Welp… Wednesday’s 4-3 Kraken overtime loss to the Oilers had Nov. 6, 2021 vibes to it. If you’re not sure what happened on Nov. 6, 2021, that was the night when the Seattle Kraken—in their inaugural campaign—limped into Gila River Arena with their season veering in a miserable direction. They desperately needed a victory against a still winless Arizona team. The Kraken tied that game 4-4 with 1:18 left on a Mark Giordano shot from the point, but then they handed the game winner to Lawson Crouse just 13 seconds later.
That was arguably the lowest low point of 2021-22, a season filled with low points.
Wednesday’s game played out in a very different manner, and the Kraken did take a standings point. But with Seattle again badly needing a win, blowing a 3-1 lead late in the third is going to sting players, coaches, and fans alike.
“Giving up that second [goal] obviously gives them a little bit of juice and a little bit of momentum,” coach Dave Hakstol said. “It comes down to the tying goal. Our centerman gets bulldogged on that, so we’re not able to pressure that on the half wall, and that puts us a little bit in the soup down low. So it’s disappointing, no question, because of how hard our players worked.”
Here are our Three Takeaways from a painful 4-3 Kraken OT loss to the Oilers.
Takeaway #1: They had it
The Kraken played about 53 very good minutes of hockey on Wednesday. They didn’t score in the first period, but they had the better of the play and the looks, with 63 percent of the shot quality in the frame. Brandon Tanev even slid one behind Stuart Skinner, through the crease, and out the other side. The chances were there.
They conceded the first goal of the game when Adam Larsson tried to force a Leon Draisaitl turnover at the blue line, but Draisaitl made an elite play to get the puck to Connor McDavid. Forgetting about McDavid is generally not recommended and unsurprisingly resulted in a goal, but Seattle bounced back from the gaffe.
Jared McCann, Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, and Alex Wennberg each scored in that middle frame, and Seattle went to the dressing room in complete control after the second.
Things were still going fine for most of the third period, and the Oilers were even showing signs of frustration. But Evander Kane redirected an Evan Bouchard pass by Joey Daccord at 13:28, and suddenly Edmonton had life.
That thud you heard with 46 seconds left was the sound of every Kraken fan on the planet slumping to the ground when Kane scored again to tie it and send it to overtime. The whimpering you heard at 2:57 of the extra frame was Kraken fans gently weeping after Kane completed the hat trick to give Edmonton the win.
“We played a great road game for 56 minutes, and even in the last five, six minutes, I didn’t think we played poorly,” Daccord said. “They just found a way to score. It’s frustrating, but it is what it is. You know, at the end of the day, I think we probably deserved to win tonight, but it just didn’t go our way.”
It was a miserable, miserable night.
Takeaway #2: Another two-goal lead wasted
During Seattle’s road trip to Detroit, Carolina, Florida, and Tampa Bay earlier this season, the team blew two-goal leads in all four games but managed to come home with a 2-1-1 record. We talked to several players after that trip about why two-goal leads are so hard to keep, so give that a read if you’re perplexed.
We hoped it was just a phase this team was going through, but the two-goal struggle keeps rearing its ugly head, and it did so in the ugliest fashion Wednesday.
There is just something about that two-goal lead where the opponent finds one and then starts getting momentum. As the team that’s leading, you can’t help but sit back and try to play defense, and then all of a sudden, you’ve blown the lead.
Still, what’s been happening with this Kraken team this season isn’t normal. They have to start closing out games when they have the opportunity.
Takeaway #3: Where do they go from here?
When a team is struggling, we look for little positives that indicate it’s getting close to re-entering the win column. If this game hadn’t played out in the manner that it did, with the late tying goal and subsequent overtime loss, we would have been able to take a whole bunch of positives from it.
Here are a few positives we could have taken: Tanev has been awesome since his return from injury, and his line with Jaden Schwartz and Wennberg is clicking. Joey Daccord had another solid night in net. Wennberg scored his first goal of the season. McCann scored for the first time since Nov. 2, and we know he tends to score in bunches once he gets going.
Those could have been some positives to take away, but instead, we’re left feeling like this team will never win again. Of course, that’s an overreaction, but for as well as Seattle played for most of this game, there’s still a sense that it was yet another step in the wrong direction.
“Obviously, it’s a tough way to end it,” Wennberg said. “And there’s a lot of good things out there, but I mean we just can’t lose this game. This is one of those games you’ve just got to fight through and just find a way to win. But, unfortunately, we didn’t today.”
