I was lucky enough to catch an interview as I was driving home with the radio analyst for the San Jose Sharks, an ex-player named Jamie Baker. Baker’s a former college and NHL player, who spent a few seasons with the Sharks, and I was impressed listening to him over the radio – he was concise, he was logical, and he made a bunch of very good points.
At one point in the interview, Baker was asked if coach Todd McLellan’s decision to strip Marleau of his captaincy was the reason he has played so well this season. It’s a common theory that I’ve heard at least a dozen times in the media, and it’s a theory that Marleau has consistently disagreed with. Baker took Marleau’s side, reminded us all that he’d been a very good player last season, he’d been playing injured down the stretch, and that the addition of Dany Heatley was obviously a big help.
It’s difficult to measure how much impact Heatley’s had on Marleau’s game, but Baker’s comment about playing injured grabbed my attention. Marleau missed some time at the end of March with a “lower body injury”, but his play dropped off before that – actually at almost exactly this point in the season. Marleau’s played in 58 games this season; let’s compare his numbers this year through the same number of games last year.
| Season | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- |
| 2008-09 | 58 | 33 | 30 | 63 | +25 |
| 2009-10 | 58 | 38 | 26 | 64 | +25 |
The thing about those numbers is that they’re so… similar. Marleau has more goals this year, but the points and the plus/minus are spitting images of each other.
Unfortunately for Marleau, over the season’s final 20 games (including two in the chart above), he managed just five goals, eight points and a minus-9 rating. His play actually rebounded a little bit in the playoffs; he managed three points and an even rating over the six game series against the Ducks.
I can’t prove it, but I strongly suspect that the injury which sidelined Marleau in March was a nagging problem that flared up towards the end of February. If nothing else, it’s certainly interesting that his production and two-way play fell off a cliff towards the end of the season. It also casts a lot of doubt on the popular narrative that the burden of being team captain was what weighed Marleau down.







