Kevin Korchinski picked the puck up at the half boards on a Seattle Thunderbirds power play during a January game against the rival Portland Wintherhawks. He thought about shooting but instead held on to the puck, stickhandled past a defender, and slung a shot from the slot. The puck made it through traffic and was tipped in by one of Korchinski’s teammates for a goal.
It just happened to be ‘Teddy Bear Toss’ night at the acesso Showare Center, an annual charity event were the fans throw stuffed toys onto the ice when the home team scores the first goal. As Korchinksi hugged his teammates, they found themselves in a shower of plush bears, lions, and other animals.
Korchinski’s play was subtle, but it allowed traffic to form in front of the net, and his shot was perfectly placed to allow his teammate to tip it in for a goal.
It’s that kind of offensive acumen that has landed the defenseman on the NHL Central Scouting list as an ‘A’ rated prospect for the 2022 NHL Draft. Korchinski, 17, is the highest-rated prospect from the U.S. Division and is one of the Western Hockey League’s best defensemen.
“I’m excited about my game,” Korchinski says. “It’s improved at both ends and I think I’m more confident. The stuff in the offseason paid off, and I’m kind of seeing the work get rewarded, so it’s been awesome.”
Seattle selected the 6-foot-2 defenseman with the 10th overall pick during the 2019 WHL Bantam Draft and this year he’s a big reason the Thunderbirds are having a resurgent season. Korchinski runs the offense, mans the power play, and logs top minutes for Seattle, which is looking to make a long playoff run this spring.
He benefited from the COVID-shortened WHL schedule last year. With a young roster and no playoffs to worry about, the Thunderbirds gave Korchinski more ice time in elevated situations that a 16-year-old rookie might not normally get.
“It really helped me kind of see the pace of the league,” Korchinski says. “Get to know the guys and just kind of see what I had done offseason and the work I had to put in heading to this year.”
Korchinski is projected to be a prospect that hears his name called sometime in the mid-first round to mid-second round in July.
Kevin Korchinski the player
Nobody is going to confuse Korchinski for a throwback, stay-at-home defenseman. He is every bit the modern defenseman who is an offensive threat, can skate, and move the puck with the best of them.
He’s a power-play quarterback and through 61 games with the Thunderbirds this season he has four goals and 51 assists – 24 of which have come on the power play.
“Definitely my skating, my puck moving ability and just my offensive instincts,” he says, self-scouting his strengths. “I’m always trying to create offense and always trying to put the puck in the back of the net, whether it’s a pass or shot.”
Korchinski’s game has drawn a lot of comparisons to Vegas Golden Knights defenseman Shea Theodore. Those that have seen them both play feel that they have similar skating ability and can take the puck from coast to coast. Theodore looked to score more while Korchinski is happy to set up teammates.
Those comparisons have made it back to Korchinski and he’s just fine with it.
“Yeah, I’ve heard that a lot,” he says. “Being compared to guy like that, it’s unbelievable. He’s one of my favorite players. He’s unbelievable. And just being an ex-Thunderbird, it’s really cool.”
By comparison, Theodore scored 19 goals, 31 assists, for 50 points in 71 games during his draft year with Seattle.
Korchinski is not only looking to hear his name called by an NHL team this summer but wistfully looks at the potential of some day representing Canada at the World Junior Championship, something he certainly is on pace to be in the mix for.
“It’d be an honor to go to the World Juniors,” he says. “ It’s something that I grew up watching… I actually went to it in Montreal in 2015, flew down there with my family. It’s something that I just love. It’s something that every Christmas I watch and my dad’s really passionate about so it would make him really happy if I played.”
One player on the gold medal winning Team Canada that season in Montreal? Theodore.
Like most junior defensemen, Korchinski knows that he has to continue to work on his strength. He says that is the offseason plan, but for now, he wants to help the Thunderbirds go as far as they can in the postseason.
Korchinski on film
On this play, Korchinski shows off his skating, stickhandling, and vision as he circles the zone and finds a wide-open teammate on the doorstep for an easy tap in goal.
It’s not all offensive play however. Here, Korchinski retrieves the puck, gets away from two forecheckers and gets the puck up the ice and out of his own zone.
One of the things I look for in translatable NHL qualities is how a player handles pressure with little time and space. Touch passes. Quick releases. etc. Kevin makes a lot of pressure puzzles seem simple to solve. #2022NHLDraftpic.twitter.com/ME84VdB79M
Korchinski controls the play and can make even-strength play look like a Seattle power play. Here he reads the ice and makes a perfect pass for a goal.
