The Nemesis
Semper Tyrannus
I've been somewhat negligent on these survival threads for a couple of weeks via a combination of being surprisingly busy given the world's still in shutdown mode and trying to figure out what alterations I want to make to the whole quarantine survival ouvre. But I figure it's time to get back on track with a new question.
In honor of "do-over" week at The Athletic, it's a fairly open-ended question:
If you could have a do-over on one piece of Sharks history, what would it be?
Any sort of decision-based element of team history is open for nomination. A trade? A FA Signing? A draft pick? A hiring/firing? A lineup decision? A play in a game? Adding black 3rd jerseys? Not naming the team the "Blades"? Leaving the Cow Palace? Allowing SJ Sharkie to rappel from the rafters? You can be as serious or flippant as you wish. And the decision doesn't have to be by the Sharks, it just has to impact them. If it's something the league did that involved the Sharks, that's fair game.
For the sake of the argument, some ground rules on allowable choices:
1) Let's limit ourselves to things that would've been controllable at the time, so elements of random chance like injuries or the sharks giving up or not scoring a particular goal don't count. Or at least they don't count for that moment in itself. You can't say "I wouldn't let player X get hurt because he was useless afterwards. So my do-over would be that he stays healthy and productive" but you can say "I wouldn't acquire Player X knowing that he's going to be useless afterwards."
2) For the sake of not getting bogged down in too much murky hypothesizing, let's assume that player career trajectories aren't altered too much by any changes to the timeline. Just to eliminate "yeah well the Sharks suck at developing players so you just know they would've ruined <insert superstar player here> if they had picked him instead of <insert Sharks draft bust here>" If you want to argue that a guy might not have gotten a chance because of the roster makeup (like the hypothetical Kipper/Nabokov/Toskala discussion from that other thread) sure, that's defensible. But let's not just assume that a player's talent would eventually shine through and not that the failure of a player or team on one end of the decision means that its alternate universe replacements would've stumbled just as hard.
3) Be reasonable with how realistic/sensible the altered choice is. No cherry-picked super-hindsight stuff like "I wish we had drafted this late-round eventual uber-star instead of random 6th round bust #35374". Because those are the sorts of do-overs everyone wants and nobody sees coming. Of course 29 other teams would love to have had Pavel Datsyuk, but that doesn't mean it's a sensible ask to have the Sharks draft him instead of Brandon Coalter or Mikael Samuelsson (the last 2 Sharks picks prior to Datsyuk being selected) or, even worse, picking him over Brad Stuart in the 1st round that year.
(had to do it)
