2006.04.25

The first home playoff game at the Shark Tank in two years (evil greedy lockout!) featured the Sharks against the Nashville Predators. Coming into the game, Nashville had trouble drawing a full arena at their venue for game 2, and in fact, game 5 will probably be blacked out in the Nashville, TN area since it's not sold out. By contrast, you had a rabid full house of Sharks fans and Bay Area Bandwagoners chomping at the bit to get in for some playoff action.

As usual, there was the typical pre-game corporate-sponsored hoop-la on Autumn St next to the arena, featuring face painting, music from 98.5 KFOX, sign making, and various companies trying to get your contact information. Perhaps my personal favourite was Dodge (they who make the cars) who were giving away regulation 6oz. ice hockey pucks for filling out an information form. I got three while they weren't looking.

Cops on Horses. Horses wearing shark fins on their heads. Now where are the "frickin' lasers" that could be fitted on their heads?

Now I know I said previously that any game that wasn't in the Conference Finals or Cup Finals wasn't worth it, but come on - how could I resist playoff hockey and the chance to taunt Nashville goalie Chris Mason? Plus, I got seats in the lower deck of the arena for the first time ever.

Here's the view from section 123. It was far enough away from section 209 that I couldn't hear any of their usual banter, but it was close enough to the ice to see a lot of the action in one end.

Of course, the downside of being this close to the ice on one end of the rink is the difficulty in seeing action that was going on in the other end; too often, the people in front of me would stand up prematurely, thinking that the Sharks would have scored a goal. I say: if you don't see the flashing red light, keep your ass in the seat!

This is one of the more amusing pictures I took during warmups: looks like an innocent shot of Shark players stretching their groins on the ice, eh? Well, it seems that they always go to the same place on the ice to stretch; for instance, Joe Thornton always does his stretching while straddling the blue line. Superstitious, perhaps?

The game? Well, Sharks win, they score four, I get my free pizza the next day. *Yawn.*

Post-game jumbotron shows Patrick Marleau being interviewed by some TV dude from FSN. It's a shame none of us could coherently hear any of what was being said....

Sharks in 5. Seriously. And next round, I bring my real camera, instead of relying on the bad excuse for a camera included on my cell phone.