Kraken Drop Key Game To Start Road Trip

NASHVILLE – Perennial playoff mainstay Freddy Gaudreau wasn’t biting after a disappointing Kraken defeat Thursday night when asked whether his personal “sense of urgency” was starting to ring off the charts.

Gaudreau in recent years has viewed the postseason as an annual rite of spring playing for Minnesota and a Nashville Predators squad that handed his team a crucial 3-1 loss here in a game with direct playoff implications. So, he knows as well as anyone that surrendering two points to a team now tied with the Kraken and Los Angeles for the eighth and final Western Conference playoff spot was not an optimal way to begin what could be a season-defining six-game road trip.

“I think I can speak for everybody – it’s been high,” Gaudreau said of the urgency level. “We’re aware of what’s going on with the standings and all that. But through it all, there’s not a guy that’s happy with how things are going results wise, but we’ve got to stick together.”

The Kraken lost for the eighth time in 12 games coming out of the Winter Olympic break yet still found themselves holding the conference’s second wild card when the day began. One difference once the day’s game ended was the Predators now joining them on an equal points footing with the Kings, though the Kraken hold the tiebreaker on both based on regulation wins.

Those wins haven’t come easily since the break ended.

Gaudreau scored a tying goal with 80 seconds to go in the first period off a nifty net front feed by Chandler Stephenson, but it would be the only one scored by the Kraken all night against Nashville backup goalie Justus Annunen. The Kraken had learned before gametime that Predators starting netminder Juuse Saros was out with an upper body injury, which amounted to great news given he’d stonewalled them last week in stopping 43 of 45 shots.

But the Kraken couldn’t take full advantage. They managed just 13 shots combined over the final two periods as a Ryan O’Reilly go-ahead marker on the power play seven minutes into the middle frame stood up the rest of the way. Filip Forsberg sealed the deal in the final two minutes of regulation with an empty net marker with goalie Joey Daccord pulled for an extra attacker.

“They’ve got big defensemen first of all,” Gaudreau said of why the Kraken struggled to generate shots on net from in close. “They play a connected game. It felt like there wasn’t much room out there.”

Stephenson, himself a longstanding playoff veteran with Stanley Cup victories playing for Washington and Vegas, said it wasn’t a case of the Kraken failing to fully capitalize on Saros being out by jumping on his backup early. The Kraken did manage 13 first period shots and got the lone goal before intermission against backup Annunen.

“With a goalie, it doesn’t really matter who’s in,” he said. “It’s not like we were licking our chops in here. Every goalie is good. So, it’s just kind of a different game plan, I guess, on goalies and trying to attack different tendencies.”

Advanced stats for the night from SportLogiq showed the Kraken did generate as many good scoring chances as the Preds only to have Annunen save two goals beyond what should have been expected based on shot quality. The Kraken also won nearly twice as many puck battles to generate those chances.

They just could not finish them off the few times they presented themselves.

“We had some looks, had some chances,” Stephenson said. “We just came up short.”

Stephenson added that the reality of being in “playoff hockey mode” games is that tight checking teams won’t give up much to one another. So, you need to finish those chances off once they do surface.

And remember having generated them in the first place. The Kraken head to Columbus needing a win Saturday night against the Blue Jackets and Stephenson said there’s no use hanging heads over a Predators game already done. He feels the Kraken must “focus on the good” to keep these latest consecutive losses from spiraling into something worse. 

“You can’t feel sorry for yourselves,” he said. “Or the season’s going to be done before you know it.”

Kraken head coach Lane Lambert felt his team played one of its better games in a while in terms of effort, structure and battling for pucks, even if they mostly couldn’t finish the scoring chances they did generate.

“We had enough chances to score to win the hockey game,” he said. “And we missed the net on some of those. We’ve got to find a way to put it in the back of the net. But overall, you can’t be unhappy with the effort and the way we played.”

Lambert wasn’t happy with the timing of consecutive penalties taken at the start of a tied second period. His team was penalized for too many men on the ice, then, after killing that one off, saw Jamie Oleksiak flagged for interference.

It didn’t take long for Nashville to score on that one as an initial shot by Steven Stamkos was blocked, but Forsberg slipped the rebound across to O’Reilly for the point-blank goal.

“When you take back-to-back penalties, it takes a lot out of your penalty killers,” Lambert said. “We’ve got guys out right now who are penalty killers so we’re already short in that regard.”

The Kraken called up Jani Nyman from AHL Coachella Valley to play on an emergency basis with Jaden Schwartz and Eeli Tolvanen still injured and Ryan Winterton dealing with what Lambert said was an illness.

None of those absences are helping this playoff push, but lone goal scorer Gaudreau – just like Stephenson – said focusing on the negatives won’t get anyone to the postseason.

“We’ve got to keep focusing on the right stuff,” he said. “It’s easy to be upbeat and positive when things are going well. But when it’s not going so well results-wise that’s where you see the real ones. The guys that stick together. The guys that do it for each other. And it’s a group filled with those types of people. So, we’ve got to just stick to the process."