In this clip, he calls for the puck, gets it, walks the blue line to create a lane and shoots. His shot is deflected and Seattle scores on a rebound.
Seattle Thunderbirds defenseman Kevin Korchinski is rocketing up our draft board at @FCHockey (currently 14th and he could go higher) and this clip is a good example as to why
He wants that puck, and then when he gets it he uses his superb footwork to open up a shooting lane pic.twitter.com/Q8esriJDaJ
The city of Los Angeles is known for its mind numbing traffic but perhaps that inspired the Seattle Kraken Monday night. Seattle attacked the Los Angeles Kings net, and goalie Cal Petersen, with traffic all night on their way to a 6-1 rout at Crypto.com Arena.
A game after Petersen was able to settle in and be comfortable in net, Monday he had to deal with bodies, screens, and waves of Kraken taking the puck to the goal. Six different goal scorers found the back of the net for Seattle (21-38-6), which ends its road trip with a 2-1-0 record.
“It’s a key to this game,” Yanni Gourde said. “If you want to score goals, you got to go to the paint, you got to be determined to go there and create chances… you have to do that in this league to have success. And eventually you get bounces, and they go in for you.”
Lost in all the scoring was a 36-save night for Chris Driedger who made his first start since March 10.
“I felt pretty good, felt patient,” Driedger said. “Just felt like I was in good position for the point shots and I got a couple of good sticks on those and just felt like I was meeting it at the top of the crease. I felt like myself.”
Petersen made 32 saves for the Kings (35-23-9), who lost ground to the Calgary Flames for the Pacific Division lead.
Kraken get early jump
During Saturday’s loss to the Kings, the Kraken struggled in the first period. They corrected that on Monday and scored 14 seconds into the game when Ryan Donato’s wrap around chance was stopped but Alex Wennberg followed up and potted the rebound to make it 1-0.
“We’ve gotten off to some good starts, we didn’t the other night,” Kraken coach Dave Hakstol said. “This time of year, it’s hard to play from behind. It’s tough to play from behind and dig out of a hole. We earned that lead tonight. It’s an important way to start the game, especially coming off the loss two nights ago.”
The Kings tied the game 1-1 at 6:23 on a power-play goal from Arthur Kaliyev, but it was all Kraken after that.
At 8:24, the Kraken went ahead 2-1 when Adam Larsson flung a puck through traffic for his career-best sixth of the season.
“Larsson’s goal, if you look at it the second goal, we have great net presence on the flash screen coming through their goaltender’s eyes,” Hakstol said.
Victor Rask scored his first as a Kraken to make it 3-1 at 13:55 of the second period. It was another goal scored through traffic after Rask raced into the zone, put on the breaks, and fired a shot to score his first since Jan 14.
“We had a guy come in late on that play that I thought he might slide right to the middle of the rink but he held it,” Hakstol said. “The real key is the net front presence on those on those goals. We real good net front presence with guys stopping at the top of the blue paint.”
Jordan Eberle extended the lead with a breakaway goal in the third period. Seattle then made it 5-1 on a Jared McCann goal when he and Morgan Geekie created a 2-on-1 break down low.
Daniel Sprong would score his third goal since joining the Kraken at 12:13 of the third when his shot rebounded off Petersen and then hit Jordan Spence in the face before falling in the net.
“It was a pretty complete effort. everybody chipped in,” Hakstol said. “Things went right for us offensively, but I felt like we earned it. We got some breaks late in this game, but we earned everything in the first 35 minutes of this hockey game. We played hard with the puck, we put some miles on them defensively and that has a way of paying off later in games and it did tonight.”
Tentacle Tales
+ Vince Dunn had two assists and has eight in his last seven games.
+ Sprong became the first Kraken to score in each of his first three games with the team.
+ Karson Kuhlman assisted on Rask’s goal for his first point as a member of the Kraken.
+ Wennberg’s goal was the fastest goal to start a game in Kraken history.
+ Kings coach Todd McLellan coached his 1,000th career NHL game. He previously coached the San Jose Sharks and the Edmonton Oilers.
Along with the rest of the Kraken community, Sound Of Hockey was abuzz when the team announced that Jared McCann had signed a five-year extension worth $25 million last week. McCann is the team’s leading goal scorer and one of a small handful of players young enough and skilled enough to bridge the Kraken from the current roster to whatever comes next.
