At Friday’s morning skate, Kraken coach Dave Hakstol said this: “Most importantly, it’s the start of the hockey game. The beginning of the game gives us an opportunity to build a 60-minute performance.” But after a 5-1 loss to the Vancouver Canucks, the Kraken bench boss was not happy with the way his group got out of the gates.
“It’s not an effort issue, it’s a readiness issue,” Hakstol said after the game. “They were the more ready team at the drop of the puck, and you saw that in our execution in the first five minutes of the hockey game. Once you start that way, it’s really hard to catch up in terms of your overall performance.”
Hakstol didn’t mince words in his evaluation. “We had too many guys below the bar tonight, and that’s the bottom line,” he said. “This is not a part-time league. It’s a full 60-minute league.”
Here are our Three Takeaways from a 5-1 Kraken loss to the Canucks.
Takeaway #1 (Curtis): Slow start on the power play
Like so many Americans, the Kraken were a step slower than usual on this day after Thanksgiving, at least to start. Vancouver piled up the first four shot attempts at even strength and seemed to be outworking the boys from Seattle.
Fortunately for the Kraken, though, the team drew the first penalty at 3:23 in the first period, a holding call against Nils Hoglander behind Seattle’s net (Rick Tocchet must have loved that).
And the calls against the Canucks didn’t stop there. J.T. Miller tripped Jaden Schwartz three minutes later, and then Tyler Myers got his stick into Jordan Eberle’s face (with a double-whammy friendly fire on Miller) at 11:33 in the period for a double-minor penalty.
These plays–none of which were particularly “earned” by Seattle–gifted the Kraken eight minutes of first-period manpower advantage time.
These power plays should have been enough to give the Kraken a jolt and get them on the board. Coming into the game, the Kraken were tied for seventh in the league with a 25 percent conversion rate on the man advantage. And the Canucks’ penalty kill has struggled, conceding goals on 23.4 percent of opponent opportunities, 10th worst in the league.
Unfortunately for the Kraken, just the opposite happened. On the team’s first power play, the group seemed disorganized and sluggish, conceding two breakaway counterstrikes to the Canucks penalty killers–the second of which found the back of the goal off Teddy Blueger’s stick.
“The first foot out there, we gave up two short-handed breakaways,” Hakstol said. “Obviously not good enough.”
The second power play seemed to start well when Matty Beniers rifled the puck past Canucks goaltender Thatcher Demko, but the play was ruled offside on the zone entry after a successful Vancouver challenge. From there, the Kraken could never quite find an opening against Demko over the remaining five-plus minutes of power-play time in the first period. The result was a net minus-one on the scoreboard in eight minutes five-on-four.
Kraken defenseman Vince Dunn agreed with Hakstol’s assessment. “It’s awful on all of our parts. Both units will have to take a look at where we were going wrong and come to a quick fix… The foundation of what we were doing out there was not executed well. We made things a lot more complicated than we needed to.”
Takeaway #2 (Darren): Missed opportunities in second period
I agree, Curtis, that the first-period power-play miscues were a big issue on this night. But it’s funny to think that if the Kraken hadn’t been offside some 18ish seconds before Beniers scored an apparent equalizer, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The negated goal changed that narrative dramatically and probably altered the course of the game. Such is life.
The other thing that altered the course of the game was Seattle’s inability to score in the opening eight minutes of the second period, when the Kraken came to life and tilted the ice. In that time, they put eight shots on Thatcher Demko without allowing a shot to Vancouver, and they had a few great looks that Demko shut down.
When a team has a stretch like that, it has to capitalize, because the momentum will eventually swing back the other way. Sure enough, a sloppy-looking play in Seattle’s end led to Conor Garland whacking a loose puck toward Joey Daccord, and Dakota Joshua cleaning up the rebound to make it 2-0.
Tye Kartye scored the Kraken’s lone goal of the night (his first goal in exactly a month), but Seattle didn’t build off of it in the third period, and Vancouver eventually ran away with it.
Takeaway #3 (Darren): Tanev hurt, late response
With 2:46 left in the first period, Tanev got caught off balance in the neutral zone and got lit up by Hoglander with a high, hard (clean) hit. Hoglander had the puck, turned it over to Tanev, and the moment Tanev touched it, Hoglander crushed him. Tanev slammed to the ice with all his weight coming down on his left leg and had to get helped to the bench by linesman Brian Gibbons.
Visibly in pain, Tanev stayed on the bench for the remainder of the first and came out to test the leg at the start of the second. But he determined he couldn’t go, went back to the dressing room, and was officially ruled out with a lower-body injury.
A second issue happened in this game that was arguably worse than the hit on Tanev, when Tyler Myers—the same guy that injured Matty Beniers with a cheap shot last season—delivered a high hit on Oliver Bjorkstrand in the third period and appeared to make contact with his head. Sam Lafferty scored to make it 3-1 just moments after this hit that shook up Bjorkstrand.
Before I make this point, I want to be clear that I’m not a big proponent of fighting. I think it’s fine in some scenarios, but if it got removed from the game altogether, I wouldn’t be sad about it. I also don’t think signing or trading for a tough guy or calling up John Hayden is the end-all answer for the lack of response a lot of people think it would be. (Although, to be fair, Hayden did drop the gloves with the 6-foot-8 Myers in pre-season.)
I do think it’s important, though, that players stick up for one another and minimally show opposing teams they’re not willing to accept their teammates getting hurt, regardless of if the hit that causes the injury is technically clean or dirty.
I asked Hakstol if he wants to see a physical response when a key player gets injured on a big hit, and he said, “Depends on the situation. I won’t get into that one.” Fair enough. It’s a sticky subject, and getting into the details of how he wants his team to respond doesn’t benefit Hakstol or his players.
Without trying to guess how I think Hakstol wants his team to handle these issues, the way I view it is that having a physical response doesn’t have to mean somebody squares off in a bare-knuckle boxing match at center ice. But there should be *some* immediate reaction that makes a guy like Hoglander think twice about taking the exact same run at Brandon Tanev that Brett Howden took at him on opening night in Vegas. (I will refrain from saying somebody should immediately jump Myers in this scenario, because I wouldn’t want to go after a guy twice my size either.)
After all, Howden’s hit cost Tanev the first month of the season, and the pesky forward has been showing just how important he is to this team in his seven games since returning from that injury. Now he’s potentially gone again, and still, nobody immediately went after Hoglander, just like how nobody went after Howden, nobody went after Andrew Mangiapane when he smashed Jared McCann’s face into the ice, and nobody went after Jacob Trouba when he cost Andre Burakovsky six-to-eight weeks on the shelf.
It is worth noting that Kartye did seem to be challenging Hoglander late in the game when he got his 10-minute misconduct, and Yanni Gourde dropped the gloves with Blueger. Were those instances related to the hits on Tanev and Bjorkstrand? Perhaps. But those challenges came at the very end of the game when Seattle was already down 5-1.
Anecdotally, I seem to recall that last season almost anyone on the team (heck, Ryan Donato seemed to do it semi-regularly, and he is not known for his toughness) would jump on an offending player, sometimes getting his own clock cleaned in the process. What happened to that mindset? It’s not about having guys that will stand toe-to-toe and get their faces punched in, but rather having a pack mentality that simply doesn’t accept opposing teams taking liberties with your players.
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