Huge Win By Disciplined Kraken To End Road Trip

WINNIPEG, Manitoba – It was in the waning minutes of the second period that exasperated fans here paid Jaden Schwartz and his Kraken teammates the ultimate compliment by voicing their displeasure at a frustrated home squad.

The Winnipeg Jets are one of the NHL’s best and yet the Kraken, at the point the audible fan critiques started coming, had them hemmed inside their own zone to where they could barely even touch the puck. It was indicative of the tight, disciplined game played by the Kraken throughout Thursday night’s 3-0 victory that saw Schwartz score twice to help finish a grueling road trip on the most positive of notes.

“They’re good in this rink – they’ve got a good home record,” Schwartz, when asked about the crowd’s frustration, said of a Jets team that hadn’t been blanked at Canada Life Centre since January 2024. “So, we did a good job, I thought, of moving our feet and playing together. The defensemen were involved for one another and so, all around, we just put pressure on them.”

The Kraken opened the game laying on a heavy forechecking approach in the offensive end that never really relented. Schwartz finally opened the scoring just under three minutes into the middle period, pouncing on a long net front rebound of an initial Shane Wright shot and powering it past goalie Connor Hellebuyck.

It was the only goal anybody would score all game until Schwartz added his second of the night and team-leading fifth of the season into an empty net with under two minutes to go. Jordan Eberle then scored another empty netter to help the Kraken finish the trip 2-2-2.

Kraken goalie Joey Daccord stopped all 32 shots faced, some of the better chances against him coming in the final period for a Jets team left largely incapacitated by the Kraken approach the opening 40 minutes.

When the Jets finally managed to gain control of a puck in the Kraken end late in the middle frame, one leather-lunged arena patron bellowed: “Get in the slot! There’s no one in front!” Indeed, the Jets had briefly gained possession behind the goal, but the net front area had nothing but Kraken defenders in it -- preventing Winnipeg from creating any kind of scoring threat.

The disenchanted Canadian hockey aficionados would occasionally yell, “Let’s go! Play Jets hockey!” at a team quite obviously playing nothing resembling what anyone in the stands is used to. And that was largely the Kraken’s doing.

“I thought we just did a lot of little things right today,” Schwartz said. “We checked hard – they’ve got a lot of skill over there. So, we were tight. We were moving our feet. Our D-men were good with gaps and were defending hard in our own end and letting Joey (Daccord) see the puck. And we had good shifts in the offensive zone.”

If there’s one thing the Kraken will no-doubt take from this six-city road swing against mostly playoff teams from last spring, it’s that the tight-checking, defensive system used by coach Lane Lambert to generate offense out of the back end can actually work against the NHL’s finest squads.

In fact, given how injuries risked derailing the trip midway through, the Kraken did well to upend a Jets team that had won five in a row. They benefitted from the return of Mason Marchment, who missed the prior game in Washington with a lower body injury and played a key role in the heavy forecheck established here in the early going.

The Kraken came in having only beaten the Jets twice in a dozen games all-time, going 2-6-4 overall. They also had a five-game winless stretch against them, going 0-3-2 since March 2024.

Winnipeg did have a great chance to score on Daccord with just seconds to play in the first period, but a deflected Josh Morrissey shot from the high slot hit the crossbar and then came back down right on the goal line without crossing it. Daccord swiped the puck out of his crease but then Mark Scheifele got to it and fired a shot point-blank that the goalie snared.

“I didn’t see the deflection, and I just heard it hit the crossbar,” Daccord said. “So, I just turned around and I watched it go off the bar and then land basically right on the line and then it’s a coin flip as to which way it’s going to go.

“It came towards me, and I just swiped it out (of the crease), turned around and then Scheifele shot it right into my glove.”

But such breaks tend to bounce a team’s way when playing solid hockey. Daccord seemed to channel his inner Lambert, borrowing a phrase from the coach about how “attention to detail” by the Kraken – shot blocking, sticks deflecting pucks, zone clearances -- was at its finest when the Jets mounted a huge push the final 10 minutes.

“It’s two points either way but it’s a big swing,” Daccord said of the importance of taking this trip finale. “I would say more mentally than anything. When you look at the road trip you can kind of say it’s a success. I’d say that’s a pretty good road trip. It’s early on in the year and we’ve played six of our eight games on the road. It’s tough.”

The Kraken had to cross the U.S.-Canada border a third time on this trip just to get here and a fourth time flying home to Seattle immediately after the game.

Winning in Toronto last weekend and snagging points for prior overtime and shootout losses in Montreal and Ottawa also bought some cushion for when the injury toll began mounting. After a regulation loss in Philadelphia on Monday, coach Lambert had not been pleased with an ensuing Tuesday defeat in Washington -- saying afterward he expected far more from his team against the Jets.

“Obviously, it’s nice to win but for me it was about the level of battle, the level of compete and the buy-in to playing our way in the structure,” Lambert said after the win here. “I talked about the fact that we got away from that a little bit in Washington. And give our guys credit. They did a great job. They got the message and they stuck together and they won as a team.”

A team that new Kraken scoring leader Schwartz feels is full value for the split-record trip that bolstered their season mark to 4-2-2.

“We knew with a win here it makes it a pretty good road trip,” Schwartz said. “Obviously, we didn’t win every game. It could have been better at times, but we were playing in some tough buildings. A lot of games in a short amount of days and a lot of travel.”