We had debated potential McCann contracts internally just days earlier after Ron Francis indicated the team would get something done with McCann one way or another. When the contract came down on March 8, we all agreed that this was a good deal for the team, but disagreed a bit on whether there was anything truly surprising about it. As recounted on the SOH podcast, Darren Brown appropriately took a victory lap for his close contract prediction. Good job, Darren. Andy Eide and John Barr indicated the deal was in the neighborhood of expected term and value for the player. But I thought the deal was incredibly team friendly.
My reaction was largely based on my projection of the value that Jared McCann brings to the team. Per TopDownHockey’s WAR statistic, McCann has been the 23rd most valuable skater in the NHL since the beginning of last season. (If you’re curious to read more about TopDownHockey’s WAR stat, dive in here.) Even if that metric is a bit optimistic on McCann, there is no denying his goal scoring touch is tremendous. And at 26 years old, he should have several productive years in front of him.
I also thought I understood McCann’s negotiating leverage. McCann was scheduled to be a restricted free agent this summer, meaning that he was almost certain to return to Seattle on a new contract of some kind. He could only sign with a different team on an offer sheet, and offer sheets are exceedingly rare in hockey due to the draft pick compensation involved—and, you know, the collusion.
But McCann was due for unrestricted status in the summer of 2023, which in my mind should have given his camp significant clout to seek a long-term, big-money deal or a one- or two-year bridge deal that would have gotten him to UFA status quickly.
Given that McCann’s contract didn’t fit my expectations, I wanted to dig into the recent precedent for McCann’s deal by examining contracts signed by comparable players with one year left to unrestricted free agency. After analyzing these comparables, I will return to the question of whether this is a fair and expected deal, or the best contract the Kraken have signed, by far.
Methodology
I gathered contract information from CapFriendly. At the time Jared McCann signed his contract, he had played in 403 games and amassed 188 points. Using CapFriendly’s contract comparable tool, I was able to compile a long list of contracts signed by players as restricted free agents with similar totals in games played and points at the time of signing.
From this long list I further filtered the results manually. Most importantly, I limited the results to only those contracts signed beginning with the player’s last RFA year. In other words, when the contract was signed, the player had only one more season left to unrestricted status.
Second, I included only contracts signed for the 2010-11 season to the present. I chose this limiting factor arbitrarily with the goal of limiting the sample to a reasonable recent time period in which point production is roughly similar.
Third, I calculated the points-per-game production of this list of players and further reduced the sample to only those players whose production matched Jared McCann’s scoring production with .1 points per game. Put differently, assuming a full season of games played, I limited the sample to players who had averaged approximately eight points per season more or less that McCann has averaged.
For each of these contracts, CapFriendly supplied not only the dollar average annual value (AAV) of the deal, but also the percentage of the salary cap the AAV represented at the time the deal was signed. Using this percentage, I was able to adjust these contracts into a present value by multiplying the percentage by the current NHL salary cap ($82 million). This facilitates a fairer, direct comparison to McCann’s deal. I refer to this figure as the “cap-adjusted AAV” below.
Reviewing the comparable contracts
The narrowing process described above yielded 13 comparable contracts.
A few trends and takeaways from this group of player contracts:
More than half of the comparable negotiations resulted in contracts of two years or shorter
Of the 13 comparable contracts, four were one-year deals, meaning that the team did not buy out any UFA years. Three were two-year deals, meaning that the team was able to secure only one UFA year.
The collective bargaining agreement limits a player to restricted free agency with his existing team through all of his early prime years. (See an explainer on the NHL’s free agency rules here.) This status depresses the player’s salary because he is not able to really shop his services to the entire league. Naturally, a player gains greater leverage to maximize his salary when he is unrestricted.
For a player like McCann heading into his final RFA year without an existing long-term deal, a short deal has the advantage of getting the player into unrestricted free agency when he’s still in his mid-to-late 20’s, the prime range for scoring the biggest free-agent payday. There was a strong preference in McCann’s comparable group for this short-term approach, likely because any longer terms offered weren’t enticing enough to forego the chance to become a UFA.
Teams needed to pay to increase the term
Due to the dynamic described above, players and teams were more willing to settle on a lower AAV on a short-term deal. Conversely, to secure a player long term, the team needed to commit to a higher AAV. This is because a longer-term deal would mean that the player could not become an unrestricted free agent until he was well north of 30 years old.
Data from CapFriendly; chart by DeepSeaHockey
The data suggests that while the team and McCann may have been able to settle on a sub-$4 million, one-year contract, it should have required $6 million AAV or more to get the longest terms available under the CBA.
