That may have officially (but really unofficially) cooked the season. In brutal fashion, the Seattle Kraken frittered away a late two-goal lead and fell 5-4 in overtime to the Vegas Golden Knights, the team that currently holds the last wild card spot in the Western Conference.
After Oliver Bjorkstrand scored what should have been the dagger with 8:30 left in the game, the Kraken allowed the dreaded response goal to William Karlsson, and suddenly the Golden Knights had life.
We’ll talk more about what happened next in the actual Takeaways themselves, but… spoiler alert… it wasn’t good for Seattle fans, who left Jordan Eberle’s 1000th NHL game with a bitter taste in their mouths and a realization that their team’s chances of making the playoffs are all but gone.
Here are our Three Takeaways from a brutal 5-4 Kraken overtime loss to the Golden Knights.
Takeaway #1: The response goal was a killer
Response goals haven’t been as big of a thing for the Kraken this season as they seemed to be the last couple years, but man, the Karlsson one Tuesday was a doozy. Bjorkstrand had just scored Seattle’s third straight goal to make it 4-2, and we were sure that would be enough to let the Kraken cruise to a win.
But the Golden Knights had other ideas. Before Chet Buchanan could even finish announcing Bjorkstrand’s goal, Brayden McNabb faked a shot from the left circle and slid it across to Karlsson at the top of the right circle. Karlsson one-timed it by Grubauer, and in just 53 seconds, the Golden Knights went from dead in the water to alive and looking dangerous.
“A big part [of the loss] is giving up the goal right after going up by two,” coach Dave Hakstol said. “There’s a couple opportunities there to take care of a puck. One is actually in the offensive zone, just to get a little bit of grind time, and there’s another opportunity to take care of the puck [to get] out of the zone. That obviously changes the complexion of the last six, seven minutes.”
Indeed, both Brian Dumoulin and Yanni Gourde briefly had the puck touch their respective stick blades, but neither player controlled it enough to get it out of harm’s way. In a flash, it was in the back of Seattle’s net.
Takeaway #2: They still had it… and then they didn’t
Even with Karlsson’s goal at 12:23 of the third, the Kraken still very much had the game within their grasp. Vegas pulled Adin Hill for an extra skater, and the Golden Knights went to work in the offensive zone, getting Seattle to run around a bit in the closing minute.
Still, there wasn’t anything particularly dangerous coming toward Philipp Grubauer, until Jamie Oleksiak tried to rim it out of the zone but didn’t hit it hard enough to get it past Jack Eichel at the point. Eichel wristed it toward the slot, but instead of tipping it on goal, Chandler Stephenson made a crafty little drag play to pull it into the left circle toward Jonathan Marchessault. Marchessault was left all alone and beat a diving Grubauer for the tying goal with just 16 seconds left in the game.
That was Marchessault’s second goal of the night and FIFTH in two games. Once that happened, you knew Vegas was going to get the game-winner in overtime.
The teams played three minutes of 3-on-3, back-and-forth, fire-wagon hockey before Bjorkstrand, Adam Larsson, and Andre Burakovsky all went in on a rush that Alex Pietrangelo broke up with a brilliant poke check.
Pietrangelo flipped it high into the neutral zone and landed it in front of Eichel, who beat a gassed Bjorkstrand in a footrace. Eichel went in alone and ended it.
Bjorkstrand slamming his stick in the foreground while Eichel celebrated tells you everything you need to know about how Kraken players felt after this one.
“There’s good chances up and down the rink, and probably on both sides, you’ve got some tired bodies,” Hakstol said. “But in a perfect world you’d say, ‘You know what? We’d love to just get a line change and live for the next day,’ but we’ve got a scoring chance also. We don’t capitalize on a couple of real good opportunities, and that opens up the opportunity going the other direction.”
Takeaway #3: That’s it, right?
There have been so many moments this season that have felt like the nail in the coffin for the Kraken, who haven’t risen to the occasion enough times in the games they’ve had to win. In terms of how it feels, our immediate reaction to that game is that there’s no recovering from that one.
Seattle had it in the bag against the team is its current primary target in the standings. But the Kraken made enough mistakes down the stretch against a skilled club to let the opposing superstars take over and widen Vegas’ lead in the standings to a whopping nine points.
Believe it or not, MoneyPuck somehow still has the Kraken at a 13.4-percent chance of making the playoffs, but with 18 games left and three teams to jump, this deficit feels too big to overcome. Still, Hakstol isn’t ready to throw in the towel.
“We don’t need fire, we don’t need confidence, we’ve got that,” Hakstol said. “We’re disappointed we didn’t close the game out, but I’ve said it all the way along, no matter the result, we need everybody to walk out tonight, clear the deck, and come back. There’s no time for anything but [that], so we’ll get back to work tomorrow.”
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.