Kraken Must Pay Price For Success In Key Homestand

Sure, it sounds a bit extreme to hear Kraken defenseman Brandon Montour talking up a “make-or-break” homestand before the NHL season is even out of February. 

But there is nothing hyperbolic about the Kraken defender’s analysis. Not this season, which has gifted all teams a condensed schedule built for extremes that test an athlete’s outer limits. 

Montour’s team is now two hapless games into a set of three contests in four nights coming out of the Winter Olympic break. And they aren’t even in March yet, when they’ll play 15 games in 31 days. In other words, blink, the season will be over. 

The Kraken just blinked twice in two nights in Dallas and St. Louis. Do it too many more times, they risk looking back come April and smacking themselves in the forehead. 

That’s why, extreme sounding or not, Montour is probably correct in predicting this upcoming six-game homestand – really like a nine-game homestand with eight contests at Climate Pledge Arena and one interspersed road matchup just up the highway in Vancouver – will likely decide the season. 

Or, at least, whether this season’s playoff dream lives beyond those home games.  

“We’ve got to collect as many wins as we can,” Montour said.

That they do, starting Saturday night at Climate Pledge where they are 14-9-5 and facing a Canucks team with the league’s worst record. Not that records mean much in a parity driven league where a Blues team with the NHL’s second worst point total heading in just used the Kraken for target practice. 

No, the Kraken won’t win merely by showing up. They’ve never managed to do that no matter who they play. And that, if anything, must be their takeaway from these initial two eggs laid in their post-Olympic schedule. 

A common Kraken refrain heard on this “wasted” trip – as Montour termed it -- was that there’s no excuse for their sluggish play after the three-week layoff because all 32 teams are in the same boat. Ah, yes, but not all teams are created equal. 

The Stars, for instance, may have used a depleted lineup Wednesday that was missing standouts Mikko Rantanen and Roope Hintz. But when you’ve got elite scoring talents such as Jason Robertson, Wyatt Johnston and even an exhausted Miro Heiskanen fresh off the Olympics, you can get away with stuff. 

The Kraken don’t have those types of players who can take over games merely by going at three-quarters speed. They win through a combination of hard physical work and strict, disciplined mental attention to detail. None of that is easy, mind you. But it’s the price this team must pay nightly to succeed. 

The past two games looked as if they abandoned that hardscrabble approach and tried finessing their way through; passing the puck around the perimeter without directing it to the net or doing any hard work afterward to get rebounds and tips.  

Or watching goalies Joey Daccord and Philipp Grubauer make save after save in hopes a loose puck will bounce straight to a defender rather than paying the physical price of attempting to move bigger forwards out of the way. 

Kraken head coach Lane Lambert used slightly different verbiage in describing this exact dynamic.  

“We dumped the puck poorly,” he said after the St. Louis game. “We couldn’t establish a forecheck. You don’t get a lot of offensive zone time if you can’t establish a forecheck.”

That’s Lambert code-speak for not working hard enough. Not bringing enough energy. Trying to half-speed it through games and minimizing the requisite bumps and bruises. 

You establish a forecheck by jumping all over guys and hitting them so that they make hasty and costly decisions. The Blues outhit the Kraken 11-2 in Thursday’s opening period alone. Adam Larsson wound up on the opposing bench after one of those St. Louis hits. The Kraken didn’t get their first shot on net until the opening period was halfway done. 

More Lambert code-speak: “This game comes down to winning your individual battles.” 

Translated, it means the Kraken aren’t working hard enough. They also aren’t working smart enough, but that’s another half-speed byproduct. When you’re not all-in energy-wise, you tend not to focus on details, lose valuable positioning and make it tougher to prevail in any battles – be they for pucks in the corner, net front body work, blocking shots, getting to rebounds, clearing them away, and so on. 

As mentioned, there’s a price to pay for the Kraken to succeed at all that. And yeah, it looks far easier watching on television or from a pressbox than doing it on the ice. No one wakes up in the morning hoping to get bruised and battered.  

But that’s how the Kraken win. They show commitment and pay the price. 

The good news is they’ve already done it very regularly. It’s the only reason they’re still in a playoff spot. They did it for weeks at a time before the break and beat some of the league’s best teams at home and away. 

Frankly, they look as if they may have forgotten some of that during the break. Sure, Kraken players may say all the right things before the game. And it’s not like they’ve put in zero effort. But at the NHL level, even putting in three-quarters or 90% effort won’t routinely get it done if you’re the Kraken. 

That’s the reminder you won’t get on some beach during a well-deserved Olympic break. You sometimes need to get back on the ice in an actual game to realize what you thought was total effort is really 50%, 75% or even 90% and getting you embarrassed out there.  

Sure, the price is probably less steep if you’re the Stars, Golden Knights, Wild, or Avalanche. But that’s life. The Kraken price is one paid in blood, sweat, bruises and, unfortunately, guys sometimes even going on injured reserve as was happening down that January pre-break period. 

It’s a price the Kraken didn’t pay the last two games.  

A small sample size, to be sure. And the Kraken have earned our benefit of the doubt in assuming a quick reminder is all that’s needed. 

So, let’s consider them reminded. With two dozen games to go, they don’t have another week or two to get back to their typical commitment level. These upcoming nine games will see them at home and eventually away against the Canucks, while also playing Carolina, facing the Blues again and then Ottawa, Nashville, Colorado, Florida and Tampa Bay.  

Those aren’t exactly easy opponents. But the Kraken, as mentioned, have beaten very good teams already when they remain committed to paying their price for winning.  

And now that they’ve hopefully remembered what that price does and does not look like, they can dispense with this two-game dressed rehearsal and begin their playoff stretch run in full.