Just like his team in general Kraken captain Jordan Eberle spent much of a now-completed homestand making up for lost time.
After being sidelined for three months with a rare pelvic injury, Eberle took off on the homestand with six assists in the three-game span and looked to be back to playing like his former self. Meanwhile, the Kraken, now 3-1-1 since the trade deadline, also continued to look more like the team expected by most pundits when the season began.
“We’re playing better hockey and I think that’s the most important thing,” Eberle said. “I think we’re just trying to build something. I think you try to take a game-to-game approach and try to play the best you can each period.”
The Kraken can now add to that and more with upcoming road games in Chicago on Tuesday and Minnesota on Wednesday ahead of a Saturday contest in Edmonton and another in Calgary next week.
The only blemishes in the five games since the deadline have been a late loss to the Washington Capitals on the road and then a 3-2 overtime defeat to the Winnipeg Jets to close out an otherwise perfect homestand. Washington and Winnipeg had entered Sunday tied for the best record in the entire NHL, while two other teams the Kraken beat on the homestand were Montreal and Utah HC – both red-hot at the time and in the heat of playoff battles.
Eberle was far from the lone bright spot for the Kraken, though his absence most of the season is the easiest to identify as a key missing ingredient from what the team’s plans had been back in October.
Kraken defenseman Brandon Montour on Monday was named one of the NHL’s Three Stars of the Week along with Los Angeles Kings goalie Darcy Kuemper and New Jersey Devils forward Jesper Bratt. Montour picked up the Third Star for tallying three goals and adding three assists in three games on the 2-0-1 homestand.
And winger Jani Nyman, who has rocketed through the Kraken system since being a second-round selection in the 2022 NHL Draft, scored his second goal of the homestand in Sunday’s loss to the Jets. Nyman now has two goals in three career NHL games after scoring 26 in the AHL to lead all rookies there by a wide margin ahead of his Kraken promotion.
Eeli Tolvanen also scored three goals on the homestand and now leads the team with 21. Tolvanen has a shot at becoming only the second Kraken player other than Jared McCann to reach the 25-goal plateau.
The team’s center play has also produced at an impressive rate since the deadline, with Chandler Stephenson now leading the Kraken with 47 points. Stephenson has already set a Kraken record for centermen with 36 assists and is within 10 points of the club record for the position set by Matty Beniers during his Calder Trophy season two years ago.
“We’ve liked our game since the trade deadline,” Stephenson said. “I think we just keep building and do what we’ve been doing.”
Stephenson helped set up arguably the Kraken’s highlight of the season against Montreal, spotting an unusual alignment by the visitors ahead of winning a faceoff to start overtime and immediately feeding Montrour on a pre-planned breakaway chance and goal just four seconds in. It was the fastest overtime goal in NHL history.
In many ways, free agent signings Stephenson and Montour have both met and even surpassed expectations from when they inked their seven-year deals last summer. That’s partly what made the team’s faltering overall record somewhat disappointing ahead of this month’s trade deadline period that saw them deal away Oliver Bjorkstrand, Yanni Gourde and Brandon Tanev.
Most pundits had the Kraken pegged to exceed last season’s 81 points and at roughly an 85-point minimum floor, but the team had underperformed to just a 73-point pace by the trade deadline.
The seven points of a possible 10 accumulated the five games since have now upped the season’s pace to 76 with four weeks to go. And while that’s still well below expectations, the recent play from players all expected to contribute in upcoming seasons bodes well.
Stephenson and Eberle, both Saskatchewan natives, have been on a line together with Tolvanen that’s shown plenty of promise. The three players combined for 11 points on the three-game homestand.
“We were talking about how we haven’t played with each other and yeah it’s obviously good,” Stephenson said of him and Eberle. “A guy like Ebs brings a lot of energy, a lot of experience. Just his presence is huge for our group. It’s nice having him back and obviously you can kind of see him feeling better.
“It’s good to see that he’s finding his stride, finding his game right now. Just the whole group. Things are going good right now so hopefully we can just build on this.”
That building will continue this off-season as the Kraken look to add to a future multi-year roster core now built down the middle around centers Stephenson, Beniers and Shane Wright along with defensemen Montour, Vince Dunn, Adam Larsson and Ryker Evans and goalie Joey Daccord. Kraken general manager Ron Francis secured two first-round draft picks and two second-round selections in return for Bjorkstrand, Gourde and Tanev.
And armed with plenty of additional salary cap space, he plans to use some of his stockpiled picks and financial flexibility to bring in additional NHL-proven talent to significantly upgrade the team. A team that already has additional forward talent in McCann and December trade acquisition Kaapo Kakko also expected to be around multiple seasons to come.
Throw a prospect such as Nyman – who has the makings of a pure goal scorer the Kraken have long sought to add – into that mix and the results have been instantly obvious. Nyman has two power play goals already for a special teams unit that had struggled at times with its finish around the net.
The puck movement and possession shown by the Kraken in post-deadline games has evidenced some of the skill already in-house.
Kraken coach Dan Bylsma has lauded how the team has looked “more connected” from the back-end defenders to the front-end forwards in recent weeks but particularly since the deadline. Having a strong core of puck moving players up the middle of the ice helps with that connectivity and has enabled the Kraken to look more like the fast-paced transitional team envisioned when the season began. Bylsma said that in the first three games coming out of the deadline, the Kraken had “two more minutes in the offensive zone than the opposition.”
In those three games, the Kraken scored 11 goals. They’ve scored four or more goals in three of the five games since the deadline, having done so only three times in 11 contests just prior to this recent stretch.
“You repeatedly saw us playing north and fast and quick,” Bylsma said. “And that’s the way we want to play night-in and night-out. Guys are taking in that challenge amongst themselves here to play that way the rest of the way.”
One of those guys, Eberle, is finally contributing again the way he did in beginning the season at a fierce clip. The loss of Eberle, Dunn, and Gourde for prolonged stretches hampered the team’s ability to find a rhythm all season long.
“For me, it’s about trying to get back to making smart little plays – trying to win some more battles and getting to the net,” Eberle said, adding: “But as far as the timing and speed of the game, I feel like I’m at that level now.”
As is a Kraken team playing more up to a winning level envisioned a while ago and that will be expected from here on.
