If the Sharks were trying to take the pressure off Patrick Marleau by removing the spotlight from him, they've done a damn good job of it in their marketing campaign, or at least the season ticket portion of it. I got mine in the mail today and on the front cover is:

-Joe Thornton -- the guy Doug Wilson said he wouldn't trade

-Dan Boyle -- the guy that Wilson said was his best player in the playoffs

-Joe Pavelski -- the guy that...uh...well, everyone thinks he's got the potential to be a future captain.

No Marleau and no Evgeni Nabokov. Ok, well let's flip through the tickets and see what other players they have. Surely they will have their franchise goalie and last year's team MVP in there, right?

Let's see...Thornton again, Marc-Edouard Vlasic, another Boyle, and another Pavelski.

Huh. Ok, let's turn the page to the next sheet of tickets. Torrey Mitchell, Douglas Murray, Devin Setoguchi, and Jody Shelley.

Jody Shelley? Jody Shelley gets on the tickets but Patrick Marleau doesn't?

(Other notable missing guys include Jonathan Cheechoo and Milan Michalek, or The Guys We've Identified As Trade Bait.)

Several schools of thought on this one: First, Wilson publicly stated that Marleau hasn't been asked to waive his no-trade...yet. Perhaps this is preemptively assuming that the former captain isn't on the preferred list when when Doug Wilson is looking at his fantasy keeper roster. Second, since every photo of Marleau in the past five years has him with a big C on the jersey, maybe they just didn't want to add confusion on there.

(I doubt that, though. Joe Thornton's on here and he's got his A right there. Plus, there's this thing called Photoshop -- which, if you know anything about it, is something that the Sharks graphic design crew obviously know the bare minimum of because all of their designs over the past decade are really just cropped photos with a few standard filters and shadow effects on them.)

I suppose the third option is that Wilson is trying to push Marleau's buttons in order to either make demand a trade or play better (though, as I've argued a bazillion times, Marleau played pretty damn well last season and in the playoffs considering what his injury was), or just to fuck with him for kicks.

Finally, and probably the most logical answer, is this: the marketing department had to finalize the details of their campaign early in the summer. They probably asked the hockey ops folks who they should feature, and their answer was the safe folks: the guaranteed-to-be-here stars (Boyle, Thornton), the build-around-them young guys (Pavelski, Vlasic, Mitchell, Setoguchi), and the he's-cheap-and-no-one-would-want-him tough guy (Shelley).

That leaves Murray, who is...um...well...he's kinda overpriced for what he does, so maybe that makes him untradeable. Or maybe Doug Wilson is fucking with his head too.