DETROIT – In the battle of Joes, it was the San Jose Sharks’ Joes who came out on top.
All the Detroit Red Wings wanted to do was come home to the Joe Louis Arena, knowing how poisonous it has been to the Sharks over the years.
In the end, not even the deadly confines of the rink could prevent the Sharks from winning.
San Jose is one game from eliminating the Wings from the Stanley Cup playoffs after a 4-3 overtime win gave the Sharks a 3-0 lead in the best-of-seven Western Conference semifinal.
It wasn’t Joe Pavelski who stuck the dagger in the Wings as he has done repeatedly in this series.
It was Patrick Marleau, who scored at 7:07 of overtime.
And he had a lot of help from the Joe who has been overshadowed in this series.
Joe Thornton lived up to his nickname of Jumbo Joe Tuesday night.
He was huge.
Trailing 3-1 in the third period, he scored to give the Sharks some life. He came around the net and fired a wrist shot off a stick and into the net.
In the overtime, he made a perfect pass on a two-on-one, giving Marleau nothing but an empty net to shoot at.
The combination of Thornton and Marleau has faced tremendous heat over the years for its failure to help the Sharks advance in the playoffs.
“It’s a big thing in our lockerroom but we believe in those guys way more than the outside world does,” Sharks coach Todd McLellan said. “You could see a very determined 19 (Thornton) tonight. All that stuff is more for you guys who write about it than it us for us.”
The Sharks had managed just eight wins in 44 games at Joe Louis Arena before Tuesday night.
The Wings hoped the Joe would help cool off Sharks’ point machine Pavelski, who had four goals and two assists going into the game.
“That history is in the past,” Sharks Ryan Clowe said before the game of the Joe Louis curse. “We have a lot of different guys here.”
He turned out to be prophetic.
As for the Wings, the game turned out to be a nightmare.
Up 3-1 going into the third period, the Wings couldn’t hang on to the lead. The backbreaker came with less than seven minutes left, when netminder Jimmy Howard gave up the tying goal to Sharks’ Logan Couture in a fashion that made one think the ghosts of Joe Louis Arena where actually in the Sharks corner.
Couture fired a low shot from the boards almost at the goal line and somehow it wound up between Howard’s pads in the net.
“I had a chance like that the last game and he moved his legs then but made the save,” said Couture, a London native who was called up to the Sharks in March. “When I shot it, I thought it was going in. You always have to think it’s going in. Like they say, any shot is a good shot.”
The Wings were in control of the game until their third period collapse. It will no doubt lead to speculation yet again about the aging roster.
“I thought this was our best game as far as controlling with our forechecking,” Wings coach Mike Babcock said. “Then they got that wraparound goal and the ice tilted a little bit.”
Down 2-0 in the series, the Red Wings needed a strong first period and they got it. But like the first two games in this series, the Wings would have at least one key breakdown and it cost them.
This one came with 3.2 seconds left in the first period. After dominating for most of the other 19:56 and taking a 2-0 lead, the Wings couldn’t get out of their own zone.
Devin Setoguchi spun quickly and his weak low shot snuck under Howard’s pad.
The Wings had gone ahead on goals by Tomas Holmstrom and Dan Clearly. They also had a Zetterberg goal overturned on review because he kicked it in. Evgeni Nabokov also stopped Zetterberg with a great glove save on a penalty shot.
Zetterberg then got one to go in, giving the Wings a 3-1 lead when his shot bounced off Sharks’ Doug Murray and past Nabokov early in the second.
It gave the Wings some energy.
But in the end, it was the Sharks who had the bounce to come back.
