Kraken Have Been Cooking At Home

Home is where the Kraken have had plenty of collective heart lately, and it’s been a key boost as they continue an early-season surge.

They are off to their best start in franchise history overall and at Climate Pledge Arena, where they remain unbeaten in regulation at 3-0-1 with a chance to further that in three upcoming games ahead of heading back on the road. Prior to winning their third home game on Oct. 25, the earliest they’d done that was Nov. 4 of their 2021-22 expansion campaign, and it subsequently took them until the Nov. 12-17 range to manage their first three Climate Pledge victories in each of the next three seasons.

“We’ve been inconsistent,” Kraken defenseman Vince Dunn said of the team’s past home play. “We know our home record needs to be better. And we know we’ll always have the crowd to back us up to do it.

“So, we want to make this a hard place to play.”

The Kraken take a 5-2-3 overall mark into Saturday night’s contest against the New York Rangers, bolstered by home victories over Vegas, Edmonton, and Anaheim squads currently sporting winning records.

Prior to this season, the Kraken were 71-75-18 at Climate Pledge for a .976 home points percentage that’s only marginally better than their 71-78-15 mark and .957 points percentage on the road.

Teams count on having far better home records to boost overall totals. The Kraken know this and made a significant logistical change this season to better their chances of prevailing at home.

They’d held their pregame morning skates at Climate Pledge their first season, largely due to logistics surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. In the following seasons, though, the game day skates took place at the Kraken Community Iceplex. That created a situation where visiting teams would often get a better pregame feel for the Climate Pledge ice than the Kraken did.

So, this season, they’ve switched the pregame skates back to Climate Pledge.

“I think it’s important,” Kraken head coach Lane Lambert said of the switch. “You know, there’s practice day and then there’s game day. There’s a different feel to both days. So, to come over here, I think it’s important to skate on your ice in the morning and certainly get prepared for that at night.

“The ice is different here than it is over at the practice rink, so it’s important to just kind of get that feel.”

Kraken captain Jordan Eberle was ready to try anything to get the team rolling at home.

“I like it,” he said. “It gives you an opportunity to play at the rink where you’re going to play the next night. We’re just trying to find a way to improve anywhere. We’re trying to find an edge in any aspect.”

Eberle said the commute to either rink makes little difference for most players. But the “opportunity to get used to the ice and how it’s going to be that night in the building you play in” made too much sense not to try.

Time will tell whether the Kraken can significantly improve at home overall, but the early points percentage of 1.75 in the small four-game sample size is a good place to start. It also helps that the teams they’ve beaten at home – and the Montreal squad they lost to in overtime last Tuesday night – have a combined 24-7-11 record this season, with three of them having played in last spring’s playoffs.

In other words, there’s less of a chance this start is some short-term anomaly that a soft schedule would typically bring about.

The upcoming opposition Rangers, the Chicago Blackhawks, and the San Jose Sharks, offer less-hyped squads than the ones that have already played here. On paper, it would appear to offer the Kraken a chance to seriously pad the home mark.

Which is exactly the type of thinking “trap” the Kraken must avoid. And you don’t need to look much further than their recent home record against the Sharks to figure that out.

The Kraken have dropped two of the past three games against San Jose at Climate Pledge despite the Sharks posting the NHL’s worst record the past two campaigns.

The Rangers are struggling early on but have held the Kraken to just five goals total in their four games at Climate Pledge, prevailing in three of those contests. And while the Kraken own an impressive 5-1-0 record against Chicago at home, the games have been closer than that mark indicates, while the Blackhawks this season are off to a 5-4-2 start.

In other words, the Kraken need to show up for all three of those teams a lot sooner than they did in salvaging an overtime point against Montreal with three goals in the final 11 minutes of regulation. Their three home victories saw the Kraken hold Vegas, Edmonton, and Anaheim to a combined four goals between them by playing a structured, at-times suffocating defensive style.

But the Kraken have also averaged just 2.67 goals scored in those three games and 2.75 at home overall, with help from that late offensive spurt against Montreal.

They’ve scored more on the road, averaging 3.0 goals over a half-dozen contests. So, there’s plenty of room to improve still.

Prior to going on injured reserve, Kraken forward Jared McCann welcomed the location switch of morning skates and allowing the team a chance to better acclimate to “the skating, the boards,” and especially the ice.

“I feel like skating on it a little bit more is going to be good for us,” he said.

So far, the record can’t get much better. And the home fans have been lapping it up, showering Kraken players with praise and applause.

“We’ve got great fans, and they always bring the energy for us,” said McCann, who scored huge goals in the team’s first two home victories. “It’s on us now to kind of piggyback off of that and just continue to get better and better each game.”