It wasn’t always pretty, and this one could have costly ramifications for the Kraken moving forward, but they slid by the Blue Jackets for their franchise-record ninth consecutive win, 7-4, Saturday in Columbus.
Neither Andre Burakovsky nor Matty Beniers finished the game, and the bench got shortened and shuffled, but Seattle overcame those absences and three different deficits.
“We’ve got a lot of guys that are feeling less than 100 percent,” coach Dave Hakstol said. “It’s that time of year where there’s stuff running through the guys, but guys did what they could in the lineup. We weren’t at our best, we weren’t sharp, especially to start the hockey game. But we showed some real good resiliency to dig out of a hole and build a lead.”
Indeed, after Tye Kartye tied it 3-3 at the 9:45 mark of the second period, Oliver Bjorkstrand, Jared McCann, and Brian Dumoulin scored the next three goals to put the game out of reach.
McCann and Yanni Gourde had three and two points respectively, putting both forwards over the 300-career-point mark in the same game, which is neat.
Here are our Three Takeaways from a 7-4 Kraken win over the Blue Jackets.
Takeaway #1: Beniers and Burakovsky exit
Just when the Kraken were starting to enjoy the luxury of four healthy forward lines, two of their key players left the game in Columbus early. Burakovsky played just 1:40 of ice time before being ruled out with a lower-body injury.
One thing we thought of was that maybe Burakovsky is sick and tried to gut it out, since Hakstol referenced “stuff running through guys.” But the lower-body tag makes us second-guess that and just hope that whatever is happening isn’t a long-term thing.
Said Hakstol, “I don’t know if he got hurt on a particular play or not. He went down the tunnel to get checked out and just wasn’t available for the rest of it.”
Burakovsky’s tenure with the Kraken has been rough so far. He’s been good when in the lineup, but the guy just cannot stay healthy since he suffered a season-ending groin injury in February last season. Since spending the whole summer rehabbing from that, he’s worked his way back from two separate upper-body injuries, only to leave Saturday with another lower-body issue.
As for Beniers, he got rocked by Cole Sillinger with a blind-side hit into the boards toward the end of the second period. He played another shift after that and looked fine but took another more innocuous-looking high hit during that shift didn’t come back out for the third.
After Sillinger boarded Beniers, it was great to see Vince Dunn step in and immediately feed him his lunch. As we’ve said before, we don’t particularly care about fighting, but there should be a physical response when a guy takes a run at one of your players, especially the reigning Calder Trophy winner.
Seattle’s lack of physical response was a common topic of conversation early in the season when guys would take cheap shots at the Kraken, and nobody would react. That certainly wasn’t the case on this night, as Dunn wasted no time in making Sillinger answer for his actions.
We were really liking the four-line mix Hakstol got to run out the last two games. If Beniers misses additional time, we would presume McCann slides up with Tomas Tatar and Jordan Eberle, while the Alex Wennberg and Gourde lines stick together. If Burakovsky also can’t go, we would expect Devin Shore and Kailer Yamamoto to draw back in on the fourth line with Kartye.
It’s a relatively easy fix that doesn’t disrupt much in the top nine, but it means Seattle would be back to three even lines and a fourth line, as opposed to four even lines like they’ve had the last couple games.
Takeaway #2: A nice night for McCann
While the Kraken had been rattling off win after win, Jared McCann had quietly been on a nine-game goal-scoring drought. He broke out of it Saturday when Oliver Bjorkstrand did the hard work down low and found McCann in the slot, who got just enough wood on his shot to beat a sprawling Daniil Tarasov. That tied the game at 2-2 late in the first period.
McCann returned the favor to Bjorkstrand on his power-play goal that made it 4-3, then scored what would end up the game winner in the third, streaking in and sniping after Jaden Schwartz found him at the red line with a beautiful between-the-legs dish.
“You know [the goals are] going to come,” Hakstol said. “He’s been through a bit of a drought; it’s going to happen to everybody. We asked him to play up the middle tonight, [but we had him] playing up the middle, on the right wing, and the left wing. And with that, he scored a couple of real big goals for us, and so he ends up with the game winner.”
We do think getting McCann into different spots with different linemates and easier matchups has helped him build back any confidence he may have been lacking lately. He set up Kartye for his goal in Washington on Thursday, then erupted for his 15th and 16th goals of the season on Saturday. His assist on Bjorkstrand’s goal was point No. 300.
