[Cali Panthers Fan]

Just for perspective, Joe has been a playoff producer despite the notion that he's not a leader. For comparison here are his regular season and playoff point comparisons for his career.

Regular Season: GP-1271, G-355, A-896, P-1251, P/G-0.98

Playoffs: GP-132, G-24, A-76, P-100, P/G-0.76

So really, not that big of a drop off in his production in the playoffs, which is largely due to how competitive the games are and how much more difficult it is to score in the playoffs. However, just need to throw this out there too.

Regular Season Career +/-: +178
Playoff Career +/-: -27

Joe has regularly been a liability defensively in the playoffs, despite his point production. Even if he was only a +5, that would still be good, but he's quite far into the negative. Of his 14 years in the post-season, he's been a "plus" player just 5 times, and often just barely. He's been a "minus" player 7 years, including some truly atrocious years like 09/10 where he was -11 in 15 games despite putting up 12 points. It might be unfair to point to plus/minus since it's a team stat, but Thornton certainly isn't helping his team, and that's definitely not what a leader does in crunch time. They may have run into some good teams, but when the same thing happens over and over again in the playoffs, it's no longer an anomaly and is likely the norm. Thornton just never had an extra gear in crunch time.

For comparison, Marleau is a -11 over nearly identical playoff games played and point production.

As for Wilson's comments, he's obviously been trying to run Joe out of town, but it doesn't reflect well on anyone the way this has played out. I called an implosion of the Sharks dressing room at some point this year, but I'm surprised it took this long.