Hackblocks

The Sharks close out their road trip tonight with a loss against the Hawks in Chicago, which apparently is a gun-casing encrusted hellhole where it’s easier to get illegal firearms than a Diet Coke despite “the strictest gun control laws in the nation.” Instead of this fiction being an indictment of piecemeal gun regulation creating incentives for a bootlegging (like, oh, the argument by the same people against states legalizing marijuana), it’s used as an argument for doing nothing.

Anyway. It’s the end of a 4 game trip that saw the Sharks kick Canada’s ass, culminating with them chasing Carey Price. Brendan Dillon observed Price’s intense stare-down as he was leaving the game, and responded with a derp face worth of the Derp Vezina.

Good god.

His partner David Schlemko, my boy, scored his first goal of the season, which I’m sure is him emptying the chamber before scatter-spraying points out of his Constitutionally mandated high-capacity clip for the rest of regular season and well into June. This metaphor is good because it’s so natural. THAT’S HOW IT’S DONE, OLD CANADIAN HOCKEY COLUMNIST HONKIES.

Anyway, I’ve seen some shit in my life, and my hard-won grizzled wisdom suggests that the Sharks are going to play disinterested, disjointed hockey before boarding a plane back home. Still, this game is going to be viewed as a referendum on whether the Sharks are “for real” or some similar horseshit, so I’d prefer that they do the smart thing, put Joel Ward back in the goddamn lineup instead of Facey Punchy or Michael Haley or whatever his name is.

Sharks @ Hawks

4:00 PM Pacific

Prediction: Timo Meier will go from “who is this guy?” to “future Hawk Timo Meier” in the course of 5-8 shifts in the minds of Chicago fans.