Instead, the Stars, missing key players and with others still somewhat jet-lagged from Winter Olympics play, took a page straight out of Kraken Hockey 101. Instead of complex passing schemes while undermanned, they simplified their game, put pucks to the net on Daccord and had a bunch of them deflected in.
By the time Ryker Evans buried a slap shot behind backup Dallas goalie Casey DeSmith with 13 minutes to go, his team was already down four and showing no real threat of a comeback.
Wyatt Johnston scored a pair of goals for Dallas while Matt Duchene and Sam Steel had the others as the Stars got bodies to the Kraken net early and often. The game turned decisively at the 5:35 mark of the second when Sam Steel, his team already ahead by two, leaped on a loose puck in the crease and jammed it past Daccord.
The Kraken took a coin-flip try at challenging for goaltender interference, but the goal stood and Johnston would tip home a Miro Heiskanen point shot just 39 seconds later during a power play aftervthe resulting delay of game penalty assessed the visitors.
“They executed better than we did,” Eberle said. “They got to the inside and found a way to tip some pucks in.”
The Kraken didn’t get a shot on goal until seven minutes into the contest and had only three by period’s end despite two power play chances in which they did little except pass the puck around well in the opposing end.
Kraken head coach Lane Lambert lamented his team’s “pass-first mentality” in those situations and others, noting that a couple of Stars goals came on shots initially going wide of the net. Lambert wasn’t buying a suggestion his team was passing up on doing the same because of an inability to create net front traffic of their own.
“Shots create shots, shots create traffic,” he said. “We had opportunities to shoot the puck and we didn’t. That’s just the bottom line.”
Lambert also suggested his defenders needed to do a better job of boxing out Dallas forwards and “getting in shot lanes” to block incoming pucks.
“Overall, as a whole, the entire game was disappointing for me,” he said. “As I said, not good enough. They’re a very good hockey team over there and we needed to be a lot better than we were.”
It was the Stars who entered the game decidedly more shorthanded due mainly to the Winter Olympics. Dallas was without Team Finland star forwards Mikko Rantanen and Roope Hintz, out due to a lower body injury and illness respectively.
They also had No. 1 goalie Jake Oettinger serving as DeSmith’s backup for the night due to his getting back to Dallas on Tuesday following Team USA’s gold medal win two days prior. Add the fact that Dallas defender Thomas Harley played for Canada on Sunday, while Finnish defenders Heiskanen and Esa Lindell won bronze medals on Saturday and the Stars were not exactly their typical Western Conference powerhouse selves.
The Kraken played Eeli Tolvanen after his bronze medal performance for Finland, but Kaapo Kakko got the night off.
DeSmith seemed poised to hand the Kraken their first shutout loss in nearly three months until Evans scored after a goalmouth scramble – one of the few times the Kraken caused any net front chaos – left the netminder down and out for the left circle shot. The goaltending swap of DeSmith instead of longtime Kraken nemesis Oettinger didn’t exactly benefit as much as hoped. DeSmith had actually entered with a stellar 4-1 lifetime record of his own against the Kraken with a 1.00 goals against average and .964 save percentage and wasn’t really tested in this game before his team put things out of reach.
“We were just passing up shots,” Evans said. “We just needed to get more pucks to the net and get a greasy one. We were just trying to make a fancy play or just pass it. We just needed to get it to the net.”
