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Three Takeaways – Another late stumble by Kraken, but Montour is hero against Maple Leafs

Darren Brown

Brandon Montour 102426

Once again, never a doubt for the Seattle Kraken.

The Kraken fumbled away a multi-goal lead for the fourth time since Oct. 13, when they took a two-goal lead at the Philadelphia Flyers, lost it, but then recovered to win in a shootout. Since then, they gave up a three-goal lead to the Detroit Red Wings and won again in a shootout, then blew another two-goal lead against the Utah Mammoth but bounced back to win 5-3.

The latest edition of the Kraken testing the cardiac health of their fans came Wednesday against the Toronto Maple Leafs. Seattle again went to the third period up by two after Chandler Stephenson scored a power-play goal to make it 3-2 at 3:33 of the second period, and Ryker Evans followed that up at 10:58 with a banger of a goal to make it 4-2.

But the tide turned dramatically again in the third, until Brandon Montour put things back on the rails with just 33 seconds left in the game.

Here are Three Takeaways from a dramatic 5-4 Kraken win over the Maple Leafs.

Takeaway 1: More third-period shenanigans

As was the case in the three previous iterations of this style of win, you still have to give the Kraken a ton of credit for righting the ship after letting a lead slip away. It’s a concerning trend that it keeps happening, but coach Lane Lambert has reminded us that being in that position in the first place is a good thing.

Game script is certainly a factor—when you’re ahead by two or more, it’s easy to sit back and try to protect, even if you’re intending to play on your toes. But at some point, it would be nice to see Seattle take a lead and then just bury an opposing team rather than having to find late-game heroics every time.

“Teams that are down… I mean, we’ve been in that situation,” said Stephenson, who had two points on the night. “You’re just kind of playing, I don’t want to say recklessly, but you’re just playing. It doesn’t really matter if one goes in because you’re down. So, whereas when you’re protecting a lead, you’re being more conservative, you’re trying to obviously defend a little bit better, and sometimes it’s that you defend a little bit too much and kind of back yourself into a corner.”

Through these four nail-biting wins, Lambert has continued to lean into the positive outcomes as opposed to dwelling on the temporarily lost leads.

On this night, he pointed out that Jack Roslovic’s goal that cut the deficit to 4-3 and gave Toronto the momentum came at 4-on-4, and Auston Matthews’ game-tying goal that looked like it was going to send the contest to overtime came with Sergei Bobrovsky pulled for an extra skater.

“I think that you’d always like to see [a more assertive approach] a little bit, for sure,” Lambert said. “We’d love to have a few more shots and things like that. But I thought we were really sound. They didn’t get a scoring chance 5-on-5 in the third period. Let me just put it that way.”

So, Lambert is indicating that he’s happy with how the team defended down the stretch, even though it gave up the two goals.

Takeaway 2: Josh Ma-haple Leafs Killer

As has been the case for much of the season, the Kraken again got contributions from all across their lineup Wednesday, including another beautiful Berkly Catton goal, the Stephenson power-play goal, and three goals from the blue line.

We’ll talk about Brandon Montour’s game-winner in Takeaway 3, but how about the goals by Josh Mahura and Ryker Evans?

Mahura—who also scored the overtime game-winner against these same Leafs last season—briefly put Seattle back in the driver’s seat after Gavin McKenna had scored his first of two power-play goals late in the first.

Just like he did to start the game, Lambert put out his fourth line along with his third defense pair. He said that was just a matchup thing because Toronto was starting its fourth line, and Lambert had last change at home.

“I think you kind of see who each team’s starting in the game and in the periods, and our mindset is just to keep it simple,” Mahura said. “Try to get some… I don’t know, I don’t want to say O-zone time, but just some puck possession time and try to play not in our end and be breaking pucks out. So it’s nothing crazy like in the sense of, we’re trying to necessarily accomplish something, but just going out and executing our game plan.”

Well, they executed it beautifully to start the second, and it led to Mahura scoring his first goal of the season and first since that great GWG last season. Freddy Gaudreau made a quick-out pass from the right half wall and hit Ben Meyers in stride. Mahura recognized an odd-man rush opportunity and jumped up into the play. Meyers put it on Mahura’s stick, and Mahura had a wide-open net to make it 2-1.

Later in that same frame, Toronto cleared to the neutral zone, where Stephenson caught the puck and quickly began the transition back to offense. He passed to Samoskevich at the red line, who made a hard cut to give himself some room. Samoskevich then found Evans flying over the blue line, and Evans fired a perfect shot that clanked off the far post and rattled in behind Bobrovsky.

“It was very impressive. Impressive enough that I didn’t even know it went in,” Samoskevich said of Evans’ shot. “He’s a great player. I think he’s playing really good right now. I think everyone’s playing really good, and when we play at that speed, we’re hard to play against.”

Takeaway 3: More late-game heroics

With about 40 seconds left in regulation and the game appearing destined for overtime, Bobby McMann floated a high flip that wobbled its way toward Bobrovsky. With the puck taking an odd bounce and Matty Beniers crashing, Bobrovsky had no choice but to cover it and take a whistle.

Beniers won the ensuing offensive-zone draw back, and Jordan Eberle jumped on the puck and quickly slid it across to an open Brandon Montour, who had circled outside to give himself plenty of space from Roslovic. Montour glided in to just above the right dot, wound up, and sent a laser beam toward Bobrovsky that squeezed between his pads and into the net.

Like we said, never a doubt.

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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