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For Bay Area hockey, it’s one and done
By Jeremy Harness November 11, 2004 |
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SAN JOSE - Before the start of a hockey game Tuesday night, the public address announcer, fresh off the player introductions, said it loud for everyone to hear. “Ladies and gentlemen, your Cleveland Barons!” That would have nice and all, except for the certain fact that Cleveland is about 2,500 miles away from the HP Pavilion in San Jose, where the game was about to be played between the Barons - the American Hockey League affiliate of the San Jose Sharks - and the Edmonton Road Runners. About the only thing one can connect Cleveland with San Jose is Jeff Garcia, the former San Jose State standout quarterback who now plays for the Cleveland Browns. Nonetheless, the 11,784 fans at HP Pavilion, most of whom being Sharks season ticket-holders, were in Cleveland’s corner on this particular night. By the way, the reasoning behind naming a hockey team that plays on ice “road runners,” one has no clue. OK, back to hockey. The NHL is mired in a nasty lockout situation, with nothing having changed since, basically, the end of last season. So enter the “home” team from Cleveland, which has no other scheduled games for San Jose this season. Tuesday night was very likely the last the Bay Area will see of professional hockey for another 11 months, given the two sides actually have something resembling an agreement by then. And to think that no local TV or radio outlet had the common decency to air the game live. Where’s the humanity, people? As for the game, the Barons lost, 2-0, despite many, many chances to score against a porous Edmonton defense, which left the front of the net wide open for much of the evening. Problem was, Cleveland had trouble shooting the puck with any velocity. On a number of occasions, players swung at the floating puck and missed. The Barons had plenty of opportunities - they had seven power plays while Edmonton had only one, as well as having a 33-25 edge in shots on goal - but they just couldn’t cash any of them in. Edmonton seized the opportunity just enough times to secure the victory. Defenseman Mathieu Roy snuck one past goalie Dimitri Patzold at the 9:11 mark of the first period to give the Road Runners a 1-0 lead, and left winger Raffi Torres followed in the second period with a goal of his own. On the plus side, fans got to see center Marcel Goc, who scored the series-clinching goal for the Sharks in last season’s Western Conference semifinal against Colorado. Naturally, he was the Cleveland player who got the biggest ovation Tuesday night at HP Pavilion. They better hope they savored every last yelp that flew from their mouths Tuesday night, because the only hockey the Bay Area will see this winter will probably be played in rec centers. |
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