Sharks Expect More From Themselves After Overtime Loss to Rival Kings

SAN JOSE -- Saturday's matinee rumble against the Los Angeles Kings was far from the Sharks' best effort of the season. Nevertheless, they found a way to snag a point in overtime despite having an off-night against the league-worst Kings. And a point is more than they got on Thursday in their 5-3 loss to the Winnipeg Jets -- a game where the Sharks played one of their most complete 60-minute sessions of the season.

So how do the Sharks' reactions to those two games compare?

"I think we'll take this one over the other night," Joe Pavelski said. "We (stood) here the other night, and we'd played a pretty good game, a pretty committed game and we got nothing."

Pavelski is the reason the Sharks were able to get a point out of Saturday's game. With a newly-rearranged forward line circling the Kings net with less than a minute to go in regulation, the captain stretched out his arms to get a stick on a Brent Burns shot. The redirected puck eluded Los Angeles goaltender Jonathan Quick's block to knot the contest up at 2-2 and carry it into overtime. They had the opportunity to snag two points on the evening, until Ilya Kovalchuk found the back of net for the Kings at the 2:29 mark in OT.

All the same, the late-game effort helped San Jose get a point on the afternoon -- something they hadn't been able to do against the Jets on Thursday despite playing a better game that night.

"We found a way to get a point, that's probably the silver lining," Sharks coach Peter DeBoer said after Saturday's contest. "We probably got what we deserved. Our execution wasn't great, our energy was just okay. It was one of those nights -- we haven't had one in a while."

DeBoer isn't wrong. The Sharks were on a nice tear up until Saturday's game, even looking good in their two losses in their last nine games. After the 5-3 loss to Winnipeg, the Sharks' coach said he thought his team had played one of their best games.

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While the Sharks will take snagging a point in overtime over playing well and losing, they're not going to be content with how they played against Los Angeles. After stringing together five consecutive wins in the month of December, San Jose feels capable of putting away any team. The Sharks are a confident team, and one that expects to get two points every time they're on the ice.

"You don't like leaving points on the table," Burns summarized after Saturday's defeat. "It was good coming back and tying it, but you've got to get two points every night. That's where it's at right now."

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