Kraken Start Slow, Can’t Finish Strongly Enough

Kraken head coach Lane Lambert quickly laid waste to his reputation for stoic, mundane press conferences Friday night with his flabbergasted take on what he’d witnessed the opening 40 minutes of his team’s latest defeat.

With his even-keeled, unruffled demeanor intact as always, Lambert nonetheless turned some memorable phrases with far more frequency than his team had turned chances into shots on goal in the opening period. By the time this 4-2 loss to the Anaheim Ducks was in the books, Lambert was warming up for the postgame media podium, about to wax philosophical about the rules of logic and the inevitable result of playing barely 20 minutes out of 60.

“I don’t have a logical explanation for an illogical event,” Lambert said. “That was the worst 40 minutes we’ve played all year.”

His dumbfounded reaction resulted from the Kraken managing just two shots on goal the opening period and 11 the first two frames overall in a game that had important implications for the Pacific Division standings. They gave up a shorthanded goal for the fourth time in five games that span and entered the final period down by two before finally making a push that saw Jaden Schwartz score early off a great Shane Wright net-front feed to get the Kraken back within one.

But that was it from there as Ducks goalie Lukas Dostal held firm, and Pavel Mintyukov sealed it with an empty netter with 80 seconds to play. Jared McCann had the only other Kraken goal and Philipp Grubauer kept his team in it by stopping Jansen Harkins on a second period penalty shot.

By then, the Ducks already had the goals they needed from Cutter Gauthier and Ryan Poehling shorthanded in the first period, then Chris Kreider off a power play rebound in the middle frame just two minutes after McCann had gotten his team on the board.

Still, the statistic that best summed up this game was Kraken forward Jacob Melanson, freshly recalled from AHL Coachella Valley, having more hits by early in the final period than the rest of his energy-lacking team combined. That changed slightly by game’s end, with Eeli Tolvanen making a late, board-banging push to finish with half the season high 10 hits registered by Melanson and pushing the team’s total to 11.

But that didn’t improve Lambert’s postgame mood much after the Kraken’s fifth loss in six games. Lambert was asked why he thought the Kraken were able to reverse course so dramatically that final period, more than doubling their shot total for the game by putting up 12.

“Well, you always hesitate to say it can’t get any worse,” Lambert quipped. “But at that point in time there was only one way to go, and that was up for us.”

The Kraken entered the game in the final Western Conference wild card spot, just two points behind Anaheim for third place in the division and holding a game in hand. They exited the contest still holding that game in-hand but now sit four points back of the Ducks and two points out of a playoff spot.

“One word can describe the game for me – it’s ‘disappointment’,” Lambert said, before offering up a few other contenders. “Friday night. Big game. Division opponent. Four-point game in front of our fans. I’m actually dumbfounded.”

Lambert has done what he can to limit hard practices for his team during this NHL record stretch of 17 games in 31 days this month. He’d held an optional practice Thursday following a Wednesday win over the New York Islanders, hoping his team could show some of the same energy.

Instead, as team captain Jordan Eberle said afterwards, they never got started until it was too late.

“We didn’t start,” Eberle said. “I mean, in the first two periods, in my opinion, we were getting out-battled. We were kind of all over the place. We weren’t really on our systems. We were disconnected. They just kept coming at us in waves.”

Eberle had set up McCann in the high slot for his goal to halve Anaheim’s lead to 2-1 early in the second period. But then Ryker Evans took a delay-of-game penalty less than a minute later for flipping the puck over the boards and Kreider swatted home a power play rebound to restore the two-goal margin and force the Kraken to keep chasing the game.

“We can’t keep doing this to ourselves,” Eberle said. “We continuously have slow starts and then find our way into games. It’s something we’ve addressed and need to address again.”

Eberle rejected a theory that fatigue might be slipping in. He instead suggested the limited practice time playing so many games could be part of why the team started out so disconnected in its approach.

But then he quickly added that players should know the systems by now.

“There’s no gray area, it’s just black and white,” Eberle said. “I think at the end of the day when we’re not moving our feet and we’re not skating and we’re not pushing the pace, they just continuously come at us. So, you add losing battles on top of that and it’s just losing hockey.”

Schwartz, who notched a point in his third straight game after a return from injury last week, agreed the Kraken “weren’t connected enough” early on.

“They weren’t giving us much time and space,” Schwartz said of the Ducks. “We really just have to dig in like we did in the third and get on their toes and pressure them a lot more. We ended up creating a lot of chances. But the first couple of periods, we were just a second late on a lot of things.”

That’s about the most logical explanation offered up all night and one Lambert seemed to agree with in summing up how the Ducks jumped all over his team from the get-go.

“I thought they were on top of us early on and they played a good hockey game,” Lambert said. “They sat back in the third period a little bit and we got going finally and probably should have tied the game.

“But when you leave it up to chance and you play 20 minutes in a 60-minute hockey game, you’re not going to have success very often.”