At some point you have to accept that even at his age, Joe Thornton is going to be able to push most teams around.

When he's paired with Joe Pavelski, one of the quietly dominant goalscorers in the league (thanks in no small part to his long partnership with Thornton) and Tomas Hertl, an emerging power forward with high-level skill, you can see where he'd become nigh unstoppable.

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Thornton, Pavelski and Hertl have been excellent in this first-round series against Los Angeles, but well beyond the point at which they probably should be operating. They're all running north of 52 percent possession at 5-on-5, and together have outscored their opponents 3-1. This is to say nothing of their power-play prowess (Pavelski with two more goals on the man advantage), but it is incredibly rare that anyone gets one over on the Kings regardless of who they are and against whom they are matched up.

Combined they have four goals and two assists in about 45, and have generally dominated opponents at a level the Kings probably couldn't have dreamed of even knowing that this was one of the dominant lines in hockey this year. And when they've been off the ice, the Sharks have gone from dominant to basically what you'd expect almost any good team to look like against the Kings: more than a little ordinary.

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Now, 50.6 percent possession when they're on the ice as a trio may not sound like a lot, but it's a huge improvement in terms of relative control of the puck, and what everyone in the league did against LA this year. For both the regular season and playoffs, the Kings held opponents to a stunning 43.8 percent corsi-for. The next-closest teams in the league (Pittsburgh and Dallas tied) were just 47.4 percent.

Of course, that number includes a lot of games against rotten teams, which the Sharks very obviously are not. In fact San Jose took seven of a possible 10 points from LA this season, with more goals (obviously), high-danger chances, shots on goal, and so on. So to some extent this play from the top line is just a continuation of that trend, though the rest of the team has clearly taken a step back.

But here's the crazy part: They've mostly gone head-to-head against Future Norris Winner Drew Doughty.

During the regular season, Peter DeBoer seemed to take extra care to keep his top line away from Drew Doughty. They only played about 14:35 against each other in their five previous meetings this year, and individually it was Pavelski who shouldered the brunt of the head-to-head matchups. Nearly as often, Pavelski/Thornton were up against guys like Brayden McNabb and Alec Martinez, which is obviously a net positive for your best scoring line, but also leaves poor Patrick Marleau and Logan Couture eating a lot of very difficult minutes.

Now, though, it seems like Doughty is there every time they come over the boards together, and vice-versa.

Unfortunately for the Kings, they've incinerated Doughty to an almost perverse extent. Even as the Kings are a team you typically do not out-possess, that's especially true of Doughty. Any and all Norris-related criticisms of his play relate back to his inability to score at a level decent enough to outweigh how overwhelming Erik Karlsson is in that regard. Doughty is a possession monster the likes of which we almost never see in this league.

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