have said no so maybe 10 years from now the chip is sewn into the helmet and he doesn't even know yeah he or she doesn't even know i guess we could have women in the game by that as well yeah so so one of the things you also do is you have your logo redesigned every year by local artists we'll get a close-up of this but we talk about a little bit about not just this year's logo but you do this every year why sometimes multiple years so it comes back to

you who are we uh you could start by saying we're an nhl hockey team which we are actually we have two nhl hockey teams we have the sharks and the barracuda actually we have more than that because we run nine sheets of ice in northern california we have a non-profit foundation blah blah blah blah so the question is are we in the hockey event business are we in the entertainment business and increasingly i think we're in the entertainment business and if we're in the entertainment the old formula for the hockey business was pretty simple right the home team wins the beer is cold i tell you people complain about cold beer sometimes we actually get complaints we don't have enough canadian beer and then oh really no kidding we do no way i think if you guys come down we don't

have enough but um but if you think about it our competition isn't really other professional sports teams it's not whether they're going to go to a warriors game or a niners game or a quakes game that's the mls team it's really getting people off their couch the the competition is i don't want to say laziness that's too negative a word but it's the the i'm stuck here i'll just put on netflix or stream something else as well tick tock or or or tick tock are you on tick tock yeah yeah yeah i know are you uh not regular i am on tick tock but you'd be good on it i do a lot of dances i do not i definitely do not um so so if we're in the experience business there's lots of other things that matter your commute matters your parking matters the food and beverage which

is what doubled down that it's not just whether we win or lose because we're not going to win every nobody ever wins every single that's never going to happen in the game of hockey where someone goes undefeated the entire year and so we want to be san jose's team the south base team we want to be embedded there so we program the building not just for hockey teams but for concerts as well and one of the ways to do that is we embrace the local community and there's a ton of really interesting artists in the local community we're not necessarily as well known but we search out those young things we actually put out campaigns to have that and when they raise their hands and we say oh great you're an emerging filipino artist we'll do a filipino recognition

reinvent tell us what san jose means to you in the context of the sharks re-look at the logo and we've done this i don't know i i don't want to make up a number probably 30 times now over the last five or six years and uh then we create merchandise hats uh we often do a warm-up jersey as well less so recently do some changes at the nhl uh etc we sell them online and in the store and proceeds go back to either a non-profit or the artists themselves that's so cool part of what we are that's so cool what and what an opportunity for the artists too indeed and when you come to the building which i have you been in the big building yet outside of it when you wander around you'll see you ran what are you rocky yeah we did run up the side stairs

we're tourists did you film it to see which one yeah we sure did yeah steve won believe it or not steve won really yeah i know he got a bit of a head start though to be honest a lot of a head it must be the shoes it's 100 but when you come to the building you'll actually see murals throughout the building uh commissioned by these artists as well as you wander around downtown you should look for the 30 or so murals that we have around downtown as well so it's not just this art it's public art as well give me your favorite sharks moment that you were there for and there have been a lot of good ones like you said like i i you you went back 20 years i i went but you the sharks made the playoffs in uh 14 of 15 years right and 10 of those years they were in the

second round or or later which is an unbelievable run of success and you would have been a season ticket i would have been and i you know what i don't think i realized how spoiled we were all that thing i just as leaf fans we do oh my god it almost became oh yeah we're in the playoffs to get great yeah i mean wake me in the second round i mean i'm a little bit exaggerating but it became sort of of course we are yeah um and so there's so many incredible moments it's hard to to pick one um and so i tend to like pick yeah i mean the one that almost every shark fan picks these days is game seven against vegas we were down three nothing there was that 10 minute major i just you know came back etc pavelsky's on the ice bleeding come back and then carlson passed

to goody and we score and overtime and goody's back on the team now so that's that's the one that most fans and she's as loud as i've ever heard any building in my entire life and that's got to be a top 10 moment in all of sports but years before that uh there was a five on three penalty kill um actually if you meet scott hannon ask about him yeah um where uh we were down two players hannon broke his stick so it's actually five on two one and a half and we killed a minute and 43 in a playoff game and that that was that might have been the second loudest i've ever heard our building i was pretty great wow yeah wow so so okay um i just ask you very quickly i'll go one more i'll give it okay yeah we're actually three power rank let's go this is an unusual one

um so we were i think the only happened in canada a lot but not so much in the u.s we got kicked out of our building during covid and stuff like that so we had a whole lost season where we couldn't play in front of fans we finally came back from arizona uh a few of us were in the bubble allowed to watch so i got cleared to watch as well uh i'm a bit of a still of a vocal fan and so i screamed uh at a player who could normally not hear me but of course there's nobody else in so he looked up at me i'm like oh this is embarrassing i should not interrupt an nhl game by yelling at a fan that's great no no no it was you yes yeah did you have a chat about that oh he gave me crap

I will kick myself if I don't ask you this. You're the president. You made the decision, ultimately, for Mike Greer to be the general manager here. Together with the Sharks owner, yes. Of course, of course, yeah. But it's turned out to be one of the best general manager decisions we've seen in the last half decade. And I'm saying that not because you're sitting beside me, but the results are in the direction of the team. Everybody looks at the Sharks.

