If you are losing faith or have lost faith in this Seattle Kraken team, you are not alone, based on what we’ve seen in our Twitter mentions the last few days. Things are not good right now, plain and simple. The Kraken are turning the puck over in terrible spots, they can’t score, and they’ve lost five straight games with three of those losses coming against teams we don’t expect to be in the playoffs at the end of the season.
Seattle’s latest defeat, a 4-2 stinger at the hands of the Montreal Canadiens, was avoidable, but the Kraken had a horrible start and never recovered.
“I mean, it’s four losses, so we probably shouldn’t take too much away from it,” Vince Dunn said. “It’s really unacceptable to come out with nothing… Being close doesn’t cut it, doesn’t win you games. It needs to be complete.”
We’re officially hitting the panic button. Here are our Three Takeaways.
Takeaway #1 (Curtis): Slow starts defined the road trip
Seattle never held a lead at any point during this critical four-game trip. Not only that, the Kraken found themselves trailing in the first period in each and every game. On the first night of the trip in Chicago, Seattle managed to level the score at 2-2 and escape the first period tied, but over the last three games, the team found itself down a goal at the first intermission each time.
“It feels like we do this every time–we’re chasing the game,” Jared McCann said. “We’re all frustrated right now because we know we have better.”
On Monday night, the Kraken didn’t play with enough pace or discipline with the puck to break Montreal’s forechecking pressure effectively early on. Seattle repeatedly turned the puck over and conceded high-danger chances to the Canadiens.
At 4:00 in the first period, Jamie Oleksiak had full possession of the puck behind Philipp Grubauer but was slow to breakout and allowed Jake Evans to close on him, causing a weak turnover to an unguarded Josh Anderson in the right circle. From there, Anderson found Sean Monahan low beside Grubauer for an easy tap-in goal.
“[Montreal] didn’t do anything special. They worked hard,” Kraken coach Dave Hakstol said. “We didn’t handle that pressure well enough early in the game.”
McCann was more direct: “The first period was pretty embarrassing.”
For me, the first period effort was reminiscent of the team’s flat start in Toronto. That led me to think that a heavy push could come from the Kraken early in the second period. But that didn’t happen.
Seattle’s sloppy play and parade of turnovers continued for the first 10 minutes of the second period. Before fans could catch their breath, Montreal was up 3-0. That’s too deep of a hole to dig, even against a truly mediocre Habs team.
“Starting from behind, and working and playing from behind, no matter how well you might feel you play in the third period, you can’t pat yourself on the back in any way for that,” Hakstol said. “We came up short in the beginning of this hockey game to match the necessary sharpness and intensity to handle the pressure.”
Said McCann, “We have some veteran guys in this room who [said] something after the first period, [but] we can’t get to that point. We need to come out a lot harder, a lot stronger.”
Takeaway #2 (Darren): Scoring is too hard right now
This iteration of the Seattle Kraken feels more like the inaugural season version than the Year 2 version that practically scored at will and got contributions from every corner of its roster. The 2023-24 Kraken work hard and mostly play within a sound structure, but they have doozy turnovers that end up in the back of their net, while goals at the other end of the ice are too hard to come by to overcome those defensive gaffes.
Struggling to score isn’t something that just recently started for this team, but it has been magnified on this five-game skid. All four of these road games against Chicago, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal have been winnable. But putting the puck in the net has felt like catching lightning in a bottle, while opposing teams just need one screw-up from the Kraken, and they capitalize.
It has been well documented that the Kraken’s shooting percentage was through the roof last season at 11.6 percent, just 0.2 percentage points behind Edmonton for tops in the NHL. This season, Seattle is hovering at 7.46 percent, good for 27th in the league, and its goals for above expected is a shabby -3.48, good for 22nd according to MoneyPuck.
