Saturday afternoon wasn’t complicated.
“Their special teams were better than ours … and that’s what playoff hockey is,” Sharks center Joe Thornton said after San Jose’s 6-3 loss to St. Louis in Game 4 of the Western Conference finals. “If their power play and penalty kill are better than ours, that team wins. That’s what it all comes down to.”
There was a lot of questions about “desperation” and how the Blues didn’t want to be down 3-1 in the series. But the Sharks quieted their own fans at the SAP Center when they went 0-for-5 on power plays, and got only two shots in the 8:40 when they had a man advantage.