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Three Takeaways – Kraken likely kill last playoff hopes with 6-2 loss to Mammoth

Darren Brown

That feels like the end of the Seattle Kraken’s playoff hopes. Optimism around the team’s chances had certainly waned in recent weeks, as the group continued to sputter its way farther out of the picture. But entering Thursday’s game three points out of the last wild card spot with nine games left to play, it was beyond time to start make hay.

The Kraken made no such hay against the Utah Mammoth, frittering away a strong start and a 2-0 lead by allowing Utah to score six unanswered goals and roll to an easy 6-2 win.

“We certainly do find ways to, I guess, beat ourselves at times,” coach Lane Lambert said. “The special teams were poor tonight, the power play wasn’t good, the penalty kill gave up three goals for the first time in, [I don’t know] how long. [We took] two four-minute minor penalties for high sticking. You can’t come through those types of careless plays with your stick.”

While Seattle didn’t deserve to win the game, it also couldn’t catch any breaks, and Joey Daccord had another tough outing—he’s now been under a .900 save percentage in three straight starts and has dropped below that number for the season—and Lambert went out of his way to say he thought the team needed some more saves from him.

Here are Three Takeaways from a (probably season-ending) 6-2 Kraken loss to the Mammoth.

Takeaway 1: Goalie interference call shatters fragile team

One of the many things that has plagued this team since the Olympic break has been its inability to overcome bad breaks. Something goes the other team’s way, and that’s all the Kraken need to shrivel up and fade quietly into the night.

On this particular night, that thing was a negated Jacob Melanson goal in the second period, which completely turned the game on its ear.

Seattle had gotten out of the gates hot, scoring 41 seconds into the first after 1,000-game honoree Adam Larsson fired a puck at Karel Vejmelka, on which Jordan Eberle cleaned up the rebound to make it 1-0.

Bobby McMann also scored his eighth goal in 10 games since joining the Kraken at the trade deadline to make it 2-0 at 13:45 of the first, finding a loose puck after a lane drive by Chandler Stephenson and sweeping a backhander past Vejmelka.

But after Logan Cooley cut the deficit to 2-1 with a power-play goal at 16:27, the next goal felt critical.

At 6:11 of the second, Melanson appeared to reestablish a two-goal lead, tipping Ryan Lindgren’s wrist shot out of the air and past Vejmelka. Melanson even had a fantastic “Melly Celly,” aggressively dusting off the ice with his right glove. But the feeling of elation quickly turned into the wind being sucked out of Climate Pledge Arena.

Utah challenged for goalie interference on Melanson, and the overhead replay showed the slightest contact between Melanson’s right skate and Vejmelka’s left pad, with the contact happening in the blue paint. That was enough to overturn the goal.

“Rules are rules, but it’s a tough break, for sure,” Melanson said. “We can’t have excuses like that. It doesn’t count, we’ve got to get right back to it and get another one.”

Four minutes later, Daccord coughed up a juicy rebound to Logan Cooley, who scored his second goal of the game to tie it 2-2 at 10:05.

The Kraken completely collapsed after that—a microcosm of the post-Olympic portion of the season—and it was all Utah for the second half of the game.

Takeaway 2: Horrendous special teams

Seattle’s special teams haven’t been great in these later stages of the season. In fact, the power play has been dreadful—it hasn’t scored a goal since a 5-2 loss at Columbus on March 21—and the Mammoth picked apart the penalty kill in this one for three goals.

“32nd in the league after the break. It’s just not good enough,” Eberle said of the power play. “I mean, we’ve had chances, we can say that. But at the end of the day, we have to find a way to be a catalyst in the game and score goals so that we can have a chance to win hockey games. It’s that simple. We’re not doing that, so that’s on me and that’s on the rest of the power play.”

“Tonight was an off night [for the PK],” Lambert said. “When you’re trying and being forced to kill multiple minutes at a time, it becomes a problem. They’ve got a good power play over there, high-end skill over there, and we know this. So penalty kill has been good [lately]. The power play was really good before the break. The power play has been not good after the break, and we’ve been looking for solutions, and we have to find them. The players themselves have to be better, they have to take accountability of that situation. They are the veteran guys for the most part, we trust them, we keep putting them out, but you can only do that for so long.”

While the power play showed its ineptitude in the game, going 0-for-3, the Kraken also gave Utah six opportunities—twice off four-minute high-sticking penalties on Berkly Catton and Eberle. Cooley and Nick Schmaltz each scored on the power play to help take the game from 2-0 Seattle to 3-2 Utah. Michael Carcone added one of the uglier goals you’ll ever see with a manpower advantage in garbage time.

Takeaway 3: Nail in the coffin (probably)

With the playoff picture looking as bleak as it did entering the game, it felt like this game was going to be the last gasp for Seattle. Win and stay alive to fight another day, lose and watch the rest of the field pull away.

Indeed, Nashville, Los Angeles, San Jose, Vegas, and Edmonton all picked up a point or more, and the hill grew to four points with four teams to leap over in eight games. It could still happen if the Kraken win—let’s say seven of their last eight—but the problems are just too plentiful for this very fragile team right now.

What a wasted opportunity this post-Olympic stretch has been.

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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