Only one comparable negotiation resulted in a deal longer than McCann’s five-year term
Of the six contracts longer than two years, five of the negotiations settled on a three-to-five-year term. Only one contract broke that mold. Las Vegas and William Karlsson agreed to an eight-year maximum-length deal starting in the 2019-20 season. That said, it may be fair to characterize that particular negotiation as an outlier. (More on Karlsson’s unique circumstances below.)
Jared McCann’s contract is below market value relative to the comparable group
Based on the precedent set by comparable players in comparable circumstances, McCann should have expected more than $5.5 million AAV on a five-year term contract. The data further suggests that, absent a deal in that neighborhood, McCann would have been well justified to reject any offers beyond a one-or-two-year term in order to test unrestricted free agency sooner.
Data from CapFriendly; chart by DeepSeaHockey
The fact that the Kraken got a full five-year term on a below-expected AAV is fairly surprising. At the time of signing, McCann’s contract is projected to provide the most surplus contract value for the team versus market expectation of any player in this data set, narrowly edging Tyler Kennedy’s undervalued two-year contract. (More on Kennedy’s unique case below.)
Analyzing notable comparable contracts
While the above analysis fairly supports the conclusion that McCann’s contract is team friendly, the comparables did not follow a particularly tight correlation along the trend line (r squared ~ .62). So, I dug further into each of the comparable players to see what, if anything, could be learned. After all, not all players with similar point-per-game totals hold the same value, particularly when those players are spread across more than a decade of league play.
Jared McCann (403 games played; 188 points; 5 x $5 m AAV in 2022 at age 26)
McCann’s point totals have been trending up with increased playing time opportunity, and he has established himself over the last three years as a highly efficient goal scorer. With strong play driving analytics too, his total contributions to his team are understated by his raw point totals.
Brock Nelson (398 gp; 188 pts; 1 x $4.25 m AAV in 2018 at age 26; $4.387 m adj AAV)
Islanders forward Brock Nelson was McCann’s closest point production comparable. Nelson had logged an identical number of points as McCann (188) in five fewer games played when Nelson signed a contract in summer, 2018, before his final RFA year. But digging deeper into Nelson’s offensive, defensive, and special teams play-driving analytics, his other play doesn’t match McCann’s contributions.
Nelson submitted for arbitration and ultimately settled with the Islanders on a one-year, $4.25 million deal. The next year, without any significant uptick in play, Nelson was able to leverage his pending unrestricted status into a further six-year, $6 million AAV contract from the Islanders before free agency.
Since McCann is a better player, Nelson’s monetary result (a total of $40.25 million over seven years) was likely there for McCann had he pursued it. On the other hand, Nelson carried the risk of injury and performance decline in the 2018-19 season. There’s no guarantee McCann would have been so fortunate should he have opted for a short-term deal.
Andre Burakovsky (386 gp; 190 pts; 2 x $4.9 m AAV in 2020 at age 25; $4.928 adj AAV)
Burakovsky was McCann’s fifth closest comparable on a point production basis, but when digging into his analytics, Burakovsky has emerged for me as McCann’s most similar and interesting comp for several reasons.
Like McCann, his underlying play-driving and efficiency analytics are strong. Burakovsky mildly outperforms McCann as an offensive finisher but lags behind the Kraken forward as a defender. All told, his value and leverage at the negotiating table in 2020 was almost identical to McCann’s position in 2022.
Burakovsky wielded this leverage differently than McCann. He negotiated to a virtually identical AAV but on a two-year term. In other words, Burakovsky sold only one UFA year, whereas McCann sold four. Burkaovsky favored flexibility and upside; McCann opted for certainty.
Now Burakovsky is slated to be a sought-after free agent in the 2022 unrestricted free agent class at 27 years old. He is poised to strike with a big-value, long-term deal.
This was the precedent for McCann to “bet on himself” and recoup as much of his value as possible. Again, had McCann gone this way, he would have carried some risk of career-altering or career-ending injury. But, assuming he emerged relatively healthy, McCann was likely to find a taker that would match or surpass his current $5 million AAV—even if his play slipped some.
By committing to the Kraken early instead of following the similar path set by Burakovsky, McCann put a lot of expected value in Seattle’s pocket. Just how much? We’ll get a better sense when we see Burakovsky’s 2022 free-agent deal.
Tomas Tatar (345 gp; 194 pts; 4 x $5.3 m in 2017 at age 26; $5.797 adj AAV)
Superficially, Tomas Tatar was the weakest comparable for McCann in the group, having recorded more points than McCann in approximately 60 fewer games played. But Tatar’s weaker underlying play-driving analytics indicate a player of similar overall value to McCann.
