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Three Takeaways – Kraken limp into Thanksgiving with 5-2 loss to Ducks

Darren Brown

That game didn’t have to end up being gross… but it was gross for the Seattle Kraken, who fell behind early, rallied back, and then collapsed into Thanksgiving with a 5-2 loss to the Anaheim Ducks on home ice.

In a stretch of hockey where the Kraken should really be winning every game and taking every available point, Seattle split its home-and-home series with the Ducks, leaving a sour taste for the boisterous pre-holiday crowd at Climate Pledge Arena.

While Seattle remains very much in the playoff hunt, Thanksgiving is traditionally a benchmark for predicting which teams will make the postseason. The Kraken are barely on the outside looking in. It’s worth noting that they were barely inside the playoff bubble at this time last season—and ended up missing the postseason by a wide margin.

Here are Three Takeaways from an uninspiring 5-2 Kraken loss to the Ducks.

Takeaway #1: We want leftovers, not turnovers

By my count, three of Anaheim’s five goals came directly off Kraken turnovers in their own zone.

Frank Vatrano’s ice-breaking goal at 8:23 of the first period happened after Chandler Stephenson picked up a loose puck along the wall and tried to shovel a backhand breakout pass to Jamie Oleksiak, who was unusually high in the zone. But the pass went behind Oleksiak and right onto the stick of Troy Terry. Terry’s initial shot got broken up by Brandon Montour but rolled to Vatrano, who scored with a spin-o-rama.

The next hot pizza pie delivery was a team effort between Brandon Tanev and Adam Larsson and came at a brutal time—just one minute after the Kraken had battled back to erase a 2-0 deficit.

Tanev tried a no-look breakout pass to Yanni Gourde but found Pavel Mintyukov instead. Larsson had a chance to bail out Tanev but took too long to make a decision with the puck and handed it to Trevor Zegras below the goal line. In a flash, Zegras found Alex Killorn, and the puck was in Seattle’s net at 10:02 of the second period.

That goal made it 3-2 and became the eventual game winner.

The real backbreaker came when Jared McCann grabbed a rebound on the penalty kill and blindly tried to throw it out of the zone. Mintyukov knocked it down, found Cutter Gauthier, and Gauthier restored the two-goal lead with 37 seconds left in the second period, an absolutely devastating time to concede a goal.

McCann was trying to clear the puck quickly and was under duress deep in Seattle’s end, but if he had just gotten his head up first, that puck would have been out of harm’s way.

Heck, even Zegras’ goal, which made it 5-2, stemmed from a Matty Beniers turnover although that one at least happened in the offensive zone, so Seattle should have had time to recover.

Regardless, it is safe to say that turnovers cost the Kraken this game.

“Yeah, I think that says it all,” Oliver Bjorkstrand said when I asked him about the three goals coming off D-zone blunders. “We’ve just got to bear down, make the right plays, get it out. I can’t go through the plays and what the mistakes were, but if we turn it over, just find a way to get over the blue or make a better play depending on the situation.”

When I asked Bylsma why he thought Seattle was turning the puck over like that, he said, “[Anaheim] certainly played a little harder [than last game]. I thought they—especially early on in the game—they had their D being more aggressive down the wall. But the execution points that you’re talking about were solely on us.”

Takeaway #2: Not Joey’s night

One luxury Kraken fans have enjoyed this season is watching Joey Daccord win the goaltending battle in nearly every game he’s played. In this one, however, John Gibson outshone Daccord, stopping 42 Kraken shots and posting 2.67 goals saved above expected. Gibson was stellar and remains undefeated in regulation this season, 4-0-1 through five starts.

For Daccord, his .848 save percentage in this game was his lowest of the season, and the five goals against marked the first time he allowed more than four.

I’ve long maintained that five players need to make a mistake before the puck even gets to the goalie, and as noted in Takeaway #1, the mistakes were plentiful. But Daccord has had a knack for bailing out his teammates after their most egregious errors this season, and he didn’t do that as often in this game.

Four of Anaheim’s five goals came off uncomfortable situations for Daccord, from Vatrano’s screened spin-around shot to Killorn’s quick-strike one-timer to Gauthier’s power-play screen to Zegras’ midair swipe.

The lone questionable goal was Brett Leason’s, which came on a 1-on-1 rush against Josh Mahura at 12:43 of the first. It seemed like a nothing play, but the puck launched off Leason’s stick and squeezed under Daccord’s arm. There was something weird about the shot, though. From above, it looked like Leason was going glove side, but the puck somehow went the other way. Either Leason has an extremely deceptive shot, or it ramped off Mahura’s stick.

Regardless, this is a game Daccord—who has been so dominant this season—will want to put behind him.

Seattle has been pushing Joey really hard, so it’s time to give him a game off, which he will surely get in one of the upcoming two against San Jose.

Takeaway #3: The Tolvanen / Wright / Bjorkstrand line was good

I was tempted to write about Seattle’s power play for Takeaway #3—it went 0-for-5 in this game and is now 0 for its last 20—but I can’t send you into arguably the best holiday of the year on all negative Takeaways. Instead, let’s highlight the strong performance of the Eeli Tolvanen/Shane Wright/Oliver Bjorkstrand line.

Remember, two of those three players have been publicly in Bylsma’s doghouse this season, with both Wright and Bjorkstrand receiving healthy scratches. But this game was one of the trio’s better outings.

Tolvanen’s goal came during a line change, so it was actually assisted by Gourde and Tanev, but he also helped create Bjorkstrand’s goal with hard forechecking on Olen Zellweger. Zellweger coughed up the puck to Wright, who found Bjorkstrand in the slot on a textbook example of how to pressure a defender into a mistake.

When I asked Tolvanen about the challenges this line has faced this season, he said, “It’s tough to say. I feel like [we’ve had] sloppy play. The confidence probably hasn’t been the highest, and if you don’t have confidence, it’s hard to play the game. I think we just have to build the confidence on the little things, and take pride in the forecheck and be the line that we can be.”

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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