Seattle Kraken at Vegas Golden Knights 7 p.m. Pacific T-Mobile Arena, Las Vegas, Nevada TV: ESPN, ESPN+, Sportsnet
It’s here! It’s here! It’s finally here! Opening night for the inaugural season of NHL hockey in Seattle has finally arrived. It’s been an unbelievable journey to get to this point, and it really was surreal to be sitting in T-Mobile Arena Tuesday morning, watching Seattle Kraken players (specifically those who aren’t in Covid protocol) going through their morning drills and preparing to take on the Vegas Golden Knights.
Vegas is arguably the toughest Pacific Division test under normal circumstances, so to have five players in Covid protocol as recently as Monday feels a bit unfair to an organization that has worked so hard to prepare its roster and its players for this moment. But as newly named captain Mark Giordano said Tuesday morning, the players in the locker room aren’t looking for excuses. They are ready and eager to go, and some players are going to get opportunities that may not have expected them.
UPDATE: Jared McCann, Jamie Oleksiak, and Joonas Donskoi all cleared Covid protocol and will play. We spotted Oleksiak walking into the arena, so we figured there could be some changes coming from what we were projecting earlier. Apparently when Dave Hakstol said the lineup was a “work in progress” Tuesday morning, this is why.
Very slick, Mr. Hakstol! Very slick indeed!
#SeaKraken forwards Jared McCann and Joonas Donskoi plus D-man Jamie Oleksiak have all arrived in Vegas, confirms GM Ron Francis. Let's go, Game 1 puck drop in 90 minutes.
One other bit of welcome news in all of the chaos of the last 24 hours was that Marcus Johansson was cleared from Covid protocol just in time to make the team flight on Monday evening. He said he did not test positive, but he was a close contact, so he had to wait for clearance to be able to take the trip to Vegas.
Jamie Oleksiak, Jared McCann, Joonas Donskoi, and Calle Jarnkrok remain in protocol, though, so they were not allowed to make the trip, and coach Dave Hakstol gave no prediction for when they might be able to join the team.
So, what the Kraken have is what they get to work with tonight. They did claim Alex Barre-Boulet off waivers from the Tampa Bay Lightning on Monday, and he is in Las Vegas but didn’t make it in time for the morning skate. Hakstol didn’t indicate whether or not they’d put him right into the lineup having never even skated with the team, but he is available. Our *guess* is that they’ll go with their more known quantities, but we shall see.
Vegas Golden Knights
All reports indicate that the Golden Knights had a lousy preseason and lost 4-0 to the Sharks in their last exhibition game, which was the team’s “dress rehearsal” for opening night.
Still, you know T-Mobile Arena is going to be electric on Tuesday, and the players will come ready.
Interestingly, Vegas is expected to play Dylan Coghlan, a 23-year-old defensemen, on its fourth forward line, as the Golden Knights have remarkably already found themselves in salary cap hell. That’s a fascinating predicament for a team that just ran into this last season.
Here’s what our friends at SinBin.Vegas see as the lineup for Vegas.
Thus, this is a guess at the lines today (definitely wouldn't say this is confirmed)
Here’s how the team is lined up in warmups. This looks a lot better than what we were projecting earlier.
Darren Brown is the Chief Content Officer at Sound Of Hockey and the host, producer, and editor of the Sound Of Hockey Podcast. He is an inconsistent beer league goalie who believes that five players have to make a mistake before the puck gets to him. Follow him on Twitter @DarrenFunBrown or email darren@soundofhockey.com.
Sick of preseason? Of course you are. BUT! BUT! It’s the Kraken’s LAST preseason game tonight in Vancouver, which means you’re getting something that will look very close to Seattle’s initial roster.
Recently, coach Dave Hakstol implied that the last preseason game could be a dress rehearsal for opening night, but in the same breath cautioned us, saying that may not be the case for this particular group. And he’s probably being truthful in that statement because a guy like Marcus Johansson, for example, is going to end up on the team but is not dressing tonight.
There’s also the Yanni Gourde factor to consider. He’s been downplaying his readiness and the fact that he switched out of a red non-contact jersey the last two days, but one can’t help but wonder how far off he truly might be.