because it's it's chris johnson who works on our network always says you're selling wins or you're selling hope yep and pretty soon you're going to sell both yep uh and the winds are the winds are coming i think next season the sharks gonna be a real problem um why mike rear what did you like about him so first of all i'd never hired a gm before right and so there were lots of people giving advice here's how you hire a gym in fact quite a few people handed me lists of here's pre-approved gms you should hire one of those but i've hired tons of executives in my career. And I think I'm a pretty good judge of character. And so to me, it was hiring a person and a GM. And there's two different things there as well. And one of the first things I said is,

I don't necessarily want a GM that's done it before. Because if I've got a GM that's done it before, they've got a mental model of how it's going to work. And it didn't work out for them necessarily. There aren't that many GMs that were wildly successful that are going to be on the market wanting to come to San Jose. Because remember, two and a half years ago, people didn't have the belief in us that you guys have now there were a lot of people very skeptical about what we were doing i've been a truther for over a year now so i uh to use a bad analogy i kissed a lot of frogs i i think there were but assistant gm joe will and i think between the two of us we talked to 43 44 people wow wow most of those by zoom i think we only got to 14 in

person or so but a lot much more and we took some people think way too long because you know a lot of people say you should be able to do this in three or four weeks i think we took 12 weeks to do it um because we just wanted to be a little bit analytical a little bit emotional double down and we were looking for people with strong points of view um that was one of the things and quite a few people i could tell were trying to figure out what the answer was and then we're going to feed back the answer to us uh and we had been in this we don't want to rebuild we don't want to reveal i think i joked to some of you guys were inventing words all the time retool reshape re at one point i think we opened the dictionary and highlighted a bunch of rewords to figure out what would not

to say the word rebuild we were resisting it incorrectly as it turned out but um but mike was one of the first candidates that said i know everything says you guys want to do this i don't think that's the right answer you ought to think about it this way and that was very refreshing from the very beginning and to be fair when i started i i don't know if he was going to be the finalist he impressed me enough in that very first interview that i was like better not write that guy off yeah but you know you look at people on paper and they come with reputation and you sort of you try not to be biased but you go in thinking you know who it was and mike just got stronger and stronger and stronger every time i talked to him he got he just we we had this very

easy camaraderie where i would say somebody like that could work and you could think about it this way as well i was like huh he's played a thousand games in the nhl and i've paid zero that's an interesting point as well and and then he would say something i was like yeah but what about this and he oh that's right and so it was almost from day one i could see he'd be a good intellectual sparring partner who would not roll over even if i was the boss or the hustle said something as well and he'd been here in san jose for successful he was always one of those guys that upped his game in the playoffs uh some of the fans like to call him big money mike because he shows up in big money situations both as a player and as a gm i called i ran into him today did you call him that

he does not like that nickname so don't call that to him if i hope you didn't no no he didn't run into him either he's totally we haven't run into him he'd be like mr greer it's nice to meet you like that's what it would have been but in the end of the day it came down to two folks um and both of them were non-traditional meaning they wouldn't have shown up on anybody's list in both cases i was doing the experimental mindset i was do i have faith that this person as a first time gm can get us where i want to go and maybe not be comfortable on year one but learn everywhere through the process and uh mike tipped the scale slightly compared the other one but i was happy that's awesome well uh jb you've been so great with your time guys

yeah yeah yeah so hey thank you thank you so much for your time it's such a pleasure to meet you And congratulations on everything else that's going on here. Appreciate it, guys. Jonathan Beck. So, Alexander Ovechkin. Two in five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk.

Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca. Score it again. 889. As he does. Six away from the record.

I'm still saying he could do it in March. He could do it in March. We got a few days left. How many games do they have left? Okay, so I'm going to look this up. Give me a second here. Tap dance for me. Here.

Well, Jesse, how are you liking California? Oh, my God. Please don't ask Steve to tap down. Two games, okay? You got the Wild tomorrow, and they're on a skid, right? Yeah. And you got the Sabres on Sunday. Six goals.

Six goals against the Sabres. Six goals would be hilarious. Really do need, like, listen, I know it's the playoffs, whatever, whatever. You need to look them in the eye. You need to hold their hand when you tell them this. I must break you. Like, I know. Like Ivan Drago?

sometimes teams at the top of the standings they take their foot off the pedal a little bit there's zero of that going on in washington and you don't want to go into the playoffs with this uh half cocked no you want to get it you want to get it done you want them to tie the record break it uh just get a lifetime supply get get a a carafe full of adrenaline and pour it all over your body and head into the playoffs with it. I think that I'm going to be really honest and say that I would be sad if he broke the record on the road. Oh, I'm with you.

I think, like, honestly, if it happens against the Bruins or the Hurricanes next week, they play April 1st, April 2nd, the Bruins or Hurricanes, I would be disappointed for this. Because this is literally a once-in-a-lifetime moment. We are going to see this over the course of our lives once. And for the Caps fans, it means even more. Yes. And for that building to have this guy throughout his entire career and then get to this moment and then to do it, like, in Carolina, that's kind of disappointing.

