Kraken Doomed By Poor Start Against NHL’s Best

Kraken captain Jordan Eberle took up what’s becoming an all-too-familiar postgame pose at his locker and described his team needing to take its urgency level several notches higher.

The Colorado Avalanche had scored three first period goals Thursday night to hand Eberle’s team a 5-1 loss that saw them serenaded with boos by the opening intermission and knocked out of their Western Conference playoff positioning. Eberle said his team realize it's in a playoff battle and can’t afford to ignore defensive structure and systems and dig itself into an Avalanche against the NHL’s top squad that ends a game before it’s even really begun.

“I don’t know if we’re hesitant or we’re nervous,” Eberle said. “Obviously, they’re a good team over there so maybe you’re sitting back. But at the end of the day, you can’t do that. Maybe we wake up tomorrow and we’re out of the playoffs and maybe we get a little bit of urgency here, understand the situation.”

That the Kraken went on to outshoot the Avalanche 21-11 the final two periods did little to prevent the home side from dropping a fourth straight game at Climate Pledge Arena to end their homestand 2-4-0. As Eberle mentioned, the loss also knocked the Kraken a point behind San Jose for the second and final Western Conference wild card spot after the Sharks defeated Boston.

Ryker Evans had the first and only Kraken goal in that middle frame, but only after Martin Necas, Nathan MacKinnon and Nicolas Roy scored in a first period in which Colorado outshot the home team 15-8. Eberle contributed to the third Colorado goal by taking a late double minor for high sticking that enabled Roy to score in the final two minutes on the power play.

Joey Daccord was pulled at intermission and Philipp Grubauer inserted in his place. Daccord couldn’t be faulted on any of the goals as the Avalanche passed the puck around at will to a plethora of open men. But the netminder was yanked anyway, mainly to light a fire under his team – and the ploy worked as the Kraken in the second period looked nothing like they had the opening 20 minutes.

Evans scored his goal shorthanded on a nice Chandler Stephenson set-up in the left circle with about six minutes to go in the frame after the Avalanche needed more than half the period to register their first shot. 

But any hope of the Kraken carrying that momentum much further ended when newly acquired Avalanche trade deadline pickup Nazem Kadri deflected home a Sam Malinski point shot to restore the three-goal margin. Joel Kiviranta added a fifth Colorado marker on a deflected third period shot with just more than seven minutes to play.

“In this time period you’re pushing for the playoffs, so you don’t really have time to feel sorry for yourself,” said Stephenson, who’d passed the puck to Evans cruising through the left circle before watching him wrist it over the glove of goalie Scott Wedgewood. “When you’re early on in the year or at the halfway point, you’re just trying to figure things out. But right now, we’re trying to get in and so is everybody else. You see how tight it is and so I think there’s no reason we shouldn’t be playing at our best and our hardest every night.”

The Kraken indeed remain very much in the playoff mix both within the Western Conference and Pacific Division with 18 games to go. But that’s made it all the more frustrating for head coach Lane Lambert to watch games like this where his team seemed like two completely different squads from the second period onward.

Lambert said his team “dipped our toe in the water to see what it was all going to be about” in the boo-inducing opening period.

“I can’t explain it,” he said. “Unacceptable.”

But Lambert then did a very good job of explaining it when asked whether he thought the tentative display was his team showing the Avalanche too much respect.

“Yeah, I do,” he said. “And my biggest issue with the first period is the goals that they scored are just systematical breakdowns that, you know, we’ve played over 60 games this year. We need to have poise and composure. We’re doing things that are absolutely mind boggling to me and it’s got to stop.”

Lambert admitted the team’s confidence and swagger was “low” and the only way to fix that is to start doing things properly . 

“You’ve got to do the right things,” he said. “You’ve got to play the game the right way, and you’ve got to stop making mistakes that are avoidable. And certainly, you have to correct them.”

The Kraken have a chance to do that Saturday in Vancouver in a game against the team with far and away the NHL’s worst record. They’ll play in front of about 500 of their Kraken season ticket members making the trip as part of a team-offered excursion. Those fans will also be hoping to see newly acquired forward Bobby McMann in the lineup for the first time if his immigration paperwork gets cleared in time. 

McMann should help give the Kraken a boost they can use. But regardless, team captain Eberle agreed with his coach the rest of the team needs to play better. 

“I have confidence in this group,” Eberle said. “We’ve had some ups and downs – maybe bigger ups and bigger downs than we’ve had maybe in most seasons. But we’ve dug ourselves out. And I think that’s the message. We can do it again.”