Also like McCann, Tatar opted for medium-term deal, signing for four years. But Tatar landed a much stronger deal, returning only slightly less total cash than McCann over four years rather than McCann’s five.
Tyler Kennedy (372 gp; 168 pts; 2 x $2.35 m in 2013 at age 26; $2.993 adj AAV)
Kennedy was McCann’s third closest point production comparable when he signed. When Kennedy was entering his final RFA year in 2013 at age 26, he had a 20-goal season under his belt, and his underlying analytics were solid, even if trending downwards over the previous two years.
Pittsburgh traded Kennedy to San Jose in June 2013, and Kennedy signed perhaps the weakest deal among the comparable group: a two-year, $2.35 million AAV contract (approximately $3 million AAV on a cap-adjusted basis). And while the deal was cheap and “team friendly,” Kennedy’s on ice performance cratered. He would sign just one more minimum contract in 2015 before exiting the league entirely at 29 years old.
The case of Tyler Kennedy is certainly an outlier in McCann’s comparable group. But it is also a cautionary tale for a player choosing to “bet on himself” in his mid-20’s at the end of restricted free agency. Sometimes these bets pay off, as with Brock Nelson and others. But without the long-term guarantee, those bets can go bust. Kennedy busted and unfortunately never truly monetized the value he delivered to the Penguins in his early 20’s.
William Karlsson (347 gp; 184 pts; 8 x $5.9 m in 2019 at age 26; $5.937 m adj AAV)
Moving from one extreme to the other, we arrive at the well-documented case of William Karlsson. A middling player in Columbus, Karlsson improbably broke out into superstardom after being selected in the Expansion Draft by the Vegas Golden Knights. Karlsson scored 43 goals in the 2017-18 season after amassing just 18 total across his first three seasons in the league. After he followed that up with a solid 24-goal performance in 2018-19, Karlsson approached the negotiating table in the summer of 2019 just one year from unrestricted free agency with significant bargaining power. He maximized that leverage to obtain an eight-year, maximum-term deal, carrying a $5.9 million AAV.
Karlsson’s late blooming goal production is unique. He no doubt leveraged his 40-goal campaign and his 67 total goals over two years to achieve a result that McCann could not. I’m confident that the Kraken would have bristled if McCann’s camp raised Karlsson’s contract as a comparable. But when checking below the hood, McCann in 2022 is not far off from the player Karlsson was in 2019.
An eight-year term was unrealistic for McCann. No other comparable player had achieved more than a five-year term. But there is a reasonable argument that McCann had the second strongest overall value profile in this sample behind Karlsson. For that reason, I do not think it would have been unreasonable for McCann to insist on a six-or-seven-year term at a comparable cap-adjusted AAV to Karlsson’s deal.
Cap-adjusted five-year earnings for McCann’s comparables
One other way to look at McCann’s contract is to consider what comparable players earned, in cap-adjusted terms, over the same five-year term to which McCann just committed.
Of the thirteen comparable contract situations, three (Burkavosky, Tierney, and Athanasiou) are scheduled for unrestricted free agency this offseason and have not yet signed new deals. Thus, it is still uncertain what these players will earn over a full five-year term.
Of the ten other contracts, six returned slightly more cap-adjusted value to the player than McCann’s five-year, $25 million deal. Three players earned slightly less cap-adjusted value than McCann. And, one player, Tyler Kennedy, was out of the league three years after his RFA contract and earned significantly less than McCann.
Note: Shaded cells represent RFA deal signed in the last year before UFA status; unshaded cells are UFA contract years
Refocusing on Jared McCann’s contract
After working through these comparable contracts, it’s fair to say I had set my sights too high for McCann when I argued to John, Darren, and Andy a few days before McCann’s signing that the Kraken forward shouldn’t accept any offer below $6 million AAV or any offer in the three-to-five-year term range. Players in his point production range do not regularly secure such premium contracts before unrestricted free agency. Based on his significant skillset beyond his point production, McCann and his team could have argued for a two-year $6 million AAV short-term deal or a six-year $6.5 million AAV long-term deal. But the historical precedent was not there.
That said, we can be confident in the conclusion that Jared McCann’s contract is quite team friendly relative to his contract comparables, both in term and AAV. The Kraken did well to secure a building block player who wanted to stay in Seattle on a very favorable contract for the club. The McCann deal isthe best contract the team has ever signed.
