Ice Hockey

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- As if the playoff stakes are not enough for the Sharks these days, Monday night's game at HP Pavilion features an added layer of competitive one-upmanship.

San Jose and the Colorado Avalanche -- each with 86 points -- are facing each other for the first time since the Feb. 27 trade that brought Daniel Winnik and TJ Galiardi to San Jose in exchange for Jamie McGinn.

The Avalanche has fared slightly better than the Sharks since then, going 7-4-2 while San Jose went 6-5-3.

STOCKTON, Calif. -- The Utah Grizzlies split a two-game series with the Stockton Thunder over the weekend, winning 5-2 on Saturday night at Stockton Arena to clinch their fifth-straight ECHL playoff berth before a 4-2 loss Sunday afternoon.

Winners of five of their last seven games, the Grizzlies got goals from Mitch Wahl and Colin Vock in the third period to put Saturday night's game away.

Utah never trailed in the contest, taking a 2-0 lead on power-play goals and finishing with three five-on-five scores.

Nothing in the comprehensive hockey profile of the New York Rangers suggests that they are destined for anything short of a decorous spring, so anything the Pittsburgh Penguins did to portray themselves as capable of matching Gotham's team stride for powerful stride was certainly worth the effort.

Thus there's little that can minimize what happened Tuesday night, when the Penguins not only whacked the best team this side of the NHL's conference divide, but perhaps exposed the one strand of Rangers DNA that doesn't hold up to scrutiny as well as the balance of their game.

That power play.

ST. LOUIS -- Big egos have small ears. No one will ever accuse Brian Elliott of having small ears.

"One of the things that you learn about 'Ells' is he's a really good listener," Blues coach Ken Hitchcock said. "He's resurrected a career based on being able to look in the mirror and make adjustments."

The alterations aren't about character or drive. Elliott has spent his hockey-playing life as an afterthought, the odd man out. It was that way in college, where he came out of a backup shadow to lead the University of Wisconsin-Madison to a national championship.

As 2012 dawns, the changing of the calendar offers a lot of Top of Utah basketball teams the chance to regroup for the upcoming league seasons.

While Region 11 jumped into league play in December, the rest of the area leagues used the pre-league scheduled to develop their game plan.

This week's action includes a bevy of traditional matchups, formerly region games now relegated to preseason battles for "bragging rights."

John Collins will tell you the idea grew from seeing the same picture on several walls in the NHL offices. NBC's Jon Miller, the other man credited with creating the Winter Classic, remembers watching people wrapped like fur trappers in Edmonton way back in 2003 for an outdoor NHL game between the Oilers and Canadiens and thinking, "Yankee Stadium."

But the real heroes in the amazing growth of the Winter Classic reside not in the New York offices of Collins' NHL, or cross town in the offices at 30 Rock, where Miller is a vice president of sports. No, the real heroes are the Einsteins who first invented the concept of the Bowl Championship Series, then moved their most significant games off New Year's Day, or its legal holiday equivalent.

To a league seeking to infiltrate American culture, it was the equivalent of volunteering to serve a game misconduct. Collins, 50, had barely unpacked his boxes when Miller called him with this idea he had been sitting on since he got that glimpse of the 2003 Heritage Classic, played in Edmonton between the Oilers and Canadiens in late November amid temperatures barely over freezing. That's the picture Collins kept seeing on office walls, too, specifically that of NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly.

PHILADELPHIA -- Sidney Crosby and Claude Giroux should have been intertwined this season as two of the NHL's brightest stars, competing for state supremacy, an MVP trophy and a Stanley Cup.

Yet, Crosby and Giroux were linked in back-to-back days this week for all the wrong reasons: Head injuries that have put their careers on hold.

Crosby, once the youthful face of the future of the NHL, is dealing with a recurrence of concussion-like symptoms.