I don't think that's the way it's going to work. I want the perfect storm to happen. He does it against Chicago or he does it against Carolina at home the next time on the 10th, and that's what it needs to be. so so jesse the sabers game the capitals are at home for that yeah but he needs like five yeah he's gonna get six no he would need three hat tricks which i mean he gets two and then four three and three or something yeah imagine four sabers have to like sabers fans have to sit through like a four-hour game while they're just getting pumped so the reason that i was like a little intimidated to say that is because i think i would sit him no you're insane i that's crazy i

would sit ov on the first and the second on the road against boston carolina no i would only play him once he is within two once he is within two i would only play him at home that's you're nuts why why take you they are in they are in the playoffs they have the first seed he doesn't need to play any other games this is worse than hellebuck is bad no i need you to know that this is worse than my combined goals wayne gretzky ovechkin take these yeah way worse way worse the capitals have that one oh i bet they did the capitals have three home games left i would only play i would only play him in the three games after the buffalo game so let's say he gets one against Minnesota. He gets

I don't know, three against Buffalo. Let's say it's Hattrick, so he's within two by next Monday. I don't play him Boston, Carolina. Jesse, you can't risk him not beating this. Next year. No, you can't do that. What's wrong? If you are going to do it on the

road, their last game of the season is in Pittsburgh. Yeah, no, no, then you play him that game. You play him that game. That one's like middle finger to Pittsburgh. Yeah, 100%. Oh, oh, Oh, look at that. Turns out they are attacking fans. Who cares if he breaks it this year?

Who cares? El Vetchkin. Why? Why does that matter? Because I am score. It doesn't matter if he breaks it this year or not. What matters is he breaks it in front of the hometown fans. It would be nice.

I think that means more. I think it was on the road. It was on the road. The little hoppy skip. No, no. That was at home because he was wearing. Here, I'll look at it. I'm trying to remember.

Yeah, yeah, look at her. It's a lighter of black jersey. I think it was black. I think you said them every road game. Okay, he's scoring against Minnesota. Sure. So, here, we're doing this. No, I think we just did.

I'm doing it better. He's scoring against Minnesota again. So, Gretzky did it on the road in Edmonton at Northland. Oh, okay, that's perfect. That's gorgeous. Hold on, but that was... When I was like four. But that was beating Howe's points record.

Oh, so you didn't look it up, right? Oh, did I remember the... No, he didn't break the record at 894. Yeah. It was Howe 1851, I think, was Gretzky's record. Yeah. And then the goals record, Howe was 801. Gretzky scored 802.

And I remember that. So you didn't look up the right thing. I don't remember it happening live. I'm going to find out. I'm going to find out. Yeah, this is awful. He broke Howe's goal-scoring record, 8-0-1. Hang on.

Damn it. Damn it. How's his Wikipedia? Hey, you know what? You know what? Yeah? All right. 1994.

It happened in – okay. History was made March 23, 1994, 8-0-2. Hey, I'm looking this up on the fly. Yeah, but this is why we don't ask you to look up things. Just like that 30 years ago, the LA Kings, it was on the Power Play, so it doesn't count. It's not a private podcast. No, it doesn't count.

They erased it. Yeah, they took it back. And it was, they were on the road, or they were at home because they're wearing whites. They're wearing whites. Are you sure? Yeah. Home ice against Vancouver, which is also a dagger. Also a dagger.

I mean, it's... Oh, so he did it at home? He did it at home against Vancouver, yes. Finally got there. Yeah. I would sit over Ashkahn. You're absolutely insane. It's the right thing to do.

Absolutely, completely. Also, who cares if he breaks it this year? He can break it next year. Game two. He's breaking it. At home. It doesn't matter. In that game against the Sabres and in that game against Chicago, he has less than 12 shots on goal in each game.

I think each of his linemates should be fined $50,000. Yeah. American. Follow-up. Okay. All right. You're the goaltender in one of these games. Ten the goal?

Are you like, you know, let's go on three. You don't want to be that guy. You want to be the guy. No. Absolutely not. You don't want to be Wade Flaherty. You want to be the guy. Who was in Met in the 1850s.

You want to be the guy who gave up 73 to Barry Bonds. No, you don't. Why? Yeah, you do. Okay. No, you don't. No. Yeah, you do.

Worst take again. Wow. You're just knocking them out of the pool. On that goal. Okay, so I'm Frederick Anderson. Let's say they play him on the road. Spencer Carver is like, oh, for the sake of the game, I'll play him on the road. Oh, I'm going to play my captain.

I'm not going to healthy scratch my captain. Oh, sanctity of the competition match. Healthy scratch. This is nonsense garbage. This is insane. I can't believe we're having this. Nonsense garbage. Spencer Carver, he plays Ovechkin on the road, okay?

We should be forced out of this building and on the first plane home. I wouldn't blame you. Freddie's in net Wednesday against the Caps in Carolina. I must break you. He has already tied the record, let's say, and now he's going to beat it. If I'm Freddie, oh, my glove was a little low. Went right by me. You don't want to be infamous.

I get to be in that photo forever. No. Hey, Sonny, look at me. I'm on the Oval. But when they're in the picture, they're like sad. Like it's like a sad. No, but you're in the Hockey Hall of Fame. It's Frederick Anderson making the Hockey Hall of Fame without this.

No. Here's your way in. But here's your way in. Do you think Ryan Miller goes into the Hockey Hall of Fame and looks at Sidney Crosby's gloves and he's like, you see that? Look what daddy did. That's me. I think Freddie. I don't think so.

I don't think so. Say the Hurricanes are up like 6-1 or whatever. He's like, all right, let's get this thing over with. Ovi, here you go. Right through the wickets. Five holes a little open. How dare you. Yeah.