If Gourde’s return is imminent, and he’s ready to go within the first few weeks of the regular season starting, then that changes the entire makeup of Seattle’s lineup for the better. In that case, Hakstol’s cautioning on line combinations and the initial roster will be validated.
What we have tonight probably is not the exact lineup that we’re going to see for the season opener in Vegas next week, but it is darn close. Worth noting, the all-Swede line has been broken up with Johansson out of the lineup, so Hakstol has really put Ryan Donato in a position to succeed here.
Philipp Grubauer will go the distance this evening, which we have not seen him do before. He has looked dialed in at practice of late and was solid in his most recent preseason appearance, so keep an eye on the Kraken’s No. 1-A goalie tonight.
Canucks still dressing a sub-par lineup
After Seattle mostly dominated and won 5-3 in Spokane two Sundays ago against a largely AHL roster, we were expecting to see a slightly more seasoned group this time around. That still doesn’t appear to be the case, though, as the Canucks are not yet in dress rehearsal mode. They still have two preseason games to play after tonight, so they are saving a lot of their veteran players.
We will see a better top line in Tanner Pearson, Bo Horvat, and Nils Hoglander, plus an NHL goalie in Thacher Demko. But Brock Boeser, Elias Pettersson, and Quinn Hughes will not participate tonight, among others.
We still will not be comparing apples to apples as we dissect tonight’s game, but this is what the Kraken have to work with. On paper, Seattle really should be the better team tonight.
Projected lineup
Here’s our projected lineup, based on what Hakstol said after morning skate.
Apparently having your top players in the lineup is helpful after all. On Tuesday, Seattle head coach Dave Hakstol held Jared McCann, Jordan Eberle, Jaden Schwartz, Mark Giordano, and Philipp Grubauer out of the lineup—standard practice for any team in preseason—and the result was unsurprisingly a 6-0 drubbing at the hands of Connor McDavid and the Edmonton Oilers. On Wednesday, the Kraken dressed those top players, and the result was a good, even battle with the Calgary Flames that ended in a 4-3 shootout win for Seattle.
Here are our takeaways from the Kraken’s third preseason game.
Takeaway #1: Seattle might have something cooking with its top line
So about that Eberle-McCann-Schwartz line…
There’s some obvious chemistry forming here, which bodes well for the Kraken. When the top-scoring trio was on the ice Wednesday, the pace and the passing seemed to ratchet up a notch and went up even higher when they got out there at the same time as the top defensive pairing of Giordano and Adam Larsson.
On the first goal, just three minutes into the game, Cale Fleury made a nice stretch pass from the defensive zone to Schwartz near the far blue line. Schwartz, while falling, found McCann who carried it into the zone, then dished to Giordano who was streaking into the slot. Giordano slipped one through the wickets of Dan Vladar, and the home Calgary faithful went giddy for their beloved Gio.
It was a pretty tic-tac-toe passing play that allowed Seattle to go from regrouping in its own zone to scoring at the other end in about five seconds.
In the third period, with the game level at two goals apiece and the teams playing at four-on-four, Eberle picked off an errant Michael Stone pass behind Calgary’s goal line and immediately found an open Schwartz in the slot, who buried his second of the game. That sequence took two seconds.
There was almost a third goal by Schwartz, which also would have been assisted by Eberle, but Vladar robbed Schwartz of the hat trick with a desperation toe save.
There’s bound to be some line shuffling throughout the course of the season, but Hakstol has to like what he has seen in two games from McCann, Eberle, and Schwartz. It will be interesting to watch if he continues to play them together for these last three preseason games—when they’re all in the lineup, that is—or if he moves any of them around to see how the chemistry might look with other mixes.
Takeaway #2: Seattle could use some work on three-on-three
The game in general looked a bit sloppy Wednesday, as is often the case in contests that feature just 43 combined shots on goal between the two teams. When we got to three-on-three overtime, we were expecting to see the high-octane, flowing brand of hockey that we’ve become accustomed to in past regular seasons.
That isn’t what we got, and it was a reminder that although we are a full week into training camp, the Kraken have really only had a few days of practice. And with the squad split into two groups, Hakstol and his staff have spent very little time on the finer details like special teams and three-on-three.
