Kraken Got Some ‘Swagger’ Back And It Shows

Kraken defenseman Vince Dunn was hardly the first to allude to the gradual shift in fortunes and belief within an improving team now riding a 10-game points streak.

Dunn after the Kraken’s overtime loss to Minnesota on Thursday night was quick to point out how the team wasn’t hanging its head. That it knows it could have done even better after battling the NHL’s No. 3 squad to a near standstill with less than perfect stuff.

That followed head coach Lane Lambert earlier in the week talking about how he’d started to notice an increased “swagger” around his team.

Wait, what’s that? Swagger? We talking about the Seahawks capturing the NFC’s No. 1 seed? The Mariners coming within a few outs of reaching the World Series? That’s usually what we hear about around town these days when it comes to local sports teams carrying themselves with a winner’s confidence.

A few weeks ago, extending that analogy to the Kraken seemed preposterous given they’d dropped 10 of 11 games and were fast tumbling towards the league’s basement. Sure, they’d still been playing close games during that stretch as they had back in the early season when getting off to a franchise record fast start.

But “close” doesn’t always cut it in pro sports when razor thin margins can often separate championship teams from draft lottery contenders. It isn’t enough to make scores look good on paper. You sometimes need to win your share of those games as well, otherwise you’re always looking ahead to the draft, next season and what holes need fixing.

It becomes less about the here and now and more about vague future promises. Let’s face it, that also isn’t much fun for fans that, for all the joy they can get out of anticipating a solid future, can also use some here and now to tide them over until that future actually arrives.

Well, the Kraken are now 8-0-2 their last 10 games, capturing 18 of a possible 20 points that stretch to vault all the way to within two points of the Pacific Division lead. And they haven’t cherry picked their spots, either. They’ve won at home, on the road, against playoff contenders from this season, playoff teams from last season and so on.

Sure, they might have gotten a bit lucky catching the Anaheim Ducks last month just as that team was preparing to go off a proverbial cliff. And yeah, maybe the Los Angeles Kings couldn’t beat anybody at home back then and the Kraken merely made them another victim.

But such reasoning works both ways. The Kraken also got the Philadelphia Flyers when that playoff positioned team was doing rather well and managed to beat them pretty handily. They also scored seven goals to defeat a decent Boston Bruins squad on the second leg of a back-to-back earlier in the week with the Beantowners having rested and practiced in Seattle for two days.

And yeah, they nearly took down the Wild as well on a night they were missing their best stuff for more than half the game.

Sure, they don’t want to make a habit of playing only 25 minutes out of 60. Both Dunn and Lambert were quick to emphasize that.

But you know who can sometimes get away with such nights? Good teams. Even the most prepared squads won’t always have it. Teams like the Kraken, which rely on a hard-grinding, high-energy approach can’t always bring it for 60 minutes four nights a week.

So, the fact the Kraken got away with one here was, as Dunn put it, a good sign.

An even bigger test now lies in this upcoming road trip spread over 10 days. It will be to places the Kraken haven’t always fared very well, including New Jersey, where they’ve never won a game and currently sport a record of 0-4-0.

They will also visit Carolina on Saturday night, a team they finally won a road game against last season but are still just 1-2-1 against all-time in Raleigh, NC. They also finally beat the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden last season to improve to 1-3-0 lifetime there. And they’ve lost both games ever played in Utah, including last month before the points streak began.

About the only team on this trip they’ve had road success against are the New York Islanders, at 3-1-1. But you get the picture and it hasn’t always been a pretty one for the Kraken against these teams away from home.

And that’s part of why January has always been viewed as a prime challenge for the Kraken. They are five games into playing an NHL record 17 for one month and the January schedule is about to hit them fast and furious.

So, a little swagger doesn’t hurt.

You get that from going 3-0-1 in the second leg of back-to-back games your last four such series when you couldn’t win a single one of them in going 0-13-0 a season ago. You get it from scoring four or more goals in five of your last seven games rather than the two or three you’d averaged the season’s first two months.

You also get swagger from knowing goalies Joey Daccord and Philipp Grubauer have played a month-long stretch of elite hockey night after night no matter who’s in net. And you get it from a power play that’s now ninth in the NHL at 23% and from knowing the goals are coming from a plethora of performers on forward lines No. 1 through 4 and across the defensive corps rather than just from Jordan Eberle and Jaden Schwartz.

Both Schwartz and Eberle, incidentally, are both hurt. Nothing unusual there. The Kraken have dealt with injuries to key players all season long and standout defenseman Brandon Montour, like Schwartz, has been gone since before this 10-game points streak even got started.

Schwartz is expected back soon, while Eberle isn’t expected to be out very long. Montour is working back from what was supposed to be a five-week absence and is now through the majority of that layoff period.

That the Kraken are still where they are at 20-14-7 when dealing with all of that is pretty impressive.

And if that isn’t reason for some “swagger” then I’m not sure what is.

But there’s a fine line between swagger and overconfidence.

When Kraken coach Lambert starts waxing philosophical about 60-minute efforts, he knows those are impossible for any team to pull off over 82 games. He just wants to avoid a mindset where any team feels it can head into a game on cruise control and still prevail.

The Kraken seem to understand that, given – as everyone keeps reminding them – they are a team devoid of true superstars that wins only when playing together and backing one another up. Dunn seemed to understand it the other night when pointing out the team’s flaws against Minnesota but arguing that the Kraken will learn from it and move on.

It takes a degree of swagger to say stuff like that.

Now, as they’ve done the past several weeks, Dunn and company will need to keep going out and making such statements on the ice.