Anyways, there you go. Take it or leave it. Spencer Carberry, there's some advice for you. Jesse Blake. There's some advice for you. We're getting looks. Wow. We're getting looks.

Maybe we're just too loud. That could be just that. Yeah. Well. We are in here all by ourselves. I also want to mention other great hockey players. McDavid and Dreissel, known for scoring. going to be out at least another week and the oilers who spotty goaltending good listen i had

an oilers fan tweet me and go you're so wrong about the oilers their defense is actually good um and yeah and so anyway i'm gonna people will just say and well it is the internet uh anything steve has a long standing bit about like and when you'd be like can you believe this person said that i guess steve goes yes yeah certainly sure can there's like eight billion people yes and they're all online but saying a lot of stuff saying so many things can we look at the objective facts here and the oilers are still liars are making the playoffs they've won a game six yep you got it they are six three and one and it looks like the la kings right now the playoffs were to start today it would be kings oilers again and the kings would have home ice

advantage um i'm wondering because their home ice splits uh versus their away i mean the oilers are much... I mean, they're great at home, but they're great away, too. That's actually crazy. Yeah, their home and away splits are about even. Oh, my gosh. Do the Oilers at this point care about home ice advantage is my question. Would you say the numbers? No, say the Kings numbers. Okay, so the

Kings care because they're 26-3 and 4 at home, and then 14, 18, and 5 away. Weird. They are well below 500. But the Kings are 9-1 and 0 in their last 10, which is unbelievable. And they've gained zero ground on the Golden. Yeah,

The Oilers are 22, 11, and 3 home, 19, 13, and 2 away. That's a pretty normal split. The Kings, though, they're fighting for that home ice. So here's my question, okay? McDavid and Dreisaitl out. LA Kings very clearly have to be open in their dressing room about, we want home ice advantage. We need it.

It seems to make a big difference for us, okay? And who could blame them? It's LA. It's a pretty great place to be. so let's talk no it's terrible i hate it um how who wins this race now who wins the home ice advantage race drew is convinced by the way that uh la is going to catch up to vegas i don't think so vegas has won four straight drew likes being wrong yeah yeah he's he's good yeah he's good so what do we think combative though yeah he just takes his l and walks what do you guys think

about plus minus yeah but there's empty anyway chris pronger just tweets him now yeah i know chris pronger tweets because drew's great great at engagement bait nobody can resist by the way he's at home recording this so we better be careful so what do we what do we think here about about this like is is la like does does edmond didn't care i don't know does la care i think absolutely uh edmonton i think is just trying to get to the playoffs just get there we're resting dry side only mcdavid who cares what we do for the next 12 games let's just get there and then get healthy and then play all these games the kings seem to be like we gotta fight for stuff we gotta get this home ice we gotta actually uh compete towards

the end and be good going into the playoffs kings are the oilers who cares the oilers also have to combat with they went to the cup final yeah right so there is going to be a little bit of that extra i think both teams are kind of getting what they need here uh the kings need home ice it's the the splits are insane um like there's a pretty if they get home ice i could be convinced to take them because i've over edmonton i've been pretty bullish on dude remember the last three straight years yep i could be i could be convinced to take them if they don't forget it i'm not even looking at the paper don't show me any stats don't show me nothing but edmonton badly needs to rest uh i mean they ride the hell out of those horses um and also they're legitimately hurt they need to rest

um you're talking about the edmonton dollars defense and everything uh it should not go without pointing out that Stuart Skinner is bad. He's lost 11 of his last 14 games. Actually? Yep, it's not good. He continually allows not the greatest goals, soft goals, and his safe percentage over that little stretch there has only been above 900 one, two, three, four times.

So four in the last 14 games, safe percentage above 900, not great, Stuart Skinner. One thing I will say about the Edmonton Oilers maybe having good defense is they have Jake Wallman. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So I look at this front office and I say, hey, why didn't you think goaltending was a problem? Well, you say that, and what an Oilers fan would say,

because it's always personal, is they'll come back at you and go, but the Leafs. And the Leafs have allowed more goals than the Oilers have this year. I just thought you might find that interesting. The Leafs have allowed 210. The Oilers have allowed 230. Is that it? Oh, they're the same.

And the Leafs have scored a couple more than the Oilers. But, yeah, they're plus minus. The goal differential is about the same. Don't make me be an old man and say watch the damn games. Please don't make me do that. No, the Oilers, for years, and still it's the case, are one of the most fun teams to watch because they're able to do things offensively

that just make you get out of your chair, say, wow, stuff you've never seen before. And they allow goals that make you go, whoo-hoo-fah. Evan Bouchard Corner is my new favorite segment on this show. I think it's everybody's new favorite segment. Are we straight neat or are we not? Seeing a player do less with more.

Right. He's fascinating. So they're a very difficult team to project. The one thing I'll say about Edmonton not addressing their goaltending, who got a goalie? Yeah, it's true. Nobody moved. Nobody moved on.

But Spencer Knight, that's it, really. I think the Oilers should have been the one to pony up for that. Fair. If that's what you need, you should go out and get it. Drew says, Jesse, I'm just eating the text now. Jesse, on the Ovechkin thing, that is a ridiculous take. Please mute Jesse's mic, is what he said. I control the mics over here in San Jose.

Six and 12. I do want to touch on the St. Louis Blues, who are the hottest team in the NHL right now. I'm going to repeat that. The St. Louis Blues? Two in five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters.

