The last month of this Seattle Kraken season could be loooooooooong. Because after Monday’s 6-2 embarrassment at the hands of the Buffalo Sabres, this team looks like it’s prepared to march to the end of the campaign losing every game. There’s no bite, no jam, no pushback, no… whatever word you want to use to describe what the Kraken are lackin’ (rhyme intended) right now, it’s not there.
Post-game media scrums have begun feeling akin to the pressers the players used to do in the inaugural season, when some combination of Jordan Eberle, Yanni Gourde, and/or Mark Giordano would be sent to a podium (we weren’t allowed in the dressing room that season because of COVID) almost every night, and they would talk about the group’s deficiencies and how they could be better in the next meaningless game.
Heck, Eberle even harkened back to that first season in his press scrum on Monday. “I said it two years ago, the line between winning and losing is so thin, and right now we’re on the other side of it.”
This is different than that 2021-22 season, though. Argue all you want about whether this current group ever had the talent and the depth to make the playoffs, but that first-year team never stopped trying despite those many deficiencies. Even in their ugliest losses that year, no matter how overmatched they were, the Kraken always did something to give their fans reasons to cheer. For as bad as they were, they were still an easy team to root for because of the tenacity they showed every single game.
These last few outings, we simply haven’t seen that from the Kraken. It’s like they give up a goal, and that’s all it takes to completely deflate them and remove any desire to battle back into the game.
Here are our Three Takeaways from a painful-to-watch 6-2 Kraken loss to the Sabres.
Takeaway #1: Skinner and Thompson torch Kraken
Part of us thought coming into this game that perhaps Buffalo, which had never beaten the Kraken in five previous chances, could be the remedy to at least get some positive feelings going again. The Sabres are a pretty good team this season, but they’ve been a great matchup for Seattle over its first three campaigns (Buffalo was the last team in the NHL that had never beaten Seattle).
And after Eberle scored 26 seconds into the game on a nice feed from Tolvanen, that theory briefly seemed like it might be proven out over the course of the night. But that belief lasted all of 25 seconds, because Tage Thompson ripped a snap shot under the bar to tie the game before it hit the 1:00 mark, and Jeff Skinner and Alex Tuch followed that up with goals of their own within five minutes of Thompson.
“You score first shift, and then they score right after, that kills you,” Eberle said. “But that being said, I mean, we should be resilient… They get one, and you should be like, ‘Alright, we’re fine.’”
Coach Dave Hakstol admitted there was frustration on the bench.
“I’ll be blunt and honest,” Hakstol said. “This is the first time that I’ve seen frustration come onto our bench… That’s the first time I’ve seen that. We had the day of practice yesterday, and obviously, we weren’t able to flush [the frustration] out, and it affected us today.”
Skinner took advantage of the frustrated team and added two more tallies on the night for his seventh career hat trick.
Takeaway #2: A hard night for Joey
That was about as tough of a night as you can get for a goaltender. Joey Daccord was yanked from the game after allowing three goals in the first 5:41. When he exited, the scoreboard showed that he had faced seven shots on goal, but after the game, the official stats were adjusted down to just four. So, Daccord was credited with one save on four shots, a .250 save percentage, before he was pulled for the second time in his career (previous was Feb. 29 against Minnesota).
All three goals were good, hard shots into perfect spots, but we noticed on the first Skinner goal that made it 2-1, Daccord seemed to be reacting as if the shot was going to his left, when it actually was going to his right. He clearly wasn’t tracking the puck well, and it was the right call for Hakstol to get him out of the game when he did.
“Those are quality shots,” Hakstol said. “The first goal against, with Thompson, I mean that’s just a [heck] of a shot, right? But you get to a point where, even though they’re from pretty good areas, the second and the third ones are still pucks that I know, when Joey’s on, he stops. He sees those and he makes those saves.”
Indeed, all three were unscreened shots that Daccord would normally stop. For his sake, we hope this outing doesn’t hurt his confidence too much.
Takeaway #3: Where do they go from here?
With the season on the line, the Kraken spent almost two weeks laying a giant egg and went 0-4-1 on a crucial five-game homestand. After the third-period collapse and subsequent overtime loss to Vegas, the group played three straight games in which it looked fully ready to hit the golf course.
But the Kraken have 15 games and almost a month of hockey left. The fans deserve better than what they just watched on that homestand.
“This league is about winning,” Eberle said. “And not just that, but playing well, feeling good about your effort, feeling good about— I mean, you may lose, you may win, but you want to feel good about a 60-minute effort where we went out there and put everything on the line. It’s been kind of inconsistent throughout the whole year, and that’s kind of been frustrating. And we need to find a way to just [play hard] the last 15 games here every night. I mean, it’s a privilege to be in this league.”
On the plus side, Seattle’s draft position is getting better with every passing miserable loss, so perhaps the organization is comfortable with letting things get more and more uncomfortable over this final month. But tanking is traditionally done by having a bunch of young players in the lineup, mixed with journeyman veterans that help reach the salary cap floor. That’s not what this roster is. Is the front office really ok with this roster of proud veterans just losing by playing terrible hockey?
We’re fine with losing at this point, and the more losing Seattle does for the rest of the season, the better it will be for the long-term future of the franchise. But in the spirit of what Eberle said, watching the team lose in this uninspired, beaten-down fashion is tough.
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.