What the team needs to do is look at how it played for the first 53 minutes and—somehow, someway, for the love of Joey—figure out how to extend that effort for a full 60 minutes.
Sometimes, it’s good to not have much time to dwell on a painful loss, and the Kraken will need to quickly shake this off to get ready for a home tilt against the Islanders on Thursday.
The Kraken have lost three in a row and five of their last six. They need a win.
Darren Brown
Darren Brown is the Chief Content Officer at soundofhockey.com and the host of the Sound Of Hockey Podcast. He is a member of the PHWA and is also usually SOH’s Twitter intern (but please pretend you don’t know that). Follow him @DarrenFunBrown and @sound_hockey or email darren@soundofhockey.com.
Why are 2 goal leads never hard to keep for the Kraken’s opponent?
Because they are not thinking about scoring when they have the lead, they sit back on their heels. It worked last year but this year we do not have the size or the players with size do not use it at the right times. Larson had a great half of the game. I did not see a heavy hit the Kraken in this game. They all played like they were all coming off the injury list instead of just 2. Who scored for Oilers? Kane is a big forward that goes where he wants in front of the net. We will not get out of this division with a small team. It is not a knock on the Kraken players, they play their hearts out. They just get muscled off the puck too much.
well last season the kraken lost to the oilers really embarrassingly and then the next game won against the islanders and started a 7 game winning streak….. <- someone who is delusional
That honestly is encouraging. Sometimes hockey just works like that. It’s like the previous game against Edmonton where the Oilers came into town looking like a hot mess, and it felt so much like the 2021 Arizona game going in that I fully expected a loss. Hockey history has a way of repeating itself, so maybe the similarities to last year’s game against New York will spell victory tonight.
First off, thanks Darren for the hard work and your efforts to find the silver linings in these miserable loses. Secondly, I think this team is too much in their own heads and have the fear of losing more than the confidence in knowing they can actually win. We get pushed around and only when the game is out of reach does someone (usually Vince) get feisty and push back physically. Maybe a nice win streak will spark something but these guys should come out a little salty in these next games and show the rest of the league that last year wasn’t a fluke.
What is with this obsession with physicality?? It’s not like this team is dramatically different from last year — we lost Sprong (who eschewed physical play but scored a lot of goals), Soucy (who took more than his share of incredibly stupid penalties resulting from physicality), Geekie (who was a good possession and defensive player), and Donato (who was way more than a “physical” player — he could play up and down the lineup, score 15-20 goals and also maintain possession).
As I see it, the problems are:
1) We replaced the most productive 4th line in the league with fringe NHLers.
2) The top of the lineup (specifically Beniers, Eberle, and Wennberg) is struggling and can’t make up for (1). Most concerning is Beniers, but at least he’s playing good defense.
3) The team as a whole is no longer setting records for shooting%, which can’t make up for (1) and (2).
4) Special teams still sucks — they’ve been lucky to score the number of goals on the PP given the quality (or lack) that they’ve generated, and their PK has been the worst in the league for weeks.
Maybe they’re just taking this season for granted and forgot how they got to the playoffs last year — with relentless high effort, tight checking, and opportunistic scoring. Without all of those ingredients, this team does not have the personnel or skill to coast into the playoffs. It’s a shame, cause I really don’t want to wait another 2-3 years for more playoff hockey, but that seems to be this team’s trajectory.
I think the obsession with physicality is because this season HAS been more physical – across the league – and last year the Kraken could outwork teams, whereas, this season teams seemed to have started mitigating that by being more physical. It’s not even debatable, Seattle has been getting pushed around a lot more. A good example is PEB getting knocked on his ass and then cross-checked while down, allowing Edmonton to tie and ultimately win the game.
Is that physicality though? The simpler explanation is that PEB is pushing 40 and not an NHL player anymore, and certainly not one that you should count on for any sort of puck possession against a team like the Oilers. I think the other reason that “physicality” often gets blamed is because of the banal Kraken style of dump, chase, and board battles. Other teams have caught on because it’s become so incredibly predictable, just like the push em back PP entry. Board battles are physical by nature, and usually 50/50. But if you have 4 50/50 battles, what are the chances you end up with the puck and get a decent SOG? Very low.
Yeah… it’s physicality. Watch the faceoff… it had nothing to do with PEB and what you’re describing.