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Three Takeaways – Kraken drop final away game of the season, 2-1, to the Golden Knights

Darren Brown

The Seattle Kraken closed out their road slate in perfectly acceptable fashion, bouncing back from a dud 7-1 loss to the Utah Hockey Club on Tuesday with a more competitive outing against the Vegas Golden Knights on Thursday.

But, as has happened many times before (Seattle has been largely owned by Vegas over its franchise history, now sitting just 3-10-1 all-time against the Golden Knights), Seattle battled hard and ultimately came up short with a 2-1 loss.

Here are Three Takeaways from the latest Kraken loss to the Golden Knights.

Takeaway #1: Missed opportunities

Seattle had some golden opportunities in this game that found different ways to stay out of the net. Twice in the second period, the Kraken appeared destined to get themselves on the board. Had either of those gone in, Jared McCann’s tap-in goal at 17:21 of the second would have leveled the score heading into the third, instead of just getting Seattle back in the game after falling behind 2-0.

Early in the middle frame, Kaapo Kakko and Matty Beniers showed good chemistry when Kakko found himself with the puck and minimal room to stickhandle deep in the Vegas zone. He made a couple of nifty moves to nutmeg William Karlsson and find Beniers in the slot. Beniers then made a nifty move of his own, fired it toward Adin Hill, got his own rebound, and took a second shot that rang off the crossbar.

Karlsson scored with a missile over Joey Daccord’s shoulder soon after that to give Vegas some insurance and make it 2-0.

John Hayden also had a great chance later in the period when Josh Mahura found him streaking unmarked down the slot. Hayden got a good shot off, but Hill got just enough of it with his blocker to redirect it past the outside of the cage.

The nail in Seattle’s coffin came during a feverish push with Daccord off for an extra attacker. With the 6-on-5 advantage and the Kraken doing everything they could to find an equalizer, Jaden Schwartz whacked at a loose puck and sent it into the crease. Brandon Montour was there and had a wide-open net, but he completely fanned on his attempt to push it into the yawning cage.

That chance came with 20 seconds left in the game and surely would have sent it to overtime.

Takeaway #2: A bounceback for Joey Daccord

Joey Daccord has seen heavy usage in the second half of this season, and with it, his stats have slipped a bit. He had largely found his game again with three excellent starts in a row before he was forced into playing both games of a back-to-back with travel, after Philipp Grubauer came down with the bug that’s been floating through the Kraken locker room on this road trip.

In the second of those games, Daccord got lit up for seven goals on 29 shots before mercifully giving way to Victor Ostman, who made his NHL debut with 12 stops in relief.

In this one, Daccord didn’t face massive volume—only 25 shots in total—but there were some good testers in there. He came up with a couple of timely saves that felt like the kind that could propel the Kraken to tie the game. Most notably, Daccord came up large just seconds after McCann got Seattle on the board, and he absolutely robbed Nicolas Roy on a point-blank shot in the middle of the third that allowed Seattle to make its late-game push.

So, it was good to see Daccord recover from a rough night when he was set up for failure in Utah. But in the end, Adin Hill was just a little better at the other end and got some lucky breaks to give Vegas the 2-1 win.

Takeaway #3: Draft watch

At this stage in the season—with just two more games to play—it’s easy to wonder where Seattle will land in the NHL Draft Lottery. As of Friday morning, the Kraken have one more point in the standings (74) than the Philadelphia Flyers and Boston Bruins, who each have 73. The Bruins have played the same number of games as the Kraken, whereas the Flyers still have four to play.

I’m still in the mindset of hoping for positive outcomes in games—because it’s just more fun—but it would probably behoove the Kraken to drop these last two to the recently red-hot (but just lost their last two) St. Louis Blues and the playoff-bound Los Angeles Kings.

If the Kraken can drop behind Boston and Philadelphia in the standings, they would finish four spots from the bottom. That would give them a 9.5 percent chance of winning the lottery and the No. 1 overall pick, though they’d most likely stick in the position that landed them Shane Wright in the 2022 draft.

Tanking stinks. Buuuuuuuuuut… Seattle might as well lose these last two.

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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