NHL Parity Helping Kraken Through First Rough Patch

Kraken head coach Lane Lambert continues to navigate realities of a parity-fueled league in which perspective can often be lost as quickly as a team’s positioning in the standings.

Earlier in the week, ahead of Thursday’s 9-4 debacle defeat to the Edmonton Oilers, Lambert had agreed with a question during a post-practice media scrum about whether some extra days between games could be used to remind his team of all they’ve accomplished to this point. After all, it would have been easy to be consumed by a negative vibe. His Kraken had just been blanked by the Oilers at home while scoring a mere two goals in dropping three consecutive games of a losing streak that has since hit four.

“We have talked about that as a team, just where we’re at,” Lambert said. “Sometimes you get so lost and focused on the last game or two.”

Lambert felt the Kraken played “a great game” in a 3-2 loss to the Dallas Stars eight days ago. Not so much in the 4-0 defeat to Edmonton two nights later. Still, he felt positives outweighed negatives in a season 24 games deep at that point.

“Sometimes you can lose sight of where you’re at based on just the most recent,” he said. “It’s kind of, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ I get that. But at the same time…they have put themselves in a good position at this point. We’ve worked hard. We’ve been hard to play against. And we just have to continue to grow on the offensive side and be harder to play against there.”

It would be easy to fall victim to recency bias after Thursday night’s fourth consecutive loss. Lambert himself appeared to run out of patience postgame while listing the ways his team played itself out of a game it still had a second-period chance in.

But part of the issue with viewing anything from a long-term perspective this season is the level to which parity seems to be manifesting itself compared to years past. It was already difficult to gain separation in the standings due to extra points awarded for overtime and shootout losses – which the Kraken have benefitted nicely from – before accounting for just how evenly matched all the teams now seem to be.

Ahead of Thursday night’s game, the top six Pacific Division teams were separated by just six points, with the Kraken at No. 5 with 28 points and the Oilers at No. 6 with 27. It’s even tighter elsewhere; the entire Atlantic Division is separated by six points, the Metropolitan Division just five.

But for all their recent struggles, the Kraken were just one point out of a Western Conference playoff spot and held four games in hand on the team immediately in front of them.

That playoff-positioned team was the San Jose Sharks, which tells you all you need to know about parity taking hold. Speaking of prior division doormats, the Anaheim Ducks were the ones leading the division by a point Thursday over the Vegas Golden Knights.

The Kraken have already beaten both Vegas and Anaheim the only times they’ve played this season. They also beat the Sharks a couple of weeks back after being routed by them a month ago.

So, it isn’t all doom and gloom while the Kraken struggle to boost dismal offensive totals. Even with teams flipping positions in the standings on a nightly basis, including the Oilers and Kraken doing it again Thursday night, none are pulling away from Lambert’s team. The Kraken have also recently gotten offensive stalwarts Jared McCann, who scored in Edmonton on Thursday, and Kaapo Kakko back from injuries.

Still, even with setting aside long-term perspectives, the Kraken must be careful in that they won’t have all season to figure this out. They’ll have even less time to resolve issues if they don’t prevent this modest losing streak from taking on a life of its own. When parity takes hold as it has, the only significant standings movement usually happens due to major streaks of wins or losses. So, while Lambert can indeed accentuate the positive, there remains a long-term perspective at play where his team must avoid allowing a dry patch of goal scoring to morph into a season-killing losing streak.

The Kraken have been tested by such streaks before. In the 2023-24 season, after their playoff campaign, they stayed on the fringes of contention for much of the schedule but never shook the impact of two devastating streaks.

One happened exactly at this point in the schedule, when they dropped eight consecutive games. Then, after climbing out of that hole thanks to some Joey Daccord goaltending heroics and a nine-game win streak, they tumbled into another eight-game losing streak in March that torpedoed the season.

We don’t yet know whether this current Kraken team has a nine-game win streak in them. What we do know is, given that uncertainty, it’s probably best not to tempt fate with a streak in the opposite direction.

Lambert was asked about that following Thursday’s morning skate in Edmonton, when his team was still on a three-game losing streak, now at four. For context, as of Thursday afternoon, three consecutive losses marked the NHL’s longest active stretch of defeats.

“We’ve talked about it,” Lambert said of all the standings flip-flops going on with no one winning or losing enough to pull away from the pack. “It’s tight. You wake up one morning, and you’re in first place. You wake up two mornings later, and you’re out of the playoffs.”

That’s no hyperbole. Two weeks ago, the Kraken beat the Penguins on a Saturday night in Pittsburgh and sat second in the division by a hair behind Anaheim. Then, after losing 1-0 in a shootout to the New York Islanders the next day and twice more in regulation to Dallas and Edmonton, they’d tumbled out of a playoff spot exactly one week after beating the Penguins.

If the season ended tomorrow, that would be a problem. But with four months to go, the Kraken have time to fix what ails them. So long as they avoid a much longer stretch of losses that would transform a daily standings flip-flop into something more permanent.

“At the end of the day, you just have to keep it in perspective,” Lambert said. “And you have to just take it and focus one day at a time.”

Rather than “dwelling on the past”, Lambert insists the team must find solutions for why it isn’t winning and break that cycle.

“But if you get too far ahead of yourself, you get yourself in trouble,” he said. “It’s an everyday game. You’ve got to bring your best every day. And you can’t look towards the next day until the current day is over.”

The “one day at a time” mantra may be the oldest cliché in sports, but it probably works here. For all the negatives a prolonged losing streak would bring in a league where parity has stalled significant standings movement, the best news going is the Kraken aren’t in one of those stretches yet.

They haven’t really lost ground. Turn things around Saturday against Detroit, they might even gain some.