On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.

Hear that? It's your money calling. It wants a promotion. Elevate your savings with the Scotia High Interest Savings Account. Always earn high regular interest rates that grow the more you save and invest. Conditions apply. Visit scotiabank.com slash H-I-S-A to learn more.

Scotiabank. You're richer than you think. But first, William Eklund's just arrived, and I think we should have him on. I think we should, too. He didn't just arrive. Adam's lying. He arrived before. Going by William Eklund of the San Jose Sharks.

We're so excited that you're here just off the ice from practice. Thanks for coming. thank you very much for having me um i was in sweden last year for uh the the global series and i came back thinking i was a man of the world and and i knew and i knew how to say things in swedish only to find out uh i had no idea how do you say hot chocolate in swedish that sounds that's not what you were saying i said warm chocolate that's that's pretty accurate i'll give you that one i'll give you that one We could not have given him that.

We could have given him shit for that for a year. There was also some sort of beer that you were trying that apparently wasn't true. You asked Matt Sundin about this, and he's like, I've never heard of that. I think it was literally one bar had a garlic beer, and they made it sound like it was a Swedish thing. I never heard about that. No, see, that's what Matt said. Matt's like, I think they were just pranking you tourists. Yeah, they were probably.

Ripped us off. That's all right. That's all right. So listen, man, it's so great to have you here. We're, we're, we're pumped, uh, pumped for you and pump your, for your success and that sort of thing. And, and I, I think what's sort of cool, what's going on here is that you are a part of what we're going to call the NHL sort of best young group.

That's making its way up. It's you, it's Macklin, it's, it's well, there's so many others. Um, I just want to know what it's like to be a part of that. Does that sink in day to day? Like, you know, you see your face on the side of the SAP center. Like, do you feel like, does that ever hit you or do you just kind of go out to job? It's what you do. it kind of hasn't hit me yet to be honest i guess in in the offseason more you're like yeah it's

it's pretty cool actually and every time my family is here they think fig is pretty cool but for me it's just you know i come in here i work every day and i i see all the guys in the locker room we like team it so it's you know nothing you think about well it seems like there's like they've got a really great group of mentors around you mike ricci was making noise while he walked down the highway okay the toothless guy yeah no but he's actually you love sharpening each other so yeah it's just fun him and we saw joe uh jumbo when we walked in yeah yeah uh like it just seems like a really great group i know dan boyle's you know around as well and patrick marlow makes appearances and so so tell us a little bit about that because you know those

guys are all guys that played a thousand games in the nhl which is amazing what uh what's that kind of effect on you yeah it's huge i think obviously walking into the locker room you see yamo working out upstairs and you see like you know makes you you want to work out yourself because you want to look like him when he's that age you know and yeah it's it's obviously cool to have those guys around and reach on the ice too it's it's huge for for all the guys i think you know to see them around and yeah and see what they've gone through sometimes we talk to players who grew up in europe and we say oh who'd you watch growing up and the answer is often well the games were on when i was asleep uh so i didn't i didn't get to watch a ton of nhl hockey growing

up was was that the case for you like who were you watching when you were young yeah i was watching you know my dad played in the local team in sweden so he played in that same team for 14 years and he you know obviously he played with wember he's on my team right now so i watched those guys mika seban and ja they were there too you know playing with him so those guys seems like a really cool guy yeah he's awesome awesome guy you know have you ever been to one of his concerts i haven't i haven't been but i've seen a lot of them so it's it's fun yeah sorry i didn't interrupt you yeah but who else did you play with uh who my i looked up watch i looked up a lot to peter forrest but obviously you know it's a pretty cool guy so and you know

paul that soup was one of my favorites too so those those guys those were the guys you watched and what was your dad's team you were gonna you're and you played with your guard yeah exactly yeah and it seems like the swedish all you guys trying to stay together when you guys are all in the nhl i know simon edmondson was taken like the pick before you in the 21 the draft did you guys hang out at all did you guys play together and against each other in sweden yeah we do we did a lot you know growing up and stuff like that we and he was young one year younger than me but we still played against each other sometimes and you know he you know i would play against raymond holtz and all those guys we were in the same age so you always ended up

playing against each other in the finals or something any connection with uh willie you guys you guys train it a little yeah we do in the showers sometimes it's actually my first jam skating with him and uh his brother and jesper brad and grandstrom we had a good group there and his dad there's a lot of good good drills for us and you know you could go on for pretty much two and a half hour if you wanted so oh wow yeah so yeah he trains a lot he trains hard so it's just fun to to see that get works and you know makes you want to work harder what what percent of the time does willie have a shirt on i don't know he comes in shirtless sometimes i don't know it's he's a tarps off guy yeah he's he just does his thing and it's you know it's pretty cool to see

what's what's his dad like because i've always wondered like michael now i mean he was a pretty hard-nosed nhl player but he seems to be like we watched him in the in the uh in the series over in sweden he just seemed to be very proud and happy and that sort of thing but what's he like on the ice when he's barking drills at you guys he's great to be honest you know the whole family has been great to me when i came came in there and practiced with them uh he he always does his you know a lot of cutback drills and a lot of those drills like you can see why they both are so great at that yeah he came from his father and he you know he did that a lot and and you know it's it's hard prices and that's what you need in the summer because that that gets me going before

before the camp here so you know obviously great family and a great dad there's some appreciate that yeah absolutely well so you know i'm i'm looking around here obviously we've got we're in the uh where the barracuda play uh tomorrow night you're you're we're gonna be watching you guys play the leafs and and i'm i'm you know this team uh it's really really hard as as you've seen and we won't mention any of the franchises by name for teams to rebuild and to put a good culture together and have the right veterans in the room and all of that right and And you guys seem to be in a really, really good place. I wonder from your side of things,

who keeps things loose in the Sharks dressing room? Like if you're on a road trip and it's a tough practice or a tough game or whatever, who's going to break that ice? Toffoli is a good guy. Yeah? Yeah, Toffoli. Mario Ferrari is pretty good at that too. We had a lot of guys this year who's been good at it.

