With it being summer and training camps being just a couple of months away in September, it gives us all stuff to ponder and wonder about. In the case of the San Jose Sharks after their summertime blockbuster overhaul, the subtractions of Dany Heatley and Devin Setoguchi will give the Sharks a distinctly different look up front.
The addition of Martin Havlat to the Sharks in the headline deal for Heatley means the Sharks are going to shift things in ways that only video game players have really known before. After all, when you’ve got two lines of top talent mixing and matching the lines is more fun than anything else.
David Pollak of Working The Corners day dreams a little bit himself and offers up his take on what the top two lines could look like.
Marleau-Thornton-Pavelski
Clowe-Couture-Havlat
Yeah, I thought that Marty Havlat might be penciled in on right wing alongside Patrick Marleau and Joe Thornton, too. But the idea is to put a speed threat on each of the two lines and that turns into the above set-up — Marleau on one line, Havlat on the other — which also has the benefit of keeping Logan Couture and Ryane Clowe side-by-side.
That’s a more than curious take and one that keeps last year’s Calder Trophy finalist Logan Couture as the center on the second line. That’s a curious move because Sharks GM Doug Wilson had another guy in mind for the centering job on the second line after acquiring Havlat, Brent Burns, as well as Michal Handzus through free agency.
Pavelski centering the second line would mean putting Couture on the wing and then finding someone else to play on the right wing with Marleau and Thornton. That’s where Martin Havlat would likely fit in well, but with Havlat being more of a playmaker than a goal scorer, that would make a line of Marleau-Thornton-Havlat lean heavily on Marleau to do the heavy lifting scoring goals. That said, with that much talent it’s tough to feel bad for the Sharks and when you can set up lines that look like this, sympathy will be hard to find:
Marleau-Thornton-Havlat
Clowe-Pavelski-Couture
The curious part of this arrangement is that of those six players, four of them are capable of playing center in Marleau, Thornton, Pavelski, and Couture. One thing is for sure in San Jose, they’re going to score plenty of goals and regardless of what arrangement they opt to go with, they figure to be at or near the top of the Western Conference again in 2011-2012.