It was closer than it needed to be, but Philipp Grubauer put the Kraken on his back and ended their five-game road trip with a 4-3 shootout win against the Montreal Canadiens at the Bell Centre on Saturday.
Grubauer stopped 15 shots early and helped Seattle build a 3-1 lead heading into the third period.
He had the Kraken up 3-2 with time winding down and the Canadiens net empty. Then it happened. Adam Larsson attempted to knock away a puck from the Seattle net. He swung his stick and deflected it past Grubauer for a game-tying own goal at 17:48 to send the game into overtime.
“Shit happens, you know, it’s hockey,” Jared McCann said. “Sorry about my language. But, it’s just the way it goes, [Larsson] tried to make a play and everybody saw that so we were there for him. He’s done a lot of great things for us this year, so we just stuck with him. It was great to get the win for him.”
Seattle leaned on its goalie for four more saves in overtime, including a big-time glove save from in close.
“Reaction save for sure,” Grubauer said. “Not the ideal situation in, in overtime, to give that shot up but I made the save and we won the face off and went up the other way.”
Neither team scored in overtime and Grubauer would be tasked with shutting down seven shootout attempts before finally Marcus Johansson won it by lifting a backhand over Montreal goalie Sam Montembeault for the win.
“I wasn’t even watching on JoJo’s goal,” Grubauer said. “I had my head down… So, I don’t even know what he did. But he scored so I guess it was a nice move.”
Grubauer ended the night with 30 saves to send the Kraken (18-37-6) home on a happy note with a 1-3-1 record on the trip. Johansson had two assists to surpass 400 career points.
Montembeault stopped 32 shots and Alexander Romanov had a goal and an assist for the Canadiens (15-35-8), who failed to make up ground on the Kraken and pull out of the league’s basement.
“It was a pretty even hockey game and there was a lot of pace to it,” Kraken coach Dave Hakstol said. “At the end of the day there was pretty good goaltending at both ends of the rink, good opportunities at both ends of the rink, and it’s a good way for us to finish out the road trip. It’s tough to give up the lead but I didn’t dislike the way we played in the third. They played well and they had a good push. But, you know, I didn’t feel like we had any panic to our game at all.”
Kraken build lead early
Gourde put the Kraken on the board with a shorthanded goal at 9:26 of the first period to make it 1-0. The Canadiens mishandled the puck coming out from behind their net and Gourde tapped in a loose puck for his 13th of the year.
Moments later, on the same penalty kill, Mason Appleton snapped a shot for another shorthanded goal, but the play was challenged and the goal was disallowed as Appleton was offside. It’s the second straight game Appleton has lost a goal to an offside challenge.
Montreal evened the score 1-1 at 14:50 in the first period after a scramble in the Seattle end put the puck on Michael Pezzetta’s stick in the slot. He fired and scored.
Ryan Donato gave the Kraken a 2-1 lead at 16:42 in the first when he scored after Johansson’s initial shot rebounded hard off the boards. It was the second straight game scoring for Donato.
Seattle extended its lead to 3-1 at 15:05 of the second period on a Jared McCann power-play goal. Johansson drove the puck behind the Montreal net and flung a perfect pass to McCann in the high slot where he would bury his team leading 23rd of the season and second in two games.
With the tally, McCann equaled his career high in points with 35 and power-play goals in a season with eight.
Romanov cut the lead to 3-2 at 1:04 of the third period with a point shot after another big rebound off the end boards.
Special teams big for Kraken
At the start of the road trip, Seattle’s special teams were a struggle. The power play was not converting, and they gave up a host of power play goals against. At one point they had allowed seven out of 11 on the penalty kill.
The Kraken took too many penalties Saturday, giving the Canadiens six looks, but Seattle killed them all off and scored a shorthanded goal.
“Guys were good on the PK and they got their looks and believe me that’s where you know your best PKer has to be the guy in the pipes and Grubi did a really good job there,” Hakstol said. “We found a way to get a shorty. That another big point of the hockey game.”
Tentacle Tales
+ Joonas Donskoi and Alex Wennberg missed the game due to injury. Donskoi had been placed on the injured reserve list Friday with an upper body injury.
+ Kole Lind was recalled from Charlotte of the American Hockey League. He started on the second line, but ultimately played just over 11 minutes in this special teams heavy game.
+ Morgan Geekie had an assist Saturday giving him one in each of the past two games.
+ The Kraken will return to Climate Pledge Arena for a game against the Tampa Bay Lightning on Wednesday.
