Shark's return: He's good to Clowe

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Mar 31, 2008 | by David Pollak

SAN JOSE -- Ryane Clowe was understandably a little nervous as he drove to HP Pavilion on Sunday.

He knew he was about to play his first NHL game in 155 days after being idled by torn ligaments in his right knee. Those jitters are standard. But for Clowe, they were compounded by the fact the Sharks were on a streak of 18 games without a regulation loss -- and he didn't want that to end with his return.

"Absolutely not," Clowe said of that prospect.

Turns out he had nothing to worry about. With Clowe getting an assist 14 seconds into the game and leading all players with six hits, the Sharks kept their streak alive with a solid 3-1 victory over the Phoenix Coyotes.

The Sharks already had locked in their status as the No.2 seed in the Western Conference and the loss mathematically eliminated the Coyotes chances of joining them in the post-season.

San Jose got all the scoring it needed from Joe Thornton, whose two first-period goals gave him five against the Coyotes in the past six days. Curtis Brown added an insurance tally in the third period, and goalie Evgeni Nabokov made 19 saves to earn his NHL-best 45th victory.

Clowe, who the Sharks consider an important part of their postseason lineup, missed 68 games after injuring his knee Oct.27 when his skate got caught in a rut as he was finishing a check in Columbus. He acknowledged being "kind of hyped up. It almost felt like my first NHL game again."

As the game went on, things got better.

"I think I was a little tight in the first period because I had so much adrenaline built up," Clowe said, "but in the second and third, the legs felt great, the knee felt good. It was just nice to be back."

Sharks coach Ron Wilson started Clowe on the top line with Thornton and left wing Milan Michalek and the combination clicked. Clowe took a drop pass from Thornton and fired it at Phoenix goalie Ilya Bryzgalov. Eventually the rebound reached Thornton, who backhanded it into the net.

"We wanted to get him involved early in the game to try to dispel some of the nervousness," Wilson said. "He played well. His physicality is huge, he makes great plays in the offensive zone, he uses the defense. He does a lot of nice things, and he'll only get better."

Wilson ended up pairing Clowe with another left wing, Patrick Rissmiller, and rotating a variety of centers -- Torrey Mitchell, Curtis Brown and Marcel Goc -- on the line.

The Coyotes evened things up at 1-1 when a shot by right wing Shane Doan took an odd bounce off the glass and Nabokov couldn't get his glove on the puck. It ended up on Doan's stick and he scored at 6:33 of the first period.

Thornton's second goal came just under 11 minutes later when he took a pass from Michalek and fired a 43-foot slap shot that stayed low and went into the far corner.

The scored stayed at 2-1 until 7:10 of the third period when defenseman Brian Campbell fired a shot that Brown redirected through Bryzgalov's five-hole.

It was Brown's third goal in six games since he missed 26 because of a hand injury, and he could relate to what Clowe was going through.

"You want to do whatever you can to get back in the lineup and contribute," Brown said. "The team was going so well, when either one of us stepped in, there was a lot of pressure."

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