Just another day at the office for Joe Thornton. Assist. Goal. Shower.

“I just love to play hockey,” Thornton said Saturday afternoon after the Sharks’ routine 4-2 dismissal of a bad Edmonton Oilers team.

To be precise, Thornton has loved playing in 353 consecutive games for the Sharks, an ongoing franchise record. He has not missed a single opening faceoff since our beloved Los Tiburones traded for him in November 2005. Thornton has played through a broken toe, strep throat and trips to Buffalo.

In fact, you hate to mention prominently the consecutive-games streak, because it might jinx him.

“Go ahead,” Thornton said. “You won’t jinx me.”

All right, let’s hope the following statement doesn’t jinx him either:

As of this morning, we offer a unilateral declaration that Thornton is the Bay Area’s best athlete. In any sport. On any team. On any day. Or night.

After last spring’s bitter early playoff defeat in which Thornton absorbed much blame — hey, it took until the eighth paragraph to bring it up — there were plenty of questions about how he would respond this season. Thornton has responded with his best hockey since his MVP stuff of 2005-06.

Yes, he is the NHL’s second-leading scorer, trailing only Henrik Sedin of Vancouver and ahead of glamour names such as Ovechkin and Crosby. But just watch the little things Thornton does — the faceoffs and puck-clearing and forechecking — to see why he is better than ever.

So why does that make Thornton a more superior Bay Area athlete than, say, the 49ers’ Patrick Willis or the Warriors’ Monta Ellis?

It doesn’t. Not automatically. Scoring matters. But it’s the size, skill and competitive push behind those numbers that make Thornton the Bay Area’s best.

Here is what you don’t realize until you see Thornton out of uniform: The guy is a horse. He is 6-foot-4 and 230 pounds. You could definitely see him as a tight end in the NFL or a power-hitting baseball slugger. In high school, Thornton indeed was a first baseman on a team that won the Ontario provincial championship. He also played high school basketball, his dad’s game.

But in Canada, hockey pretty much rules, eh? So that’s where Thornton naturally gravitated. However, you can count Sharks captain Rob Blake among those who believe Thornton could go toe-to-toe with just about any player, in any sport.

“There’s a reason Joe has played every game since he’s been here,” Blake said. “He takes care of himself and all of that. But he’s so strong. Especially from the waist down, he’s so thick. He’s not overly muscled. Just thick.”

Also, as Sharks coach Todd McLellan will tell you, hockey requires one additional degree of difficulty that other games lack.

“Keep in mind,” McLellan said, “that as soon as you put those pieces of metal on the bottom of your feet, everything changes.”

The ice skates, McLellan means. That’s the dividing line. In other sports, athletes do the slam-bam things as well as the finesse things. But hockey players have to do them within a millisecond of each other, while trying to keep their balance on skates as they go approximately a million miles per hour.

Granted, this is just one man’s opinion. But it says here that Thornton could do Willis’ job with the 49ers more successfully than Willis could do Thornton’s job with the Sharks. And that’s not to denigrate Willis, a legitimate All-Pro linebacker. As for Ellis of the Warriors “… he isn’t even an NBA All-Star.

Here is how dominant Thornton has been in his sport: In the just-completed decade of 2000-09, Thornton accumulated more points than any other NHL player. We are talking here about the hockey equivalent of a Larry Bird or Magic Johnson in terms of the way Thornton changes a game with his passing eye and ability to make the scoreboard jump.

Not entirely by himself, of course. Just as Bird and Johnson set up their sidekicks to finish shots, so does Thornton. Patrick Marleau is doing what many people thought he couldn’t do this season, taking over the ice on some shifts and pumping in goals. Dany Heatley is doing exactly what people believed he could do, shoving pucks at the net (and following up his shots with more shots, an underrated attribute).

And yet “… because we see this every game at the Tank, we don’t always realize that in other cities, customers don’t get this kind of show. Those annual early-spring playoff exits are always a looming sore memory, for good reason. But you get the nagging feeling that 10 or 15 years from now, we will look back on this Thornton-led era of Sharks hockey and say: “Damn, we didn’t appreciate that enough.”

We shouldn’t make that mistake. Thornton is the best there is around here. Appearing nightly.

Contact Mark Purdy at mpurdy@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5092.