Hockey Friday: On (or Off) the Schneid

One of the Sharks announcers has been using "on the schneid" an awful lot lately. The Sharks have lost their last 5 games as of this writing (I wrote this before last night's Sharks-Ducks game). What does it mean to be on the schneid?

To be “on the schneid” means to be on a losing streak, racking up a series of losing, and especially scoreless, games. “Schneid” is actually short for “schneider,” a term originally used in the card game of gin, meaning to prevent an opponent from scoring any points. “Schneider” entered the vocabulary of gin from German (probably via Yiddish), where it means “tailor.” Apparently the original sense was that if you were “schneidered” in gin you were “cut” (as if by a tailor) from contention in the game. “Schneider” first appeared in the literature of card-playing about 1886, but the shortened form “schneid” used in other sports is probably of fairly recent vintage.

From word-detective.com

I certainly hope that the Sharks and their scorers are all off the schneid by the time you're reading this.