Never a doubt! The Seattle Kraken rode a four-goal second period and cruised to an easy win and barely held on when the Philadelphia Flyers rallied back and threatened to overcome a three-goal deficit in the third period. But when things started to go sideways, Oliver Bjorkstrand scored a timely insurance goal at 14:52 of the third period to make it 6-4 and put things back on the rails.
“It’s a 60-minute game. It’s always about the next play,” Kraken coach Dan Bylsma said. “Things are going to happen, and bumps are going to happen, and you’ve just got to keep focused on the next play.”
Seattle did that, and although there were some hairy moments coming down the stretch, the Kraken deserved the win and ultimately got it, 6-4, over the Philadelphia Flyers on Thursday. Here are our Three Takeaways.
Takeaway #1: Second-period team?
The Kraken went off in the second period Thursday, scoring four unanswered goals to turn a 2-1 deficit into a 5-2 lead in just 20 minutes. Jared McCann got things started with a power-play goal, his third goal of the season and first PPG, ripping it through Ivan Fedotov’s gigantic wickets from his office at the top of the left circle.
“[Fedotov] is a monster,” McCann said. “You don’t see much mesh with that guy in net, so I feel like sometimes you’ve just got to get it off as quickly as you can, and I was able to find one tonight.”
Then Eeli Tolvanen cleaned up an Andre Burakovsky rebound, Jordan Eberle scored an easy tap-in off a nice feed from McCann, and Shane Wright got his first of the season, scoring just eight seconds after Eberle.
“[Eberle’s] been chirping me a lot, because apparently I don’t pass to him enough,” McCann joked. “But, yeah, he likes to drive the net, so I just tried to pull up there and find him.”
This is a pattern so far this season. The Kraken have had slow starts, and I think it’s fair to call the first period a “slow start” again on Thursday. The Kraken got outshot 11-9, had just 33 percent of the shot quality, and also didn’t get particularly great goaltending to bail them out in that opening frame. (I didn’t like either goal against from Grubauer in the first period, but like in the Dallas game, he ended up making some huge saves later on… He did end the night with -1.42 goals saved above expected, though.)
But the Kraken do also tend to tilt the ice in their favor in the second period, as we’ve seen in each of their wins (and one could argue they turned things around against Dallas, although they didn’t get that much going offensively that night).
“I don’t think any of us liked how the first had gone,” Bylsma said. “Yeah, they scored at the end of the period to go up 2-1, but I thought that was a huge kind of wake-up call to get us back in the game.
“That was probably our best second period of the year so far, playing fast, playing north, a great couple plays on the quick up… A lot of speed, a lot of energy back the other way, and when you do that, it allows players to play with skill.”
Takeaway #2: Lots of goal scorers (again)
For the second game in a row, the Kraken netted multiple goals from different players, continuing their well-rounded offense, and again, I was reminded of how the team won games two seasons ago. In Nashville on Tuesday, seven different players scored, and Thursday against Philadelphia, six different players tickled the twine.
It’s up and down the lineup, too, with veteran scorers like McCann, Eberle, and Bjorkstrand leading the way, but the secondary and tertiary scorers like Eeli Tolvanen, Shane Wright, and Montour also chipped in on this night.
“I think when you have everybody going like we did tonight, the last couple nights here have been good, and we’ve just got to be consistent with it,” McCann said. “We know we’re not going to score six, seven goals every game, but I think we could do a little better job at just focusing on keeping the puck in the other end.”
By the way, Ryker Evans only found the scoresheet with one assist, but it’s worth noting that he was plus-5 on the night.
Takeaway #3: Winning in different ways
The Kraken now have three wins on the season, which they didn’t accomplish until Oct. 30 last season, in what was their 10th game of the campaign (so, it took them half as many games to earn their third victory this season).
Each of the three has been very different, with the first being a come-from-behind shootout win in Minnesota, the second being a fairly convincing top-to-bottom win over Nashville, and this one being a classic, run of the mill, fall behind but then jump out to a big lead but then almost fumble it away win.
But the point is that the team is showing in the early stages of the season that it can win regardless of how the game is playing out.
“It’s critical,” Bylsma said. “Building a good team, a winning team, you’ve got to win games in different ways. They’re not always going to go to script, they’re not always going to go positive the whole way along. You’ve got to dig in, you’ve got to paddle, you’ve got to compete the whole 60 minutes to get a win.
“And sometimes, that means you’re coming back in a game, sometimes that means you’ve got to learn to play with a lead and play with a 5-2 lead going into the third period.”
This is another encouraging sign for this club, because if you think back to last season, there were so many times when the Kraken would get down in a game, and it just felt like there was no chance they’d come back. Or, they’d get a lead and give up a couple painful goals, and all of a sudden you knew they were going to fritter it away.
The more they experience these ups and downs and still come away with two points, the more comfortable they will be in these different scenarios as the season wears on.
“I think it’s one of those things where you’ve just got to keep battling no matter what the score is,” Brandon Montour said. “A good thing that we had in the past in Florida, especially, was it didn’t matter what the score was, we finished right to the end. And you bring that mentality wherever you are. I like how the guys have come together here.”
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.
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