The Kraken watched a slow start get progressively worse and fell too far behind for a brief third period comeback to change the final outcome in their first game back from a three-week Winter Olympic pause
SEA at DAL | Recap
DALLAS – Kraken captain Jordan Eberle suggested a lack of “greasy” play at both ends of the ice had plenty to do with his team’s stumbling Wednesday night start to an important six-week stretch drive.
The somewhat shorthanded Dallas Stars seemed to own the net front on a tip-fest in front of Kraken goalie Joey Daccord, while at the same time limiting traffic in their own end and holding the visitors to just nine shots the opening two periods. By the time this 4-1 loss to the Stars was done, Eberle and others were discussing the need to get out of break-mode far quicker by the time Thursday’s tail end of a back-to-back stretch gets underway in St. Louis.
“They played simple, they played good and they defended the inside,” Eberle said of Dallas defenders limiting the Kraken to perimeter attempts. “I didn’t think we did a good job of getting inside and getting greasy. As tough as that is, these games are massively important.”
Jordan Eberle speaks with the media after Wednesday’s 4-1 loss to the Dallas Stars.
Instead, the Stars, missing key players and with others still somewhat jet-lagged from Winter Olympics play, took a page straight out of Kraken Hockey 101. Instead of complex passing schemes while undermanned, they simplified their game, put pucks to the net on Daccord and had a bunch of them deflected in.
By the time Ryker Evans buried a slap shot behind backup Dallas goalie Casey DeSmith with 13 minutes to go, his team was already down four and showing no real threat of a comeback.
Wyatt Johnston scored a pair of goals for Dallas while Matt Duchene and Sam Steel had the others as the Stars got bodies to the Kraken net early and often. The game turned decisively at the 5:35 mark of the second when Sam Steel, his team already ahead by two, leaped on a loose puck in the crease and jammed it past Daccord.
The Kraken took a coin-flip try at challenging for goaltender interference, but the goal stood and Johnston would tip home a Miro Heiskanen point shot just 39 seconds later during a power play aftervthe resulting delay of game penalty assessed the visitors.
“They executed better than we did,” Eberle said. “They got to the inside and found a way to tip some pucks in.”
The Kraken didn’t get a shot on goal until seven minutes into the contest and had only three by period’s end despite two power play chances in which they did little except pass the puck around well in the opposing end.
Kraken head coach Lane Lambert lamented his team’s “pass-first mentality” in those situations and others, noting that a couple of Stars goals came on shots initially going wide of the net. Lambert wasn’t buying a suggestion his team was passing up on doing the same because of an inability to create net front traffic of their own.
“Shots create shots, shots create traffic,” he said. “We had opportunities to shoot the puck and we didn’t. That’s just the bottom line.”
Lambert also suggested his defenders needed to do a better job of boxing out Dallas forwards and “getting in shot lanes” to block incoming pucks.
“Overall, as a whole, the entire game was disappointing for me,” he said. “As I said, not good enough. They’re a very good hockey team over there and we needed to be a lot better than we were.”
It was the Stars who entered the game decidedly more shorthanded due mainly to the Winter Olympics. Dallas was without Team Finland star forwards Mikko Rantanen and Roope Hintz, out due to a lower body injury and illness respectively.
They also had No. 1 goalie Jake Oettinger serving as DeSmith’s backup for the night due to his getting back to Dallas on Tuesday following Team USA’s gold medal win two days prior. Add the fact that Dallas defender Thomas Harley played for Canada on Sunday, while Finnish defenders Heiskanen and Esa Lindell won bronze medals on Saturday and the Stars were not exactly their typical Western Conference powerhouse selves.
The Kraken played Eeli Tolvanen after his bronze medal performance for Finland, but Kaapo Kakko got the night off.
DeSmith seemed poised to hand the Kraken their first shutout loss in nearly three months until Evans scored after a goalmouth scramble – one of the few times the Kraken caused any net front chaos – left the netminder down and out for the left circle shot. The goaltending swap of DeSmith instead of longtime Kraken nemesis Oettinger didn’t exactly benefit as much as hoped. DeSmith had actually entered with a stellar 4-1 lifetime record of his own against the Kraken with a 1.00 goals against average and .964 save percentage and wasn’t really tested in this game before his team put things out of reach.
“We were just passing up shots,” Evans said. “We just needed to get more pucks to the net and get a greasy one. We were just trying to make a fancy play or just pass it. We just needed to get it to the net.”
Hear from Ryker Evans, the Kraken’s lone goal scorer in Wednesday’s 4-1 loss to the Dallas Stars.
Evans also agreed he and his fellow defenders needed to get more physical in boxing out the Dallas forwards and “tying up their sticks” in front of Daccord.
The most physical the Kraken were all game came soon after the Evans goal when a pair of fights broke out near the benches. Veteran forward Adam Ernie, known as a tough customer, crosschecked Jacob Melanson and tried to goad him into a fight before eventually landing several punches and drawing an extra minor penalty. Kraken forward Ben Meyers then got the better of Justin Hryckowian in a second altercation, pounding him to the ice before officials got between them.
SEA@DAL: Evans scores goal against Casey DeSmith
The Kraken were outshot 11-3 in the first period, though they’d managed to keep the score even until Johnston tipped home a Lindell shot with 79 seconds to go in the frame.
Dallas then outshot the Kraken 15-6 in the middle period and scored three goals in the opening six-plus minutes to salt things away. Kraken captain Eberle said his team needs to figure things out by puck drop in St. Louis because there aren’t enough games left in the season to waste a week or two getting reacclimated.
“To me, it’s just effort, will and battle,” Eberle said. “You look at how three of their goals were just shots from the point and they found a way to get their sticks on it.
“We didn’t do a good enough job, I think, especially in the first two periods when we had only eight or nine shots. We’ve got to find a way to create because you’re not going to score that way.”
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