Not good. The Seattle Kraken needed those points more than they’ve needed two points all season. And after coming out like gangbusters in the opening minutes, the Kraken let things snowball out of control in the second period and got smoked 5-2 by a Minnesota Wild team that entered the game one point ahead of them in the wild card standings.
Minnesota’s best players were their best players, and once Seattle got into penalty trouble, the Kraken simply had no answer.
“I don’t think we should be frustrated, I think we should be pretty upset with ourselves,” coach Dave Hakstol said. “There’s moments in the game that are game-changing moments that two nights ago [in a 5-2 win over the Vancouver Canucks], we met every one of those moments. Tonight, we didn’t meet very many of them.”
Joey Daccord got yanked for the first time this season, the power play went 0-for-5, and the penalty kill allowed two crucial goals.
Here are our Three Takeaways from a bad 5-2 Kraken loss to the Wild.
Takeaway #1: Tough night for Joey
We are such big Joey fans, so it was tough to see him get torched for four goals on 13 shots and replaced by Philipp Grubauer two minutes into the second period. He simply hasn’t been as sharp this week (he was getting scored on left and right at practice on Friday), and we fear the overtime loss to the Detroit Red Wings on Monday may have stung his confidence.
Now, will this outing—in which Daccord registered a season-low .692 save percentage—destroy that confidence that has been so high for most of his time as Seattle’s starter?
“That’s part of being a pro, right?” Hakstol said. “At this time of year, we can either walk the walk here and have a short memory and find confidence in ourselves, make the corrections that we need to and move forward two nights from now. Or we’re just talking to talk, and it doesn’t mean anything. And Joey is no different. He’s a confident pro, he works really hard at his game.”
Daccord may have been partially screened by Tomas Tatar on Marcus Johansson’s first-period goal that sapped Seattle’s early momentum, but it squeezed through his arm in a way we haven’t seen many pucks beating him this season.
Then, on a 5-on-3, Mats Zuccarello and Kirill Kaprizov toyed with Daccord behind his net until they got him looking the wrong way, and Kaprizov stuffed it in the short side.
That one is certainly not Daccord’s fault (it’s the fault of the two guys in the penalty box), and Kaprizov has scored that exact goal multiple times this season. But that put things in motion, and the wheels came off for Daccord and the Kraken in the second period.
Matt Boldy made an elite play to start the second (also on the power play), and beat Daccord with a backhander, then Kaprizov sniped his second off the bar and in, and that was it for Joey on the night.
“To be honest with you, I had that instinct [to change goalies] one goal earlier,” Hakstol said. “But Joey has been really good for us. He’s fought hard, he’s battled. Tonight wasn’t his night. This is not on him. But he, just like everybody else, is going to have to address his own performance, shake it off, and be ready to go for the next one.”
Hopefully for the Kraken’s sake, Daccord will remember that he is reason No. 1 that Seattle is even in the playoff conversation right now and forget about this tough night quickly.
Takeaway #2: Penalties, penalties, penalties
Special teams were the biggest deciding factor in this game, and Seattle gave the Wild’s lethal top players plenty of opportunities on this night, especially through the first half of the game. Meanwhile, the Kraken got five chances with the man advantage themselves and failed to cash in.
“I didn’t like our early power play when we had an opportunity to turn the game in the first period,” Hakstol said, referencing an advantage opportunity after Alex Wennberg drew a hooking call on Jonas Brodin at 16:40 of the first. “We come out in the second on another penalty that I don’t like that we took at the end of the first, but we have an opportunity again to get that kill to push momentum our direction.
“We failed to clear the puck four or five times before the goal was scored. So, it’s things like that… Those are clear points in the hockey game, and things unraveled pretty quickly for us over the next five, six minutes at the start of the second period.”
Adam Larsson took the elbowing call that started Seattle down a man to start the second. On the ensuing power play, the Wild got the Kraken running around, and eventually this happened:
Takeaway #3: That was a killer
The standings are almost like smoke and mirrors when a team gets to this point in the season and is fighting for its playoff life. As the Kraken won three out of four games before this one and took points in all four, they didn’t seem to gain much ground on a wild card spot. Yet, they drop one game to one of the teams in the same area as them on the table, and suddenly they look miles out of the race.
“It’s not the time of the year to be showing up for half the game or losing five minutes of momentum and panicking as a team,” Vince Dunn said.
There are six teams with a real claim at a wild card spot, from Los Angeles—currently in the top spot with 68 points—down to the Kraken, who now bring up the rear of that group with 59.
With the damaging loss Saturday, Seattle is now five points behind Nashville, which has won four games in a row, and will have to leapfrog four teams (the Flames, Wild, Blues, and Predators) to get back in the playoff bubble. The Kraken are now down to a measly 18.3-percent chance of making the playoffs, according to Money Puck. So, it’s not impossible, but it sure is improbable that this team will make the postseason.
“It hurts, especially against a group where we know we’re competing against them to get in the playoffs,” Yanni Gourde said. “Those are big games, and as a group, we didn’t respond well to the pushback they had after we scored the first goal. They came back, and we just didn’t have an answer after.”
With every loss since the All-Star break, the Kraken have inched closer toward the “sell” end of the seesaw. This one felt like a big lunge toward the front office having no choice but to wave the white flag before the March 8 trade deadline.
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.
I think they have clearly hit the sell end of the seesaw. The only question is how many will be sold of the UFAs: Wennberg, Eberle, Schultz, Tatar, Bellemare, and Driedger.
If Eberle truly wants to sign again with the Kraken, then sell him now to let him chase a cup with Edmonton and then come back in the summer. That goes for all the UFAs, they can return but Francis needs to up the team’s draft capital as much as possible. Only 12 more days, so I hope this moves from ongoing speculation to trade actuality very soon. Tomorrow would not be soon enough.
One problem the Kraken have had since their launch is having too many middle/bottom six forwards. You can’t play them all so your team is at a disadvantage.
The way out of that is to suck bad for a few years and build through the draft and get lucky signing underperforming free agents. I think the Kraken are on pace for long term development, they have to keep going with this strategy and be ruthless in selling expiring players and gathering top end talent.
In three years we are going to have an awesome team with Beniers, Wright, Sale, Rehkopf, Tolvinen, McCann, Bjorkstrand, Schwartz, and Burakovsky up front and Evans, Dunn, Nelson, Oleksiak, Borgen with Daccord and Kakko in net. We have to keep building organically and that means at times you have to prune back to make room for growth.
I am totally a TLDR violator…
so I’ll keep this short.
Minnesota has the easiest schedule remaining in the NHL.
There is no “playoffs” this season for Seattle.
Can’t wait for Monday Musings.
Go Kraken!!!
Definitely, let’s clear some space and make room for some youth.
Sell! Sell em all.
Unpopular opinion but trade Tanev, and put Kartye in his spot on wing. Get a real center in there.