This is a very anecdotal/eye-ball test observation to go with those statistics, but I can’t help wondering if a lack of shooting mentality earlier in the season has led to an overcorrection by Seattle’s players, where now they’re erring on the side of just getting pucks on net.
Shooting more is generally a good thing, and the Kraken have put 72 shots on goal the last two games. But have they now swung the pendulum too far to where they’re sacrificing precision on their shots and perhaps not being selective enough?
Again, this is just what I’ve been seeing, and I don’t have a good stat to back this up, but I’ve felt that too many of Seattle’s shots are right into the opposing goalie’s midsection, where not only does the puck have almost no chance of going in, but also where a rebound is highly unlikely.
From this game, I can remember two well-placed shots, just inside the posts; one by Jared McCann and one by Vince Dunn. And those both went in the net.
Takeaway #3 (Darren): Panic button time
These are officially dire times for this Kraken group, and the players know it. There are several veterans who could be on the trade block in the coming months if things don’t turn around quickly, and every passing loss makes a Trade Deadline fire sale more likely.
“Coming [into Montreal] we had some good confidence, but maybe we need to take a step back and look in the mirror,” McCann said.
If the Kraken want to save their season, something has to change. They’ve been banged up, no doubt, but they can’t keep losing to beatable teams if they want any hope at making the playoffs, which are slipping farther and farther from reality.
Now, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching NHL hockey most of my life, it’s that an 82-game season is a LONG season. Teams go through stretches where fans think they will never win again, only for the team to find a win or two, get some good feelings, and suddenly a 10-game heater makes everything feel right in the world.
But I’ve also found there needs to be some sort of catalyst to get things going back in the right direction.
One particular season jumps to mind, but before I tell this tale of campaigns past, note that I’m not implying Seattle should trade for a goalie, because A.) Philipp Grubauer isn’t going anywhere (he played well Monday, by the way, though he still somehow finished the night slightly below a .900 save percentage) and B.) Joey Daccord has generally been solid in his outings.
Ok, here’s the story. As Sound Of Hockey Podcast listeners will know, I grew up a Wild fan, watching almost every game from their inception in 2000 until the arrival of the Kraken. In the 2014-15 season, Minnesota had an awful—and I mean awful—mid-season slump where they lost 12 of 14 games and couldn’t get a save from either Darcy Kuemper or Niklas Backstrom.
In a desperation move, then-GM Chuck Fletcher traded a third-round pick for Devan Dubnyk, who had been backing up Mike Smith in Arizona. Dubnyk came in, won his first game against Buffalo, and the entire Wild organization and fanbase breathed a big sigh of relief. Then Dubnyk caught fire, pulled Minnesota out of the abyss, and the Wild went on to make the playoffs. They even won a playoff round against the St. Louis Blues before getting swept by the eventual Stanley Cup champion Chicago Blackhawks.
Heck, even last season, the Kraken claimed Eeli Tolvanen and put him in the lineup for the first time after three consecutive losses and an 11-game stretch where they went 3-7-1. Tolvanen scored in his first game for Seattle, and the Kraken then went on an eight-game win streak to practically cement themselves as a playoff team.
The point is that sometimes a personnel change is needed to bring a fresh perspective and inject positivity into the dressing room.
Seattle has tried a series of call-ups from Coachella Valley, and that hasn’t worked. Is there a waiver claim out there? Is there a low-risk trade that doesn’t cost the team too much in terms of leveraging the future? I don’t know what the answer is, but I would like to see this club try something to create a spark before it’s too late and the only thing left to do is sell veterans for draft picks.
Worth noting, Andre Burakovsky skated in a regular jersey at Monday’s morning skate, shedding the red non-contact sweater for the first time since suffering his upper-body injury on Oct. 21. Could his impending return be a catalyst for a turnaround?
Bonus Takeaway (Darren)
I really wanted to put this as Takeaway #1 with no words explaining it, but John and Curtis talked me out of it. So, here it is as a Bonus Takeaway.
I’ll show myself out.