Out of the Shark's Mouth: November at the Tank
Out of the shark's mouth and into November: the SAP Center's teal crowds, the 1994 upset that built them, and a franchise measuring a new season.
The Sharks announce themselves through a shark's mouth. When San Jose's NHL team takes the ice at the SAP Center, the players skate out through a great shark head, jaws open, fog rolling — an entrance that has been the franchise's signature since the building everyone calls the Shark Tank opened in 1993, two years after the expansion Sharks brought major-league hockey to the South Bay.
The franchise's history is the valley's in miniature: an expansion team that was a national joke in its first two seasons, then — in 1994 — authors of one of the great playoff upsets in NHL history, the eighth-seeded Sharks' seven-game dismantling of the Detroit Red Wings, the series that turned the Tank's teal crowds into a permanent institution. The decades since have been a study in sustained contention — the Thornton and Marleau eras, a Stanley Cup Final in 2016, the conference's most reliable attendance — and in November, a new season's measurement begins again.
The Shark Tank's virtues are architectural honesty: steep seating pressed close to the ice, a single concourse that smells of garlic fries, and crowds that arrive in teal regardless of the standings. The building anchors the Diridon station district whose transformation — BART's arrival, the station's rebuilding — will remake its neighborhood around it; the Sharks' lease and future there are the district's longest-running negotiation.
Down the peninsula's ice map, the franchise's American Hockey League affiliate, the Barracuda, plays at the Tech CU Arena on the fairgrounds side of town, keeping the development pipeline a short drive from the parent club's ice.
November at the Tank is the NHL season's first sorting: the long homestands, the Eastern powers cycling through, the standings beginning to mean something. San Jose's sporting identity has a dozen claimants now. The oldest major-league one still comes out of a shark's mouth, in fog, to the loudest introduction in the building's register — as it has for thirty years.
