It had been 19 games, Erik Karlsson hadn’t scored a goal yet, but Peter DeBoer had jokes.
”The reality is a lot of very good things are going on. It just hasn’t resulted in points on the scoresheet. We have to ignore the noise that you guys create,” DeBoer told San Jose Sharks and Toronto Maple Leafs media in mid-November. “We’re going to sit and have this conversation [later], you guys will forget everything you’ve written in the last month. Say I knew it was coming, like you always do.”
This was the 50-year-old coach’s thoroughly modern reasoning, “When you look at the underlying numbers of what he’s doing here, they’re as good or better than they were two years ago in Ottawa.