This latest Climate Pledge Arena debut for the Kraken was less about coming home again than it was a chance at a full compass reset in an early season heading south much quicker than they’d wanted.
Unfortunately for them, a promising start and brief lead Tuesday night was undone by some miscues that resulted in a 4-1 loss to the Colorado Avalanche team they’d upset in last season’s playoffs. More concerning than the defeat in their home opener was that it was the Kraken’s fourth straight in a brutal 10-game opening stretch against mostly playoff teams from last spring that doesn’t get easier from here.
Spokane native Kailer Yamamoto appeared to set a positive early homecoming tone by opening the scoring roughly 15 minutes in on a tough-angled, top-shelf wrister that was his very first for the franchise now playing in his home state. But the Kraken, who outshot the Avs by a whopping 30-14 margin the first two periods, failed to get off enough dangerous chances in-close and saw their opponents tie things in the middle frame when Arturri Lehkonen buried a puck allowed to bounce around in the slot a little too casually.
Midway through that same period, defenseman Vince Dunn failed to corral a puck at the point on a Kraken power play, then saw Logan O’Connor race past him to score a short-handed breakaway goal on Philipp Grubauer that put the visitors ahead to stay. Mikko Rantanen added some third period insurance, beating Grubauer with an open-ice snap shot from 29 feet out after Yanni Gourde had raced to the Kraken bench to replace a broken stick.
Valeri Nichushkin, making his first appearance in Seattle since being spirited out of a local hotel room for still-undisclosed reasons right before Game 3 in last spring’s playoff, closed out the scoring with an empty-net goal on a Kraken power play.
For the Kraken, now 1-3-1 with just one shootout loss point out of a possible eight, they must face Stanley Cup touted contenders Carolina and the New York Rangers to cap this homestand before heading on the road for a tough four-city trip to Detroit, Carolina again and the last two Cup runners-up in Florida and Tampa Bay. And while it’s still quite early in a schedule of 82-games, it doesn’t take a hockey genius to see the early hole awaiting the Kraken if things don’t start changing in a hurry.
Goal-scoring was a significant concern for the team heading in given how it allowed fourth liners Daniel Sprong, Morgan Geekie and Ryan Donato to leave as free agents and then saw Brandon Tanev suffer an early knee injury that’s knocked him out of action the next 4-6 weeks. That’s 60 goals out the window for the main contributors to the most productive fourth line in hockey a season ago, so seeing newcomer Yamamoto bag his first on the kind of shot that made him a first-round draft pick by Edmonton back in 2017 was clearly a welcome sight for his struggling team.
Yamamoto’s centerman on that revamped fourth line, fellow newcomer Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, had spoken after Tuesday’s morning skate about the Kraken needing to generate more chances in-close.
“At the end of the day, there are a lot of rebounds, a lot of bad bounces around the net where we aren’t there,” Bellemare said. “And that’s common at the beginning of the season. We just have to go back to what teams have been successful at in the past. We have to be like hound dogs, getting in front of the net.”
Kraken coach Dave Hakstol also agreed pregame the net front presence hasn’t been enough.
“There are too many pictures of five [guys] on the outside,” Hakstol said.
But Hakstol also cautioned to avoid drawing too many generalities from a small sample size of play. He liked the opportunities his team generated in their most recent road loss, at St Louis, and said what as needed was to “execute” and “finish off some of those plays.”
For a long portion of Tuesday’s game, the shots kept coming for the Kraken but the finishing still wasn’t there.
Early on, the Avalanche looked like a team that wanted to finish some of what both squads started in their seven-game playoff round last April that many around the NHL have called the best of the postseason. O’Connor made it abundantly clear the Avs were out to avenge some unfinished business when he took on Jordan Eberle in a spirited fight that was clear payback for the Kraken forward’s hit from behind in Game 6 that fractured the vertebrae of Colorado counterpart Andrew Cogliano.
Cogliano is back on the ice healthy and playing again — Tuesday being his second game — while Jared McCann faced Colorado for the first time since a late hit by Cale Makar knocked him out of last spring’s series in Game 4 with a concussion. Makar was again treated to the requisite boos from Climate Pledge faithful whenever he touched the puck but did not have to engage in any fights despite McCann appearing to say something to him before faceoffs on multiple early shifts.
Yanni Gourde also engaged in some shoving with Makar but nothing further came of it.
One guy besides Eberle forced to take some additional lumps was Kraken assistant coach Dave Lowry, struck on the back of the head by a puck in the middle period. Lowry left the bench but returned for the third period.
This story will be updated.
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