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Kraken battle Sharks for marine animal supremacy

The Need to Knows

The Time: 1:00pm PT / 4:00 pm ET (really!)

The Place: The SAP Center, San Jose, CA

Where to Watch: ROOT Northwest, ESPN+ for all other markets

Place to Listen: KJR 93.3fm

An Opposing Viewpoint: Fear the Fin

Know Your Enemy

The Sharks are a surprisingly relevant team right now despite being near the bottom of the division, has lost far fewer games in their last 10 than they’ve ever had a chance at winning, and with no realistic chance of making the playoffs. This is because they have two players who may be traded by the time you read this.

Erik Karlsson is a two-time Norris Trophy winner, awarded to the league’s best defenseman. He is having a Norris-caliber season this year and is a dynamic player, especially impressive after most assumed he was completely done after a couple of down seasons stemming from an ankle injury. The Sharks are trying to rebuild, and Karlsson would be a nice piece for a team trying to make a championship run this year. However, his contract is gigantic ($11.5m AAV through 2027), so it’s unclear how, or if San Jose will trade him. But teams are certainly looking at him with roster lust, and rightfully so. He’s great.

The other player is Timo Meier. You may remember him as the player who scored the hat trick against the Kraken in Seattle’s 8-5 win earlier this year. He’s a pending restricted free agent, he’s young, and he’s elite.

Seattle is probably not going to make a big splash trading for Meier, but it’s not out of the question. They have the cap space and the assets, and that would give them an elite forward to build around alongside Beniers and Wright.

What a shot!

The rest of the team is kind of disjointed right now and nothing seems to be going right. Pretty much every young talent outside of Meier hasn’t taken the next step necessary to get back into the mix, and their vets are…replacement level and falling. The Sharks became only the 2nd team in the last 53 years to score an empty net goal at the end of regulation, then lose in overtime. The other team? The 2019-2020 San Jose Sharks.

So yeah, the vibes aren’t great in San Jose right now.

Maybe that’s because…

The Sharks goal song is a crime

With the Flyers upgrading massively at goal song, the Sharks now stand top Bad Goal Song Mountain. It’s Get Ready for This by 2 Unlimited. You’ve heard it. Because everyone’s heard it:

Now I’m not against classic songs. The fact that this was released in 1991 is not by itself a problem. The issue is this has been played ad nauseum since it came out. For over 30 years, we’ve heard it in the context of every sporting event, it was in a Bring It On movie, and is the platonic ideal of “lazy Jock Jams choice.”

It’s overused, it’s stale, it’s completely unoriginal, and with the option of so many great Bay Area acts, they chose to go with an act based out of Belgium. Even more offensively, they changed the goal song in 2016 when it ostensibly won a fan vote, at which point the song had been done to death and completely worn out. This? Why was this even a choice? This is your goal song?? I’m pretty sure the only way it won a fan vote was because the options presented by the Sharks were comically abysmal, although one of the options did eventually end up remixed as the Avalanche goal song.

The lack of effort and thought that went into this is an affront to hockey. You have this entire library of tens of thousands of songs to choose from, and they’ve settled on the singularly least original choice.

Sharks, do better.

[someone whispers into our ear]

What do you mean “they did better?” what could they have possibly chosen that was worse?

[someone continues whispering]

Oh. oh no.

Well the song still sucks, but it’s better than giving Gary Glitter money.

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