What were the pranks? Pranks are good. You know, obviously you see you've seen a lot of that with the Will and Mac, you know, they're sleeping all with Toffola and that stuff. And yeah, you just have been a fun group this year. And I don't know, it's a lot of it's a good group. Yeah. You can tell like you can tell like you guys are having fun,

even though the season probably hasn't gone the way you want it. Everybody wants to win, but you can tell that it comes through on the ice that you play hard and you enjoy being around each other. Yeah, we do. And I think that's something that is a first step in the rebuilding process. You know, we have it all in front of each other, but also when we go on ice, we compete. And, you know, it's been good competition in the practices. And I think that's a huge thing for success in the future.

We all come from, everybody sitting at this desk comes from a very cold country. You know, we're Canadians. You're from Sweden. You know what winter feels like. What is it like playing here and then walking out in the afternoon and you see palm trees? And like, do you think you could never go back, right? Oh, I guess. That's when I'm, you know, I noticed that too.

I get pretty soft right now. You know, you go to like a medium cold place. It's like, it's cold there, right? Yeah. Guys, it's like, oh, it's pretty warm today, I guess. And it's like, ah, I'm just used to the heat out here. So, yeah, you get softer and softer, I guess. Yeah, no, we've been here for two, three days.

And today it wasn't 30 degrees Celsius. And we started complaining. We're like, oh, it's a little windy. You know, where's the hot weather? You know? Jacket weather? I see how that happens like quickly it does it does yeah it's it seems to be um it seems to be just a uh like a really like one of the things I think people talk about in in a climate like this

is like oh I can I can play hockey in the morning go golf in the afternoon what do you do outside of this like so after this like I don't need an itinerary of your whole day but like what would you do on an average day where you're not playing you do your practice in the morning what's next What do you do for fun, I guess? For fun, I usually play a lot of video games, I guess. Yeah, what do you do? What game? Fortnite, FIFA. I usually play with Rasmus Sandin and Fabian Sederlund.

Okay, who's better, Fabian, Rasmus, or you? I'm going to be honest. I'm actually the worst player of those three. I'm going to be humble like that because I think they're pretty good. But yeah, we play pro clubs together and we have a lot of fun doing that. that's that's a lot what i do in the afternoon even if it's sunny outside i've played some

weird games nice one last time we yeah so we played as a group together oh like the eshl yeah yeah you're on the same team steve does that with his friends too and he ends up yelling at them so it's a lot of screaming and it's never my fault no never it's insane it's a crazy thing it's never my fault i know you said like it hasn't really hit you yet but have you had any uh over the last two years like welcome to the nhl moment yeah i guess when you you know you play like you know probably teams like this toronto or you play mcdavid on the edmonton you play those guys and you go up and just feel their speed and feel their how they are out there i think that's something that's like wow it's it's pretty cool to go against what is it like to play against mcdavid

uh it's you know it's it's tough to stop it yeah you can't stop it pretty much but you just gotta find a way to you know eliminate his chances as much as you can yeah that's what i guess yeah there's so uh you know watching alexander ovechkin go for his record i think as of this recording he's six away yeah what is that like does that inspire you like does that something you look at you go man this guy is like 39. he's eaten subway sandwiches before every game and hot cheetos yeah of course that's i don't know how he does it to be honest he's so impressive like he's how he's been made able to score that many goals every year and he's still like still scoring and i watched a lot of the games because uh good friends and dean so i watched a lot of games so

it's just impressive to see him out there rasmus seems like a fun guy too he's like pretty hilarious yeah yeah it's just like we we obviously we watched him sort of grow up a little bit in in Toronto and and he always seemed like a really confident sort of fun guy that everybody seemed to like uh what what position does he play in FIFA just so we know because that's what we really need to know in the pro clubs yeah he's forward so he said no no he's not for what I'm saying it sets his sudden is forward and he's like a calm so central offensively okay and on the wing so yeah we have a lot of fun good man that's great what's what's his style like will he get back on defense is he a rockstar he does actually yeah then he gets his rockstar moment sometimes on his piss but

but he he will get back on defense he's actually good at that so do you guys play you guys play against people online then yeah okay do they ever know that it's you no i don't know i don't think so no i don't think so no that's now are you able to like i haven't played fifa online in forever are you guys talking to people like you know i think you can if you want to but uh we haven't I haven't really done that. Steve used to cheer people on. No, you should definitely stay anonymous because it's one thing to lose, but I would lose and then they would tweet at me like,

my team just kicked your ass. It made for a bad night. Yeah, it does. I didn't like it. Well, listen, you've been really gracious with your time here. We really appreciate it. And I just want to say congratulations on the success of this season. I know you're already well past where you were at last season

in terms of points and stuff, and it's just going to get better for you. So we're really looking forward to watching your journey and watching the Sharks' journey too because it's going to be pretty exciting over the next few years for you guys. For sure.

