(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.)

It is becoming increasingly obvious that this season will probably be Joe Thornton's last in San Jose, because you don't normally tell your GM to “shut his mouth” and call him a liar through the media and stick around for too long after that.

And so the Sharks are at a crossroads. Rumors swirl that the general manager would have liked to see Joe Pavelski named captain over the summer, after stripping Thornton of the duty at the same time, but that there wasn't really a lot of support for that in the Sharks' room. Everyone still likes Joe Thornton and what he brings to the table, except his GM apparently.

The first part of Wilson's quote was relatively innocuous, “He cares too much and yells too much,” and all that stuff. He's said it all before. What he hasn't said too much is this:

“The pressure and stress, I felt, was getting to Joe. And I sat him down and said we need other players to step up and share this. Leadership group in this league is a shared thing, it's not one guy.”

The reason people, including Thornton, seem to be upset about this is that it looks an awful lot like blame-casting. Thornton couldn't Lead The Team by himself and therefore he couldn't be captain any more. (Please don't examine the logic here too closely; by my count 17 of the NHL's 27 current captains haven't won a Cup. Moreover, it seems like not-having a captain isn't helping the Sharks too much these days.)

As has been pointed out many times by nearly many people in the past several months, the Sharks suffering that series loss to the Kings after taking a 3-0 lead fundamentally broke Wilson's confidence in his team as it was constituted (which is to say: very well). Rather than see that the Sharks had one of the best rosters in the league and went through a fluke loss to one of the most successful teams assembled in the salary cap era and consequently standing pat with what he had, Wilson went shopping for accountability and toughness and whatever other buzzwords he could find. In doing so, he made the team worse, adding a series of not-good-enough players to a roster that was previously one of the strongest in the league.

Since the Sharks acquired Thornton in December 2006, there are very few players with better possession numbers than him (he's 24th at 55.8 percent corsi). Even fewer have more points at even strength (he's sixth at 360). And the thing is that, even though he's now almost 36 years old, he's not really slowing down. His CF% this season is right in line with what it's always been, as is his points per 60 minutes. For all the perceived “Joe Thornton is a loser” stuff you see get thrown around the NHL at surprising levels even today, this guy is almost as good at 35 as he was at 26. Which is something that happens very, very rarely.

So the prospect of trading Joe Thornton has always been one that didn't make a lot of sense. Yes he's older, and yes the tread has to come flying off the tire at some point, but with Thornton's ability to drive play and post points goes the Sharks' ability to be as effective as they have been for a decade. In terms of how he's used, he's the only one on the Sharks who gets a tough ride in terms of possession. Future Captain Joe Pavelski has generally played soft minutes in his career specifically because Thornton eats all the hard ones so he won't have to. When he's been on the ice since his acquisition, the Sharks drive possession like the Los Angeles Kings at their absolute best (55.8 percent!). When he's off, they're slightly above water at 51.2 percent, or roughly as good as the Stars this year. If you adjust for score effects, his possession numbers are actually sixth in the league as well (56.4 percent). Over 650-plus games, that gives you a pretty good idea of just how much of a driver Thornton is, and where the Sharks would be without him.

But this year, with Wilson having made such a comprehensive effort at making his team worse, the difference is even bigger: They're a 56.8 percent possession team when Thornton's on the ice, and 48 percent when he isn't. That's pushing Patrice Bergeron-type levels of play-driving, and granted that's in part due to the fact that they've made the competition a little easier for him this year — as though he couldn't handle tougher? — but the point of all of this is that Thornton is still one of the biggest difference-makers in the league.