It’s also a stark reminder that Seattle has a unique challenge in that it has never done any of this before. Hakstol has maintained that every year poses similar challenges, because every team is—in a way—starting over and building something from scratch. But other teams have the luxury of familiarity between most of the players and usually between the players and the coaches. The Kraken have no such luxuries, so they will need to continue to ramp up quickly as we approach opening night just 12 days from now.
Takeaway #3: Don’t cross check guys
In yesterday’s NHL, cross checking was easily the most frequently committed offense that got penalized with the least frequency. Did that make sense? What I’m trying to say is that players got away with cross checking all the time as recently as last season.
The NHL has decided to crack down on cross checking this season, and we’ve already seen it called a handful of times in the Kraken’s three preseason games, including once for each team in Wednesday’s game.
The change evokes memories of the period after the NHL returned from the 2004-05 lockout and decided that the clutch-and-grab era was officially over. Suddenly every stick infraction made through the neutral zone—remember, in the clutch-and-grab era, there was a stick infraction made on every trip through the neutral zone—was penalized.
History has proven that players will eventually adjust and stop cross checking guys in the lower back when they’re already down on the ice or hitting them so hard with the shaft of the stick that they topple over. But that will take time, so for now, expect a lot more of these calls to be made.
Darren Brown is the Chief Content Officer at Sound Of Hockey and the host, producer, and editor of the Sound Of Hockey Podcast. He is an inconsistent beer league goalie who believes that five players have to make a mistake before the puck gets to him. Follow him on Twitter @DarrenFunBrown or email darren@soundofhockey.com.
After things got ugly for the Seattle Kraken last night in Edmonton, they will look to have a preseason version of a bounceback tonight against the Flames in Calgary. The whole team went on this trip to Alberta, so if they didn’t dress for last night’s game, they are dressed tonight, except for Alex Wennberg, whose fiancée just had a baby, and Yanni Gourde and Colin Blackwell who are injured.
Jaden Schwartz, Jared McCann, and Jordan Eberle all slide back in tonight after sitting in Edmonton. That trio made up Seattle’s top line on Sunday in Spokane, and all three were important pieces of the win, with McCann looking dominant at times.
Also back in the lineup are starting goalie Philipp Grubauer and top defenseman Mark Giordano, who will play his first “game” back in Calgary after his 15-year run there came to an end at the Expansion Draft. There should be some conversation happening on the ice between Giordano and his former mates.
Former Flames captain Mark Giordano ahead of the Kraken’s preseason game in Calgary tonight on how he hopes Flames fans remember him. pic.twitter.com/NZwTYMo9aM
We also will see the preseason debuts of Cale Fleury and rookie Jacob Melanson.
The Flames have a decent lineup going, with Matthew Tkachuk, Johnny Gaudreau, and Mikael Backlund all expected to play, among others.
How to watch
This game will again be aired on KONG. We heard that some folks successfully watched Tuesday’s game on the Edmonton Oilers’ website, and the Flames have indicated that they will be streaming tonight’s game on their site. That link does not indicate any restrictions or blackouts, so it’s worth a try if you don’t have a way to get the game locally on TV.
Projected lineup
Here is our projected Kraken lineup. Being that morning skate was in Calgary (and we are not in Calgary), the lines are a bit of a guess, but the players included are correct.
The Kraken are north of the border for the first time tonight for the first of back-to-back games against the Oilers and Flames. Edmonton’s lineup will be a cut above what Seattle saw from Vancouver on Sunday, as Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl will be playing, among many other regular NHLers.
Seattle will have quite a few of their regulars back in the lineup as well, with some youngsters like Ryker Evans and Luke Henman mixing in. Chris Driedger will get at least two periods, according to Dave Hakstol, and Joey Daccord will finish things out. The entire team (except Colin Blackwell, who is day-to-day with a lower-body injury) is on the trip, since many who are not dressed tonight will play tomorrow.
Coach Dave Hakstol on matching up (or not) against McDavid and Draisaitl tonight.
The game is airing on KONG, which is not available on a lot of streaming services. However, it is over the airwaves, so if you don’t have cable but you have an antenna, you should be able to get it.
By the way, we fixed the comment section so it won’t make us approve your comments anymore. So chat away about the game below, but be please be nice to each other!