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. So it's worth mentioning the Calgary Flames guys have a record of 6-2-2 in their last 10. That's really good. That's really, really good

for the Calgary Flames. Yes. The problem is that the St. Louis Blues are 8-1-1 and have won seven straight hockey games. That's so not fair. seven straight hockey games the st louis blues might kick both the flames and the canucks out

of the playoffs and by the way we all were like doug armstrong what are you talking about you won't trade braden shen at the trade deadline that's not what i said he was right and so were you damn uh this is a good team dude flames and canucks they might kick the wild out they might i don't two points back now i don't know how to look it up but jordan bennington's been on an absolute terror since coming back from four nations and so i i think there's going to be a lot of about jordan bennington he was legitimately mediocre and like heading into the four nation face-off then during the four nation face-off straight up mediocre too bad then he had a couple good periods against finland you're like oh maybe and in team in the final game against the u.s

you're just like who is this person i've never that's one of the craziest lock in single game performances i've seen in recent memory and he's just stayed pissed off i guess like yeah yeah Maybe, like, I almost wonder, you know how sometimes, like, oh, the media, and I just want to stay away from the headlines and whatever. What if the headlines helped him? Yeah. What if that motivates him? What if he needed to be, Jordan Bennington needs to be mad to play his best. And I don't think he's had a good day since.

Nine and two, by the way, since Four Nations. Nine and two with a what? I don't have the save percentage in front of me. 11. Really good. 40 save percentage. Nine and two. you know people were saying it was funny that people were saying oh well no players have been

good since they came back from four nations like does jordan biddington not exist and sydney crosby he counts as insane yeah and you're talking about how good the blues have been since january 27th they are the number one team in the national hockey league this hasn't been a recent development where there's just they're just kind of the best team in march or the best team in february you go back to january 27th they have 33 points total 15 5 and 3 that's the best record playoff start today who do the blues play they would play because they're their final wild card they would play the jets oh oh you know what shoot i think they're the favorite if i'm picking that series right now no no don't lose in five don't say that give them one don't say that give those boys and

win a bag one okay why okay i'm not ready the jets are monsters they're monsters yeah yeah who's Who's the monster lately? The St. Louis Blues. I think I'm becoming a Jordan Binnington fan. And by the way, the Jets beat the Caps earlier. You know, battle of the best. They beat them. They beat the Caps.

Schedule a loss for the Caps. Oh. Is that what it is? Yeah. Look at the leadoff. The Jets play in Missouri. No, they don't. Well, irrelevant.

Okay. Wow. That is. Oh, man. If I'm the Jets, I am cheering for the Wilds every game, even harder than i usually do you have to pray that the blues get out of that second wild card that is it that's the most dangerous team in the west damn dude that's that's okay that's crazy that is crazy grab tweeted this might not even make um yeah it's true the second hottest player

since the four nations break uh which bennington was the hottest also plays for the blues and his name's dylan holloway yes uh 17 games eight goals 12 assists 20 points 16 of those points came even strength uh three game winning goals didn't count uh 32 hits yeah that's because you know power play doesn't count 32 hits 45 shots on goal that's from grav like i said uh this guy has been pretty spectacular uh just as a pickup from uh the edmonton oilers and it's interesting we were talking about it quickly off mic and then jesse told us to stop because yeah it was we were having a good conversation i was like save it for the air and listen i watched three rounds uh you know i did i streamed two rounds and then and then obviously the oilers in the finals and

you streamed the last round but like watched and watched and watched the oilers last year in the playoffs and dylan holloway was really good but i didn't see guy on pace well he has 60 points yeah he has 60 points now now and the others could really use that dev scoring but why okay like why does that happen um i think some players are first liners some are second some are third some are fourth right not everyone like if you go out uh for the playoffs and you really need a fourth line center that's what your team needs and you go out and you spend the assets on a second line center you might be like gosh we're friggin stacked we are so deep we're so that's not really how it works right there's only one puck and there's only 60 minutes um would holloway

have ever hit these heights in edmonton i don't know that he would there might not be enough room he had he had one power important in st louis yeah he had one power play point the entire year last year he is he has 13 this year in the regular season his his minutes per game last year were 11-22 and the year before were 9-35. This year it's 16-51. So basically 17 minute a night player. And so to your point about opportunity,

his shooting percentage is higher, much higher than it was last year. So it was about 11% last year. It's about 14% this year, but not... 14 is reasonable as hell. It's not crazy. It just means progression.

