Jeff Sharples has played pro hockey for eight years. He played with last year's championship Utah Grizzlies' club, and he's been in postseason playoffs seven times now.
But he said on Saturday morning that, for him, the feeling in Utah's sad dressing room right after Friday night's 3-2 overtime loss to the Long Beach Ice Dogs, who swept the defending champs out of the IHL Turner Cup series, was "almost like, one of those things where you lose a hockey game, and you just think, 'Well, we'll just come back down to the rink and regroup tomorrow' - but there is no regrouping tomorrow," said Sharples. "It's done.""It doesn't a lot of times hit you until the next day that you've actually lost," said coach Butch Goring.
Reality having finally sunken in, the Grizzlies spent Saturday morning cleaning out their Delta Center lockers and saying goodbye to each other a month earlier than they'd expected.
"I think there's a little bit of shock," said Sharples. "You build up an aura around your team (that won back-to-back Turner Cups in its first two years of existence) that whatever comes your way, you can handle it. It doesn't let you down easy.
"I'm embarrassed. We had a lot bigger plans. It reminds you," says Sharples, "how hard it is to win it all. Last year, we didn't have to answer to anybody. We won. That was it."
Defensemen Sharples, Rod Miller and Jeff Sirkka have Grizzly contracts that will likely bring them back to Utah to play in the Grizzlies' new home, the West Valley "E" Center, when it opens in the fall. Sharples and Miller and assistant coach Kevin Cheveldayoff plan to stay in Salt Lake City most of the summer. Miller and family have been looking to buy a home here, but high prices have hampered that plan. Miller and Cheveldayoff will take courses at the U. to complete their college degrees, and Cheveldayoff, whose wife delivered their first child a month ago, says he'll also spend the summer "learning to be a dad."
Sharples' daughter, Meg, was with him Saturday morning. He'll return to Vancouver for awhile to fish and fly his father's small plane, and he'll become a father again in August.
Playoff goalie Don Beaupre, 35, heads home to Minneapolis and likely retirement. He said he's not looking for another contract, though he'd listen if the right situation's offered.
Regular-season goalie Mark McArthur is one of seven Grizz (also Derek Armstrong, Vladimir Orszagh, Chris Taylor, Andrey Vasilyev, Mick Vukota and Vladimir Chebaturkin) whose whereabouts next fall will be determined by their parent team, the New York Islanders. McArthur said he will return to Salt Lake later this summer to work at Chevedayoff's hockey school.
Miller will work the school, too. He wore sunglasses most of the morning, the glare of the Ice Dogs' sweep still too bright to handle. "That hurts," he said of the four-and-out series, "especially when we feel we were the better team. I don't think we played to our potential, and that makes the series even harder to take. Any time your season's finished, it's devastating.
"But (Long Beach) played great, like the New Jersey Devils did." Miller said the 'Dogs' neutral zone trap was the key. "Our whole game's speed, and we couldn't create any. They just stopped it. When you can't get nothing going, it's so frustrating."
Goring expected to do better, but he admitted all the player transactions hurt continuity. He brought in a number of players near the end of the season, like Sirkka (traded for Nick Vachon, who got Friday's OT winning goal for The Beach), Andy Brickley, Ravil Yakubov, Derek Armstrong and Beaupre, but they had little chance to play with their new team before the playoffs started. "I was not happy with the changes I made - I would have liked to have made them earlier, I would like these guys to have been together since February," he said.
The Grizz finished the regular season at 43-33-6 for fourth in the Western Conference and were 3-4 in the playoffs.