DeBoer and Thornton go for beers after DeBoer’s firing

It’s been nearly a week since the San Jose Sharks fired head coach Peter DeBoer and DeBoer admits to still feeling “numb” about it.

“Little bit numb,” DeBoer said when asked about his emotions by Sharks insider Curtis Pashelka of The Mercury News. “You always know that’s always on the table as an option, but until it happens, it still always seems to kind of catch you off guard.”

So… how has DeBoer coped? By going for beers with Jumbo Joe Thornton, of course.

“I had a beer with (Joe Thornton) after it happened and we talked about how great the last four years were,” DeBoer told Pashelka. “When I showed up here, everyone told me the window was closed or closing, and the team had missed its opportunities.

“We had a great group of men, professional and fun to be around. The best dressing room I’ve ever been in and we played four years of great playoff hockey, 60 playoff games and a Stanley Cup Final. It was a great run.”

Indeed it was. Since his hiring in May of 2015, DeBoer has finished his time with the Sharks with a198-129-34 regular season record, a trip to the Stanley Cup Final — a first for the franchise — and a second appearance in the Western Conference final last spring.

In the end though, DeBoer couldn’t get his team over the hump and this season’s dreadful first quarter was too much for him to come back from. But what went wrong?

“I think it started in training camp,” DeBoer said. “I thought we had a poor training camp for a couple of reasons. Obviously turnover really forced us to take long looks at a lot of different young players, which didn’t allow us to get our group together as quickly.

“Coming off the conference final, you reflect back. Did we push them hard enough? Should I have pushed harder to get our group together quicker and done some of those things?

“And then you have Erik Karlsson coming off surgery and starting slow because he hasn’t been able to do a regular training regimen that he would have had in the summer, and Evander Kane getting suspended. And then starting with an angry Vegas team over the way the last season ended. It was a tough start for some of those things or a mixture of all of those things.”

The Sharks rebounded in November to win 11 of 15 games, but things fell off the rails these past two weeks and, unfortunately, it’s DeBoer who ends up paying the price.

For the full article from Pashelka, click below: