The San Jose Sharks will have plenty of video to watch during their two-hour flight back to California. They can thank the Utah Mammoth for that.
Saturday wasn’t the Mammoth’s smoothest victory — a 6-4 final score with plenty of ups and downs — but the way they figured out how to get things under control in an unfavorable situation showed the maturity that they’ve developed over the last 12 months.
Let me explain.
Each period was seemingly its own game on Saturday in the Mammoth’s preseason finale.
After allowing an early goal, the Mammoth answered with four of their own before the end of the first period.
Then the second period was all Sharks. They scored three times, quieting the Delta Center a little more with each one.
In the third frame, the Mammoth regained their stride — and their lead — thanks to goals from Clayton Keller and Brandon Tanev. They held onto the lead this time, closing out the preseason with two consecutive home wins.
Oct. 28, 2024 is a day Utah would love to forget. After holding a 4-1 lead with four and a half minutes left in the third period, they allowed San Jose to come back and win in overtime.
Three and a half weeks from the one-year anniversary of that game, in the same building, facing the same team, it happened again.
Fortunately for the Mammoth, they got their feet back under them and won, but they certainly would have preferred to keep the three-goal lead intact.
You can call it a beat reporter’s curse (I’ll wear that one), but you also have to acknowledge the tendency that the team has had to put it in cruise control when they gain a comfortable lead.
It happened more times than you could count last year, and it has already occurred twice this preseason that Utah has blown a multi-goal lead.
Last year, it was a matter of ‘parking the bus’ and letting the opposing offense come to them. They allowed far more scoring chances that way, which resulted in a lot of goals against in the dying minutes.
This time, they did a bit too much coasting. On the Barclay Goodrow goal, for example, both Jack McBain and Nick Schmaltz gave up on the back check, allowing a 2-on-1 where it otherwise could have been an even rush.
Several Mammoth agreed in their postgame interviews.
“Moving our feet, I think. That’s the biggest thing for us,” Keller said. “We talked about it, and we’ll get better. We had chances last year of kind of the same thing, for whatever reason, so we’ll keep working at it and making sure next time, we know what to expect from the other team.”
That being said, head coach André Tourigny likes the improvement that he’s seen over the last year.
“(We’ve come) far,” he said, reflecting on that October 2024 game. “We won this game. We closed this game, and like I said, we gave up 13 shots. We’ll take that any day. If we can do that 82 times, we’re in good shape.”
“Every game, we’ve been getting better, so that’s the right progression that we want to have going into the regular season,” Tanev added.
While most of San Jose’s goals didn’t come from egregious mistakes on Karel Vejmelka’s part, he probably could have done more on a few of them.
It’s not all about the numbers, but through three preseason games, he has a .787 save percentage. He has shown frustration at a few points during training camp practice sessions after allowing several goals in a row.
Goaltending is just as much of a mental game as it is physical. Vejmelka showed last year that he has the physical ability to stop the puck, but if his confidence is low, that skill won’t matter.
The season hasn’t even started yet, so there’s plenty of time for the newly extended goaltender to get back on his feet.
Is that Ian Cole or Quinn Hughes?
Cole put a pass through four Sharks, perfectly on Kailer Yamamoto’s tape. Credit to Yamamoto too, of course. He tipped it perfectly past the Sharks’ last line of defense, Yaroslav Askarov.
We also have to shout out Tanev. They call him “Turbo” — and he showed why in the third period.
He scooped the puck up off a defensive-zone face-off, chipped it off the boards and put it in high gear. Once he was all alone with the goalie, he made a move to the backhand and made no mistake putting it in.
“I was just fortunate enough to get a good bounce and maybe get a step on the guy,” Tanev said of the goal after shouting out his line mates for putting him in a good position. “Made a play and it ultimately went in the net.”
