SAN JOSE – San Jose Sharks coach Ryan Warsofsky didn’t have to remind his players about what happened the last time they played the Tampa Bay Lightning.
“Our guys aren’t stupid,” Warsofsky said Wednesday of the 8-1 drubbing the Lightning handed the Sharks last month at Amalie Arena. “They remember that game pretty vividly.”
Warsofsky got the response he was looking for Thursday as goalie Yaroslav Askarov finished with 24 saves to help the Sharks beat the Lightning 2-1 before an announced crowd of 11,103 at SAP Center, snapping an eight-game losing streak.
Tyler Toffoli and Mario Ferraro scored in the win, San Jose’s first since a 4-3 victory over the St. Louis Blues on Dec. 12.
Askarov was especially sharp in the late going, as he made 11 saves in the final period to preserve the home victory. Before Thursday, the Sharks had lost a third period five times in their last seven games.
Toffoli opened the scoring at the 13:52 mark of the first period.
After Jan Rutta sent a shot from the point wide of the net, Marc-Edouard Vlasic pinched down, won a battle and collected the loose puck along the wall. He then sent a pass to Toffoli, who stickhandled around Anthony Cirelli, dragged the puck around Ryan McDonagh, and fired a shot past Andrei Vasilevskiy for his team-leading 15th goal of the season.
Vlasic was making his season debut after he missed training camp with an upper-body injury and spent the last several weeks building up his conditioning. Playing in his 1,297th career NHL game, Vlasic was paired with Rutta and was part of the team’s penalty kill.
“I’m 100%. I’m ready to go,” Vlasic said Thursday morning. “Just happy I’m in and excited for tonight.”
The Sharks were looking for a significant response after their lackluster performance Tuesday at home against the Philadelphia Flyers.
Playing without any sense of urgency or desperation despite being on a seven-game losing streak, San Jose looked flat on New Year’s Eve and fell behind by three goals by the 13:44 mark of the second period.
The Sharks finally responded with some passion late in the third period, but the Flyers had already added another goal by that time and walked away with a 4-0 win.
Warsofsky on Wednesday called the loss “one of our worst games of the year. We just weren’t ready from the start. We weren’t physical. We were soft in the middle of the ice. We let them set the tone of where the game was going to go, and we never got up to the speed of where the game was going.”
Since their 2-1 win over the Washington Capitals on Dec. 3, the Sharks, in losing 11 of 12 games, had scored an average of just 2.08 goals per game, tied with the New York Rangers for the lowest total in the NHL. The Sharks have also allowed an average of 4.08 goals per game, tied with the Flyers for most in the league.
“We’ve got to get back to being a north-south team,” Warsofsky said.
For added motivation, the Sharks were playing a Lightning team that blasted them by seven goals less than four weeks earlier at Amalie Arena.
The Sharks wanted to be more physical on Thursday, especially in light of the injuries to forwards William Eklund and Carl Grundstrom.
Eklund missed his fourth straight game Thursday after he was leveled by a hit from Vancouver Canucks defenseman Tyler Myers on Dec. 23. Carl Grundstrom, placed on injured reserve on Thursday, was five days removed from a big hit he absorbed from Calgary Flames defenseman Brayden Pachal.
“It’s something we addressed and talked about: we need to be more physical,” Warsofsky said. “We’ve got to be the team to initiate the contact, and we just haven’t done that lately. I thought earlier in the year, we were more physical, we were competitive, we were in on battles. For whatever reason, we’re a step behind everything.”