The series isn't over yet, but already the 'experts' are speculating about what will happen to the Sharks next.
The Globe & Mail's Eric Duhatschek, is, to give him credit, one of the more erudite hockey scribes...his thoughts from today's G&M:
SHARKS UNDER ATTACK: Ever since the current conference playoff format was adopted in 1994, seven No. 8 seeds have knocked off No. 1s, the most recent in 2006, when the Edmonton Oilers knocked off the Detroit Red Wings and rode that upset straight to the Stanley Cup final.
The Anaheim Ducks are poised to duplicate that feat, after taking a 3-1 series lead over the San Jose Sharks, and the common denominator there is defenceman Chris Pronger, who was Edmonton's best player in its 2006 upset-filled playoff run and has been exceptional for Anaheim again this time around.
The Ducks were outplayed, on balance, in the first two games of the series, but won anyway because they scored the pivotal goal after both games were tied after 40 minutes. San Jose won the third game, but Anaheim crushed them Thursday night - 4-0 - and the Sharks look like a dispirited team, set to make their earliest exit from the playoffs since 2003, when they missed them altogether and responded by firing Darryl Sutter.
All the off-season tweaking by general manager Doug Wilson - to bring in Dan Boyle, Rob Blake and coach Todd McLellan - plus the trade-deadline acquisitions of a couple of ex-Ducks, Travis Moen and Kent Huskins, have done little to make them more playoff ready.
Boyle and Blake were their best players in their only win; Joe Thornton and Patrick Marleau, their two key players up front, have been unable to make any kind of impact in the series at all.
So if the Sharks go out in one of the next three games, what does GM Wilson do next? Last year, he fired coach Ron Wilson.
This year, he is out of easy options. Presumably, he'll have to move either Thornton or Marleau - and hope that someone's prepared to take a chance on one or the other, even though they have had so little playoff success between them.
In a perfect world, if Wilson could swap out one or the other for a player with less skill, but more grit and leadership ability, maybe that's the recipe to turn a team on the perpetual cusp of playoff success into a winner.
Because nothing that they've done with this core group of players suggests that they can win big when it matters most; and their window of opportunity is closing in a hurry if they don't do something soon.
Wilson may not be under the same scrutiny as Gainey - could anybody be? - but he will need to show his managing chops in a meaningful way if the Sharks aren't going to go down in history as one of the great woulda, coulda, shoulda franchises of this era.
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