St Louis Blues v San Jose Sharks Live

Without any doubts, San Jose lived up to everyone’s expectations as they lead the Western Conference with a 17-6-4 record after two months of play. Thus, Dany Heatley and the Sharks will host the struggling St Louis Blues at HP Pavilion on Friday at 3:30 a.m. GMT.

Unlike the Sharks, the Blues’ front-office is not overly excited about the performance of Andy Murray’s squad thus far. More specifically, the team around Paul Kariya is uncomfortably close to the bottom of the Western Conference and showed significant shortcomings in the first two months of action. Most importantly, St Louis had a lot of trouble finding the net and showcased a surprisingly stagnant offense. In fact, the Blues’ leading scorer is defenseman Erik Johnson who recorded 3 goals and 14 assists in 24 games. Especially franchise cornerstones Paul Kariya and Keith Tkachuk performed poorly with 10 and 13 points respectively. Thus, the Blues were unable to benefit from their fairly decent defensive since they simply failed to score consistently down the stretch.

The San Jose Sharks on the other hand turned out to be the best offensive team in the league so far. In fact, they average no less than 3.4 goals per contest and caused a lot of problems for their opposing defensive lines. If Joe Thornton, Patrick Marleau and Dany Heatley keep up their scoring pace all three could finish the season beyond the 100-point mark. In the opening two months of this year’s NHL campaign Marleau, Heatley and Thornton combined for 97 points in just 27 games. That said, the Sharks were not particularly bad at the other end of the ice either, led by goaltender Evgeni Nabokov who allowed just 2.37 goals per game while posting a .921 save percentage. Therefore, it looks like the Sharks will enter their encounter with the Blues as the undisputed favorites to clinch another victory at home. Ultimately, it appears to be questionable whether St Louis will be able to withstand the pressure of San Jose’s high-octane offense.

You can watch all games of the St Louis Blues and San Jose Sharks right here on www.watchlivenhl.com, the home of NHL live streaming.