What a difference a day can make. After an abysmal performance Monday in New Jersey, the Seattle Kraken looked like a different team against the New York Islanders on Tuesday and earned a 2-1 shootout win to snap a three-game skid.
With the Los Angeles Kings, St. Louis Blues, and Nashville Predators all losing on this night, the win remarkably pushed Seattle right back to within four points of either of the two wild card spots. So, for as much as we thought it might be time to throw in the towel on Monday, suddenly this team has life again.
“It’s a heck of a road game,” coach Dave Hakstol said. “That’s the way you have to play it. You’re playing teams that are in a fight for a playoff spot every single night, or fighting for playoff positioning every single night. And this is the type of game that you have to play.”
Here are our Three Takeaways from a critical 2-1 Kraken shootout win over the Islanders.
Takeaway #1: A nice return for Philipp Grubauer
It was oddly unfamiliar to see Philipp Grubauer between the pipes for the Kraken on Tuesday. Though the German Gentleman was activated off long-term injured reserve way back on Jan. 23, Joey Daccord continued to hold down the goal crease for the next six consecutive games. Hakstol stuck with the guy that had helped get his team back into the race, even as we thought—on several occasions—that surely he’d turn to Grubauer and give Daccord a break.
Finally, Grubauer got the nod Tuesday for the first time since suffering an injury in Seattle’s loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning on Dec. 9, and he looked good in his return.
One thing that has plagued Grubauer through his tenure with the Kraken has been when games start with few or no shots on goal. When a shot finally comes, it tends to be off a doozy of a rush or takes a weird deflection, and suddenly he’s off on the wrong foot.
Grubauer seems to like getting into a rhythm with a few early shots to let him feel the puck, and he really didn’t get much work at the beginning of the game Tuesday. But when he did—and things picked up toward the end of the opening frame when Andre Burakovsky took a bad-luck four-minute penalty—you could tell he was tracking the puck well, despite facing only a couple offerings in the first half of the opening period. Shots were hitting him and either sticking to him or getting steered into the corners.
“In practice you can only work on so many game situations, but once you get out there, it’s a totally different story,” Grubauer said. “There’s a lot of positives you can draw out of [missing time], and you see the game from a different perspective and you can slow it down a little. But obviously it takes a little bit of time to get back into it, and I was saying to the guys, there’s no better way than killing off a four-minute power player there to get back into it.”
We especially liked this play where he read the pass and got his paddle down to deflect it, then reacted in time to make a pad save on a quick shot from a prime scoring position.
“Really solid tonight,” Hakstol said. “He did a nice job being real settled and calm in net, and I mean, our guys did a really good job in front of him.”
Grubauer stopped 26 of 27 shots on the night for a .963 save percentage, his highest of the season. Two of those shots came in overtime, and he also stopped all three of Oliver Wahlstrom, Bo Horvat, and Mathew Barzal in the shootout to seal the deal. For his trouble, he earned first star honors and the Davy Jones Hat.
While Daccord was awesome in his long stretch of play since Grubi went on the shelf, we all knew the Kraken would need both goalies at some point. The question was how the team’s No. 1 goalie (is he still No. 1?) would play when he returned to the net.
One game is a small sample size, but that was a very positive outing for Grubauer. If this team is going to make the playoffs, it will need Grubauer to get hot down the stretch.
Takeaway #2: Bounce back for Matty
After a tough outing for Matty Beniers on Monday against the Devils—he rode the pine for 11 minutes following a terrible turnover that led to a goal—the forward had one of his best games of the season Tuesday.
He scored Seattle’s only regulation goal, and it came mere seconds after he got thrown awkwardly into the end boards and briefly appeared injured. But Beniers dusted himself off and retreated to the neutral zone in time to receive a stretch pass from Jared McCann just outside the Islanders blue line.
Matty cruised in and fired it off Ilya Sorokin’s blocker and in, giving Seattle a 1-0 lead at 5:27 of the first.
“It definitely hurt,” Beniers said. “I was trying to just get off the ice, and then I saw the opportunity, and I was like, ‘I’m not that hurt.’ It didn’t feel good, but plays will happen like that in hockey. And [Ryan Pulock] just kind of got me off balance, I went into the boards pretty hard. Canner made a nice play, and I was just fortunate to be there.”
This season has not gone according to plan for Beniers, and the Kraken desperately need him to find his game. Perhaps Tuesday was a step in the right direction for the reigning Calder Trophy winner.
Takeaway #3: The Kraken showed life
One thing we found interesting from that Davy Jones Hat presentation video in Takeaway #1 was Hakstol joking that the team had heard enough from him during the day. Clearly, there was a lot of conversation had amongst the team in the lead-up to this game, and the players and staff were not happy with how things had been going since the All-Star break and bye week ended.
Whatever was said worked. Since Seattle’s nine-game win streak ended on Jan. 15, this group had not looked right but finally put together a cohesive performance against the Isles.
“It was awesome, I think, all night from the whole team,” Beniers said. “I don’t think our battle level and compete was there the last two nights, and that’s kind of been our identity since the beginning. So that was the big emphasis on tonight was we’re not going to get outworked, we’re not going to get out-battled.”
Indeed, the Kraken came out of the gates fast Tuesday and managed to overcome a couple penalty-related stumbles. And even as the game wore on, and they dealt with the fatigue of a back-to-back, the Kraken stayed on the gas and pushed for a go-ahead goal.
“We worked hard defensively, we did a lot of really good things, we had some saves when we needed to, our penalty kill did a really nice job tonight,” Hakstol said. “And I really liked our third period.”
Now, had the shootout gone the other way, we probably would again be writing that the sky is falling. But the Kraken earned two points in this game and truly deserved them. Can this be a spark to get the Kraken going again?
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.