Kraken Turn Over Pucks And Game To Lightning

Kraken head coach Lane Lambert couldn’t find much to fault in his team’s latest defeat except for some “catastrophic mistakes” that undid Tuesday night’s performance in a hurry.

Lambert had warned ahead of a 6-2 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning that the Kraken could ill afford to give away goals against one of the NHL’s better teams. But once the puck dropped, the bigger mistakes didn’t take long and again dug Lambert’s team a hole it could not climb out of.

“For the most part, it was a fairly even game,” Lambert said afterward. “Our mistakes were really catastrophic, obviously. Some really, really poor decisions.”

Tampa Bay got a pair of first period goals off turnovers by Jared McCann and then Ben Meyers. The second of those giveaways came just after Tampa Bay had finished fending off a power play and allowed Nikita Kucherov to score his first of three goals on what became a five-point night by him.

Brandon Hagel had slid the puck over to Kucherov on the ensuing 2-on-1 rush to complete a nifty two-way passing play that goalie Philipp Grubauer had no chance on. Hagel would go on to score as well and finished with four points as the Lightning threw the puck around majestically on most of their goals until Kucherov completed his hat trick on an empty netter with Grubauer pulled late.

The Kraken had gotten caught on a line change in going 3-0 down in the opening minute of the second period as Darren Raddych hit Hagel with a long stretch pass that resulted in a 3-on-1 rush and another tap-in for Kucherov.

Bobby McMann and McCann scored a couple after that to get the Kraken on the board and shift the game’s momentum. The Kraken nearly tied it seconds after McCann’s goal when Ryan Winterton got in alone on Andrei Vasilevskiy but was hooked from behind for a penalty before he could get a strong shot off. 

It stayed a one-goal affair until Anthony Cirelli scored just under five minutes into the third period following a Matty Beniers giveaway on an attempted clearance pass from behind the net. Hagel then broke it open for good on the power play in the game’s final five minutes, capping a three-way passing play that gave Grubauer and Kraken defenders whiplash.

“I don’t know if I’ve seen as many tic-tac-toe goals in an NHL hockey game before,” Lambert quipped.

The Kraken finished off a disappointing stretch of playing eight of nine games at Climate Pledge Arena and winning only three of them. But they did manage a victory in the lone road affair in Vancouver and still maintain a hold of the final Western Conference wild card spot with several teams nipping at their heels.

They also now embark on what could be a season defining, six-city road trip across the northern and southern tips of the Eastern time zone and then out west to take on Edmonton in a key Pacific Division clash.

The team’s playoff hopes aren’t done by any stretch, and Lambert liked the way the Kraken played the Lightning evenly for much of this game. At least, the part where they weren’t giving away goals. 

“We’re making some mistakes here that you can’t make,” he said. “I’m not going to say they’re uncharacteristic because, apparently, they aren't at the moment. But you can’t make these mistakes. As for the game itself, we gave them the goals. In my mind anyway. And they buried them.”

The Kraken did show some fortitude in making it a one-goal affair with just more than half a game to go. One key was McMann scoring his fourth goal in three games for his new team off a Tampa Bay turnover that led to Beniers feeding him for a shot from the left circle. 

It came just 10 seconds after Kucherov had made it 3-0 and swung momentum from there.

“I think it shows some resiliency for this group and that we’re able to claw back in games against good teams that are pressing hard,” McMann said.

McMann added he was “proud” of how the Kraken altered their approach after being limited to just four shots in the opening frame. He said Tampa Bay’s relentless forecheck was causing all the turnovers and making it difficult to enter the offensive zone and generate sustained pressure.

“So, it’s just keeping the puck moving and trying to get it behind them,” McMann said. “And then we were trying to work it to the net from there.”

On the second Kraken goal that cut the deficit to 3-2, it was McCann taking the puck out from the side and shifting into the slot before going upstairs for his 18^th goal of the season. But McCann had also coughed the puck up at the blue line on a game-opening goal by Gabe Goncalves, agreeing the team-wide turnovers were “huge” in deciding an otherwise tight contest.

“Yeah, it obviously started with me,” he said.

He added: “We had a good effort in the second period and obviously came back and kind of made it a game. But at the end of the day, yeah, tough turnovers.”

The one consolation after this one, other than San Jose losing to keep the Kraken in their wild card positioning, was that they seemed into the game from the very start other than the turnovers committed. That wasn’t the case last week against a strong Colorado team in which Lambert accused his players of standing around and giving the Avalanche too much respect.

He now hopes the Kraken can show a similar “full team effort” in Nashville on Thursday to start the road trip against a Predators team hoping to catch them in the playoff standings. But that effort, he added, must come without all the giveaways so costly in an otherwise well played loss here. 

“It was a game where if we don’t make these crazy mistakes that we’re making, it was a fairly well played hockey game by our team,” Lambert said. “But these mistakes are really costing us.”