Sharks Gameday: The Torrey Mitchell Over/Under

Nashville Predators (7-7-1) at San Jose Sharks (12-4-2), 7:30 PST

Update: Torrey Mitchell's gone to Worcestor for conditioning, making my whole post moot. In some ways, that's fitting.

The good news: Devin Setoguchi and Ryan Vesce are back.

The bad news: Torrey Mitchell is still out. Yes, that means that our friend Torrey still hasn't played a regular season game in over a year. Incredible, huh? Remember when Mitchell showed up at training camp and we were all excited about how we'd finally get to see him progress from his excellent rookie campaign and his strong play against Anaheim in last year's playoffs?

Then came the news about his tendonitis, and since then it's just been a waiting game. The thing that made this even more frustrating is that we kept getting reports about how Mitchell was skating, and how a return was seemingly imminent. Even last week, the news was that Mitchell was farther along then Setoguchi and we might even see him this week.

So with Setoguchi coming back, where does that put Mitchell? Is the team just being super-duper-mega cautious with Mitchell so that he stays in the lineup for good? Or is this going to be a lingering injury that never heals properly?

We know that Mitchell is participating in practice and he's skating with the fourth line for that. What happens next? Your guess is as good as mine, but I'm putting the official Battle of California Over/Under (TM) at December 1st. Which way are you betting on this one? I'm taking the over.

For the game against Nashville, Todd McLellan is going against my wishes (how dare he!) and putting Setoguchi back with Joe Thornton and Dany Heatley while reuniting Ryane Clowe with Joe Pavelski and Patrick Marleau. McLellan says things are dynamic, though, so maybe by the second period he'll say, "Damn, Mike Chen was right after all" and he'll use pair up Setoguchi and Marleau to maximize their speed.

Prediction: Sharks 4, Preds 2. Goals by Setoguchi, Pavelski, Marleau, and Boyle.