The San Jose Sharks tied their Western Conference semifinal series with the defending Stanley Cup champion Los Angeles Kings at 2-2 with back-to-back home wins. Tonight, at 10:30 p.m. they will try to steal a road victory at Staples Center on CNBC. The game can be live streamed for free here; Kings fans can listen to the game at 1220 KHTS and Sharks fans can hear the action at KFOX 102.1.
San Jose took two straight low-scoring wins from the Kings, with goaltender Antti Niemi outperforming the Kings' star netminder Jonathan Quick. Still, Quick is leading all goalies in goals against average (1.64) and received a nice chunk of bulletin board material from Sharks left winger T.J. Galiardi.
What kind of bugs me about him, I don't know if I should say it, but a little embellishment every now and then," Galiardi said. "You skate by and you don't even touch him, or you barely even touch him, and he's throwing his hands in the air. So that's one of those things. It's playoffs. Everyone is trying to draw a penalty. Whatever." If that wasn't incendiary enough, Galiardi kept going on about a topic that has clearly irked him.
"The thing is, with video, something we like to say around here is, 'Ball don't lie.' It's an old basketball term, but when you watch the video, the video doesn't lie. So I'm skating by and I barely touch him, and he's throwing his hands in the air. It's kind of one of those things. He looks bad on video, not me."
Still, in the last two losses Los Angeles hasn't had poor goaltending, or shaky defense. Their offense needs to take its play up a level. Kings defenseman Rob Scuderi did not hide from that fact, but also indicated the defending champions aren't panicking.
"We're not going to do anything out of the ordinary or try to do it ourselves. ... We were down 2-0 in the St. Louis series. I know it's not as easy as everyone thinks it was last year, being up 3-0 in every series, but we have a good mentality in here, and we're trying to stay upbeat and confident, and realize our best 60 minutes are ahead of us."
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