Site icon Sound Of Hockey

Three Takeaways – Kraken close out miserable road trip with 6-3 loss to Avalanche

Darren Brown

After an emotional roller coaster of a day, you’re surely thrilled to read about a fourth straight Seattle Kraken loss and the end of an abysmal road trip. In this one, the Kraken at least found the back of the net a few times, but the end result was the same: a 6-3 loss to the Colorado Avalanche.

Once again, the Kraken fell behind early, and were forced to chase the game against the Avalanche. They did get back to level at 1-1 and 2-2, thanks to goals by Jaden Schwartz and Jared McCann, but both times, the Avalanche responded and scored the next goal to regain the lead.

Admittedly, I have been quite distracted on this particular game night, but I’ll do my best here.

These are Three Takeaways from a 6-3 Kraken loss to the Avalanche.

Takeaway #1: What happened on that offside challenge?

A big turning point in this Kraken-Avalanche matchup came when Mikko Rantanen appeared to give Colorado a 4-2 lead at 9:11 of the second period with a one-time power-play ripper off a Cale Makar pass.

BUT WAIT!

The Kraken challenged for offside for the second game in a row, and a rewind showed that Artturi Lehkonen had entered the zone well before the puck crossed the blue line and landed on his stick. So, the officials announced that the play was, indeed, offside.

BUT WAIT!

Colorado coach Jared Bender called the official over, had a conversation, and suddenly the review continued. The additional review showed that Yanni Gourde’s shot had missed the net, rattled around the glass, and went all the way through the neutral zone to the waiting Lehkonen.

And so, the officials overturned the successful challenge AND THEN ruled that it was, in fact, a good goal, which ALSO meant that the Kraken got a penalty for the failed challenge.

“The linesmen, I guess, looked at it again after… I don’t know… After they had called it offside,” coach Dan Bylsma said. “They looked at it again, and I think there’s an interpretation of the rule whether we intentionally played the puck back. But we were the last team to touch the puck before [it came] back, and that’s what they ruled.”

The rule reads, If a player legally carries, passes, or plays the puck back into his own defending zone while a player of the opposing team is in such defending zone, the offside shall be ignored and play permitted to continue.

Based on the writing of the rule, it doesn’t really matter if it was intentionally played backward. Based on that, they also got the right call in the end, but it was all kind of shady. Did Colorado challenge the challenge?

I’d also like to re-raise issue with the fact that the Kraken got the penalty for the failed challenge after EVEN THE NHL ITSELF was initially fooled into negating the goal. But I digress…

Takeaway #2: An interesting shakeup

Bylsma sent a strong message to his veteran core on Tuesday, benching Oliver Bjorkstrand—Seattle’s only All-Star last season—as a healthy scratch, along with Tye Kartye and Josh Mahura. The Kraken recalled Ryan Winterton earlier in the day, and Bylsma inserted him, along with John Hayden, into a game for the first time this season.

Bylsma indicated after morning skate that the decision to take Bjorkstrand out was a message for the whole group that everyone needs to be better. But it can’t feel good for Bjorkstrand, who has scored 43 goals since joining the Kraken before the 2022-23 season and had previously missed just one game for Seattle.

I concede that I haven’t been closely watching Bjorkstrand’s game lately, but he hasn’t struck me as the central problem for the Kraken. So, he probably wouldn’t have been the guy I would have benched, but it is nonetheless an interesting move by Bylsma and something the previous regime never did (that I can recall), taking a prominent player out of the lineup.

The shakeup also came with changes to the blue line, with Brandon Montour playing the left side for the first time next to Adam Larsson.

The big mixup didn’t work in this game, but doing something like sitting a veteran in the pressbox can have lasting implications, both positive and negative. I’ll be curious to see how things go for Bjorkstrand and other veterans moving forward.

Takeaway #3: What a terrible road trip

Following last Tuesday’s high-flying 8-2 Kraken win over the Canadiens, optimism about this team’s direction was easy to muster. But Seattle came back down from that high with a thud, dropping four straight over the rest of the trip in Toronto, Ottawa, Boston, and finally Colorado.

Now, I’ve said it a couple times that I worried after the 8-2 win that some bad habits may have crept in during that contest, because that tends to happen after a game when the goals come a little too easily. But did I think things would turn this badly? No, I certainly did not.

On what he hopes the team has learned from the trip, Bylsma said: “I hope we get a clear understanding of how we have to play and how we have to compete on an every-night basis to have success. I mean, each game is probably a little bit different lesson, but that should be the overall riding theme. And it’s the time of year to learn the lesson now, not wait for later in the year to try to learn the lesson.”

Indeed, at this stage in the season, Seattle can right the ship and will at some point, but points matter now just as much as they do in March. The Kraken need to find their game quickly, and their don’t seem to be any easy answers.

The players showed their frustrations at the end of this game, which harkened back images of some rather low moments in past seasons. Schwartz got hit with a Larsson shot that stung him and took it out on the Voodoo Ranger IPA ad in front of the Kraken bench.

Yanni Gourde got kicked out and said this (presumably) to the official…

And then Montour took a run at Joel Kiviranta and caught him high.

Hopefully, there will be no supplemental discipline after that one.

Thankfully, this pitiful road trip is finally over. Now it’s up to Bylsma and the Kraken to turn all this frustration into positive change.

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.

Read more from Darren
Exit mobile version