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Three Takeaways – Defense and goaltending sink Kraken in significant loss to Ducks

Darren Brown

The last 48 hours have been brutal for the Seattle Kraken and the few shreds of hope they had left for making the playoffs. The coach and the players had talked coming into this stretch—nine of their final 10 games at home before the 4 Nations Face-Off break—about how crucial it would be to get consistent results.

Things got off to a pretty good start, too, with wins against the Kings and the Sabres. But Seattle has lost three of its last four and was passed in the standings by the Anaheim Ducks with an embarrassing 6-4 defeat by that same feathered foe on Tuesday.

When you think about how this stretch has gone, you can realistically imagine the Kraken being back in the playoff conversation had things gone differently in the last two days. If they had capitalized on their strong start and golden opportunity to beat the superior Edmonton Oilers on Monday, and had gotten even a semblance of defense and goaltending against a weak Ducks team on Tuesday, they would be just four points behind the Calgary Flames for the last wild-card spot—with two games against those Flames coming in the next week.

Alas, the Kraken were dreadful in their own end against Anaheim and didn’t get bailed out by their netminder, and now they have gone the wrong direction, dropping to seventh place in the Pacific Division.

Here are Three Takeaways from a 6-4 Kraken loss to the Ducks.

Takeaway #1: Bad defense

The Kraken had every opportunity to win this game. Even after things unraveled in the second period, with the Ducks torching Philipp Grubauer for three goals on six shots, it felt like Seattle still could come back from two goals down in the third with how equally bad Anaheim was in its zone. And the Kraken did come out hot in the third, cutting the deficit to 5-4 with a nice power-play goal by Shane Wright at 6:15.

But Lukas Dostal was just good enough, and Seattle was just docile enough to fall short of an equalizer.

Let’s talk about how the Kraken got themselves into that position, though, down two goals heading into the final frame. Three of the first four goals conceded came off wide-open one-timers, with the first—a Troy Terry banger—coming just 1:23 into the contest.

I personally thought the most egregious defensive lapse came on Robby Fabbri’s goal at 5:39 of the second. Vince Dunn, who has played a starring role on too many goals against lately, tried to make an ill-advised breakout pass through the slot to Wright. In doing so, he put it right onto the tape of the red-hot Mason McTavish, who also scored in the contest for his fifth goal in his last three games. In the blink of an eye, the play turned the other way, and Fabbri had made it 4-3.

Brandon Montour said, “Every time we make a mistake, it seems like it’s in the back of the net, or our goalies have to make a big-time save. Any time you let up five, six goals, it’s tough to win those games.”

Takeaway #2: Bad goaltending

Hey, at least Philipp Grubauer got all the way through this game without getting pulled (although he may have been yanked yet again if the circumstances were different). The last time Grubauer had finished a game before Tuesday was in a 3-2 loss to the New Jersey Devils on Jan. 6. Since then, he started twice—once in Columbus and once in Detroit—getting an early hook from both after allowing four goals in the second period against the Blue Jackets and three goals on four shots against the Red Wings.

There was a lot of discussion about Grubauer with Seattle coach Dan Bylsma both before and after this Ducks matchup. In his pregame availability, Bylsma defended the netminder’s most recent outings, saying that the Detroit game was not on him and that his getting pulled was more of a statement to the team than to Grubauer.

After this Kraken loss to the Ducks, Bylsma said, “We hung him out to dry. The first three goals are all seams, one-timers. It was great to see him get the [sprawling glove] save in the first period on the penalty kill [against Trevor Zegras]. It’s a huge, huge sequence for us, huge sequence for him. He made an outstanding save for us, and that one should have snapped us into the game.”

That save really was sick.

BUT… but… For as good as that stop was, Jackson Lacombe’s goal to make it 5-3 at 7:58 of the second was equally bad, and that one proved to be the eventual game-winner.

At the end of the night, Grubauer had 17 saves on 22 shots, but Lacombe’s fateful innocuous-looking wrister from just inside the blue line that beat the goalie clean (I know, there was a partial screen from Josh Mahura) was Anaheim’s 12th shot of the game. So his final save percentage of .772 was actually a significant improvement from the .583 he had put up through the first half of this game.

It’s worth noting, I followed up on Bylsma’s “We hung him out to dry” statement by asking if the coach thinks those defensive breakdowns happen disproportionately more when Grubauer is in the game compared to Daccord.

Bylsma responded to that question with one word: “No.”

Without saying much, that response says a lot about how Bylsma views his team’s goaltending.

Takeaway #3: Kraken loss to Ducks felt oddly significant

There’s something about losing to fellow bottom-dwelling teams like the Sharks and Ducks that feels even more significant than the many losses this season to middling and good teams.

Postgame moods in the dressing room vary; sometimes the players and coach remain level-headed about defeats, perhaps recognizing that hockey is a chaotic game and that putting forth a strong effort can still end in a loss.

After this one, Montour, Eeli Tolvanen (who scored for the third game in a row, by the way), and Bylsma all seemed downright pissed to not get a result. The usually affable Montour repeated himself several times, reverting back to words and phrases like “awareness” and “clean some stuff up.” When I asked Tolvanen what led to the defensive breakdowns, he responded with a terse, “I really don’t know.”

Finally, when Bylsma was asked about the pain of this particular loss, he said, “Well, it’s the one in the moment, so it hurts a lot… The whole duration of the game, I think, we knew we needed to make it a hard game. We knew we needed to grind one out, back-to-back, and we just played too loose with our execution, too loose with the puck, and created a rush game, a high-event game. That was one we knew we’d have a tough time winning, and so that is the biggest disappointment.”

This was a bad one.

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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