“Obviously, I have a lot of people to thank for being where I am,” McCann said. “My parents, ownership, [Ron Francis] for giving me that contract… I’m just very humbled, very honored, and I just want to keep it going. I really believe in this team and what we can accomplish together, so let’s just keep going.”
Takeaway #3: A different way to win
The Kraken players and their coach recognized the team wasn’t at its best Saturday, and this high-scoring affair was quite different from most wins on the team’s 13-game point streak (11-0-2).
Statistically, Joey Daccord had his second-worst game of the streak (his .882 save percentage was better than the .857 he posted in Seattle’s 4-3 overtime loss to the Dallas Stars on Dec. 18), but he still made phenomenal saves at important moments in the game and ended up with 30 saves.
Almost every game of this stretch has been Daccord standing on his head and keeping the opposing team to zero, one, or two goals, and Seattle’s skaters rewarding him with just barely enough offense to earn wins. This one was different, though, as four pucks got behind the Kraken netminder, but the offense came alive for seven tallies.
The Kraken were led on this night by top players Bjorkstrand (1-2—3) and McCann (2-1—3), but they also got depth scoring from guys like Kartye and Brian Dumoulin. The team showed some blemishes, but on a night when it didn’t have its usual game, it still found a different way to win, a sign of a good team.
The Kraken are taking Sunday off to recuperate before returning to action with an early 10 a.m. Pacific game at Pittsburgh on Monday, then another game at the New York Rangers on Tuesday night.
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.
Third game in a row they’ve looked terrible at the start, but this time Joey couldn’t bail them out. Nonetheless, it never felt like they were in trouble. Ya just knew they were gonna score; after all, only San Jose gives up more goals than Columbus. Also, fourth game with double-digit high-danger chances and 3+ expected goals against. Considering it’s also the fourth game in a row where they’ve scored four or more, I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a connection there. Maybe not playing like they have to completely shut the opposition down is opening up the offense? I’m definitely not smart enough to quantify this.
Amazingly, they are now at zero in goal differential on the season. Hard to believe considering they were -27 on D10.
The vibes are high…
Go Kraken!!!
I should add… three of our last four opponents have been among the league’s worst at goals against and the other one started their No.2 goaltender… a significant drop off from their No.1.
Really depends on how the Burky and Beniers injuries play out, but I wonder if this opens the door a bit for Wright to get a few games with the big club. Hopefully they both miss no time, but if Beniers is out and Burky can go, I would not mind seeing Kartye move up to center the top line (or some other shuffle at center on the top three lines) and let Wright be surrounded by McCann and Burky.
If I were to put money on it I’d guess Burky strained his groin, my guess is he’s out for a little while regardless. Hopefully Matty was only pulled because they wanted a better diagnosis and he’s fine. Best case scenario is we bring in Yamamoto and Matty is good to go next game.
I really prefer Karate on the wing I think he’s a much more effective player when he has a little more freedom to forecheck.
I honestly haven’t really been tracking Wright and his progress on the farm this year, is he looked ready to step in?
On a funny note Davy Jones locker room was making a fairly big point about how Daccord was off last night and I’d agree he was just all right, made some big saves but also let in one or two he’d want back. Even in an off night his save percentage for the game was above Grubauers season average 😂
I am more of a Kung Foo guy, but Karate is great as well. I don’t get to watch much AHL hockey, so just know the his stats. He has 20 points in 31 games. He is tied for 2nd in AHL rookie goals at 13. I have high hopes for Wright, so getting him some NHL experience would be good, but I don’t think he is ready to make the jump full time yet.
Kartye has done good at at center in the small sample size and netting 2 goals in the last 2 games is great.
😂 love it I’m not even going to edit that. Well played.
Whilst I prefer him at wing, as we saw in the first season, McCann is a perfectly good fill-in as a Top6 C, especially now the surrounding cast is stronger too.
Also prefer him stepping in than Kartye, who it seems has a bit more to learn on the defensive side of the role and, as mentioned above, takes him away from his excellent physical forechecking.
I think we’re going to have a tough end to this road trip. Aside from the knocks to Burky and Matty the team looked spent at the end of this game. And if there’s illness and sniffles going through the squad that’s going to accumulate. We won’t get away with slow starts against Pens, Rangers and Oilers, and we’ll need to be on our defensive game to get results. If we get 3 of 6 points out of them I’ll be happy.
Finally, speculation, but the kid in me linked LBI and the literal meaning of “stuff running through guys” that maybe Burky just had an issue with his bowels 💩😜… tbh that might be best case scenario and he’ll be good to go again in 24hours. 🤞