I just, I look at this and I go, okay, when he signed, and I don't blame Oilers fans for what I'm about to say because being salty is part of being a fan. Why would you like that he's gone? But when he did sign and Broberg signed, the Oilers fans were basically, from what I saw,

some of them said, well, yeah, they just signed because they just wanted the money. And now Broberg's having a career year, Holloway's having a career year, and these guys are going to make the playoffs. Broberg had four points against Montreal. He had a goal and three assists and was a plus four. he's plus eight the last five games with six points so is that it it sure sounds like those

are guys that just maybe they wanted money and opportunity maybe they're 23 like maybe you don't give up on 23 year olds and you just kind of sign them because they're not yet what they will be okay gave up on them as harsh i i think let them go they i think they mismanaged the cap well and okay do the oilers need to get jake wallman if phil broberg is there yes sorry no 6.6.7 million dollars is what it took to keep them you could have reallocated those assets and kept them you could have you could have i mean they actually uh they made a phone call that might have gone into this building i don't know um and they uh they traded cody cc to the sharks to try to make that work the blues did that weird deal where they're like here's a couple

more picks just out of the kindness of our hearts yeah um uh listen there's no there's no being cute about it yeah holloway and broberg are better on st louis than they would have been in edmonton broberg broberg i'm actually not so sure like he he would have been very useful but holloway is what they hope jeff skinner would be yeah like yes there's no there's no way of looking at that and going well good for them that was right because that's because because you could have paid the three million bucks i mean they were trying to get holloway at like 1.1 and i think if they'd gone to like 1.5 or something they might have been able to do it and and and that was that goes back to ken holland right like i also wonder if like he does the money make you stand different

like like a little bit like let's say holloway what do you have last year he had uh uh oh this regular season he had nine points he had nine point in 38 games yeah what still like the money i make i wonder if that makes you just go holy shit all right time to time to elevate 25 games in the playoffs he had nine points there too instead of settling into this depth role that they've uh assigned me i gotta elevate but one thing adams made this point before in that it should be so simple to build this team with mcdavid and dry saddle and if you don't end up winning a cup in this era where you have those two players it's a failure on epic proportions because it should be so easy and for them we know we're lead fans screwing this up in the the part

of the era where they had Drysaddle at $8.5 million for all of those seasons, and now it's over, and you had McDavid at $12.5 million. And for you not just to be able to plug in a couple pieces around, it should be by default every year, Stanley Cup contender.

And for them to not look good every playoffs, it's a complete mismanagement in my eyes. Listen, they could still go deep, right? I look at this, just, you know, it is not Stan Bowman's fault that Holloway or Broberg wasn't re-signed up until it was stan bowman's fault because he took over right these deals happened i don't know i don't

know the time he took over in like mid-july or something mid to late time to prepare for they right right there was time and listen it's maybe you don't put it directly on stan bowman but he is the guy that traded cody cc traded for jake wallman signed jeff skinner or no just get or he did not sign i think maybe that was jeff jackson but you've got to have yeah that was skinner and arvidsson i don't remember that was season is the timelines are difficult to remember yeah and you know the other thing about that is stan bowman taking over when he did that's also something that could have been avoided because they knew ken holland's contract was up and they could have done something about sitting there all season right and i know they were waiting for reinstatement

from the nhl but come on like okay then you didn't have to do there's so much about this like stan bowman stepped in and it was a bit of a mess but you your job is to kind of evaluate that and i think they tried to go with we know what jeff skinner can be or has been i think and maybe that's that's what we need in our depth i think um i don't mind arvidson either i know that he's been injured a lot i like arvidson a lot like i i think sometimes it's easy to look at things a little too black and white and be like well the oilers are good so they make exclusively good decisions no every decision they've made great right that's just not how it works like good teams make bad decisions and i think they have made quite a few on the other side of that uh

People were picking at him a little bit. He's starting to look like a genius again. I mean, he had a pretty good offseason. And, God, the parallels to 2019 are eerie. We're talking about trading Pareko, talking about trading the team's captain, except instead of Alex Petrangelo, this time it's Braden Shen. He ends up holding on to both of them.

Bennington gets hot. the team gets ridiculously hot they squeak into the playoffs oh you you skipped over the most important part hella bucks a fraud they fired their head coach and brought in and they brought in somebody who can do this thing and by the way Jim Montgomery's revenge tour is crazy yeah like look at what the Bruins who are the Bruins dressing the Pluto Shinzawa just put out the the lineups it's a decidedly young group and and and jim montgomery stepped out of boston where he'd set records and they had a bad start because they're poorly constructed team what's the record for wins it cost him his job cam cam neely and and don sweeney's decision making about roster

construction cost jim montgomery his job and then here comes doug armstrong going you know what we have a good coach but here's a better one let's go get them and it's which is it's that is crazy It's a decision that I think gets you highly criticized in hockey. Nine times out of ten. If this doesn't work, he looks like a complete jerk for firing Drew Bannister, who was not doing a bad job. He wasn't the guy. He wasn't. Well, yeah, he was the guy until a better guy showed up.

Exactly. and uh you know doug armstrong has had a ruthless calendar year man like double offer sheet uh fired a coach i'm not gonna say with no reason um well usually coaches only get fired when they're they've underperformed yeah and that's just not what happened with the blues yeah um he's had a ruthless year but he's had a really good one and it sticks with the trend of nhl teams seen success after being pretty ruthless zero buried contracts zero buyouts zero retention slots used that's doug armstrong's team now they don't have a ton of cap to spend this offseason but i don't think it matters if they're going to play like this by the way uh we're going to be

back with a show on friday uh so and there's more content coming we got our watch party tonight for the barracuda it's going to be a fun week in san jose so gentlemen i guess we'll just wrap it up there why not when's uh shark's fan reaction coming out yeah uh at the exact same time as oh yeah because of the game you see that two and five canadians will hear the words you have cancer that's why every step and dollar raised matters on september 19th join thousands in toronto for the princess margaret cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear

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