Site icon Sound Of Hockey

Three Takeaways – Kraken fall 2-1 in shootout to Panthers, Yanni Gourde injured?

Darren Brown

Close, but no cigar for the Seattle Kraken, who had some promising looks in an effective, defense-first game against the Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers but ultimately fell 2-1 in a shootout.

“We’ll take the point,” Chandler Stephenson, who scored Seattle’s lone goal with a breakaway late in the first period, said. “Obviously, it would have been nice [to win], but at the same time, we still did some good things. But I think we’ll just look to be better next game… Joey played outstanding for us, gave us a chance, and we just couldn’t buy one in overtime.” 

Florida tilted the ice for much of the game and came close to a 2-to-1 shots-on-goal advantage. However, the Kraken defended well by keeping shots to the outside, breaking up seam passes, and benefiting from Joey Daccord’s stellar 32-save performance. This was particularly impressive given that Daccord had been a late scratch on Sunday in New York due to a stomach bug.

Here are Three Takeaways from a 2-1 Kraken shootout loss to the Panthers:

Takeaway #1: Controversial tying goal for Florida

The Kraken got the short end of the officiating stick Tuesday, with a missed call on Nate Schmidt directly leading to Florida’s only goal in regulation.

Seconds after Daccord made his best save of the game—a sprawling glove save on a 2-on-1 chance for Aaron Ekblad—Brandon Tanev sprung Yanni Gourde for a breakaway. Gourde cut to his left to shield Schmidt from the puck, but Schmidt swung his stick around and whacked Yanni on the hands, causing him to lose control.

If that same play happens 10 times, the referees call it nine times, perhaps even awarding a penalty shot two or three of those times. Instead, the play went back the other way and ended with Aleksander Barkov rifling a one-timer from the right circle into an open net.

Bylsma was screaming at the officials both during and after the play, on which just 11 seconds elapsed between the slash and the Panthers’ goal that tied the game at 1-1.

After the game, I asked Bylsma what he saw because it had looked to me like Schmidt got his stick into Gourde’s hands. “Yeah, you described it pretty good,” Bylsma said. “We get the wall play, and it squirts out there. Yanni has speed, we get it to Yanni, and he has a breakaway. It looks like his glove comes off his stick for a reason, but that’s not the way the ref saw it. He saw stick on stick.”

It’s always brutal to see a blown call lead immediately to a goal against, and in this low-scoring affair, it ended up being pivotal.

Takeaway #2: Rope-a-dope almost works (again)

Twice in the last week, the Kraken have played what I call a rope-a-dope style of hockey. They did it in New Jersey on Friday against the Devils, relying on Philipp Grubauer, who was sharp that night. Seattle ended up losing that one 3-2 due to a flubbed net-front play to start the third period, but it was anybody’s game despite a dramatic difference in zone time.

On Tuesday, against the high-flying Panthers, Seattle was back in “bend but don’t break” mode. This time it was Daccord in net, and he was dialed in from the start. The Kraken seemed more in control this time because they did such a good job in their zone, allowing shots while taking away passing lanes and blocking many of the more dangerous-looking attempts at the net.

“I thought all six defensemen did a real good job of [clearing the front of the net],” Bylsma said. “But back behind them was Joey.”

In both the Devils and Panthers games, the puck was in Seattle’s end a lot, and yet some late chances in each contest could have led to better outcomes.

Friday, it was the Brandon Montour chance that rolled through the blue paint and past a yawning cage. Tuesday, it was a cut to the middle by Jared McCann and a dish to Shane Wright, who chipped it over from a sharp angle late in regulation. It was also breakaways by McCann and Oliver Bjorkstrand (Bjorkstrand’s came with nine seconds left) in overtime, both of which were shut down by Sergei Bobrovsky.

If any of those three late-game chances had found the back of the net, Seattle would have knocked off the champs in thrilling fashion. Instead, they settled for a point and remained at .500 on the season.

Takeaway #3: What happened to Yanni?

The play discussed in Takeaway #2 was Yanni Gourde’s last shift of the second period. He played one more early in the third and then exited the game with a lower-body injury. I asked Bylsma if the injury was related to the Schmidt slash that led to the Barkov goal. Bylsma thought about it for a moment and then said, “It was after the breakaway that it happened.”

I took that to mean it happened on a completely separate play, but after reviewing the sequence, I think Bylsma meant it happened as Gourde was falling off to his left immediately following the slash. He careened awkwardly, and it almost looked like his skate dug into the ice in a way that could cause a lower-body injury. He was in distress on the bench after Barkov scored.

My working theory is that the slash itself didn’t hurt Gourde, but losing his balance did. On the shift Gourde played early in the third, he looked fine, throwing hits and skating without a limp. Hopefully, his removal from the game is similar to what happened against the Islanders last Thursday, and this ends up being just a minor issue.

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