First, happy birthday Jon.

(pause for reflection or to ask yourself who Jon is) For future reference who paused for the latter reason, of all the hits this page has gotten, at least 2,000 since August (really, who reads this crap?), Jon is the only one who regularly comments on the things I write. Thanks for that. So go out and enjoy your first day of true adulthood at age 21.

Moving on, did anyone catch the Simpsons on Sunday? The beginning of the episode had Homer getting tickets to an arena luxury box after metal plating gets dropped on his head. When he comments that he's excited to be going to a basketball game, he's informed by Lisa that they're actually going to a hockey game. He reacts by screaming and sobbing. A similar reaction is seen by fans arriving to the arena and reading the marquee.

Now, I'm gonna talk about hockey in this post so if you react to hockey like they do, you can happily skip the rest of this post.

According to the Mercury News, the Sharks are all set to hire Ron Wilson as their next head coach. For the most part, this seems to be a good move. He was fairly successful in Anaheim, where he worked with current Shark Teemu Selanne. But with a mediocre defense and spotty goaltending from Guy Hebert (comparable to the Sharks' Arturs Irbe, successful goaltender for one year), Wilson only made the playoffs in his last year and his contract was not renewed. He then headed to Washington. With a mediocre team, but great goaltending in Olaf Kolzig, he managed to mostly make them into winners, achieving 90+ point seasons in 3 out of 5 years, even reaching the Stanley Cup finals his first year. His last year was also a winning season but they did not make the playoffs. Ownership at this point felt it was time for him to go since after all, they got Jaromir Jagr, the league's leading scorer, and still couldn't win.

The Sharks obviously have the pieces to go all the way. But Sutter's defensive philosophy probably limited their potential. Too many games passed when they lost by 1, including most notably the season-ending Game 7 loss to the Avalanche 1-0. This season, Sutter seemingly continued to promote defense first but the fact is the Sharks have the worst defense at home and penalty killing was 26th in the league last I checked. Sure, people can point out that Jillson is having a hard time replacing veteran Gary Suter, that the defensemen are having trouble adjusting to the new crackdown on obstruction, that Evgeni Nabokov just came back to being a goalie 3 weeks ago. But 24 games into the season, these things should have been fixed, and frankly, they haven't.

That's the general manager's thinking. I still think firing Sutter was the wrong thing to do, at least not yet. He's been around for five years, bringing this team to be a competitor, not a cellar-dweller. He should've been given more time than this. A trade or some benchings may have stirred the team enough. But hiring Ron Wilson is a good move on a team where scoring is balanced and the goaltending is solid, and what Wilson has going for him is that he has 56 more games to get this team back into the playoffs.

Luckily, under interim coach Cap Raeder, the Sharks won tonite 3-2 in overtime against Phoenix on the strength of a Selanne goal.