Does a winning outcome negate a poor performance? Tough to say.
Touting a four-game losing skid and a historical tendency to play down to lesser opponents, Wednesday night’s contest was ripe for the fumbling at the hands of the Kraken. Founding a lead on soft chances and own goals, and supplementing meek offense with worse puck management, it almost was.
Tomáš Tatar, two goals on the night, firmly disagreed with this framing.
“In games like this you fall off track a little bit,” the winger conceded, “but when we have to, we start playing good hockey. We took a lead– I think we controlled the game.”
It’s true, Seattle opened the scoring four minutes in and never trailed throughout the entire game. Swooping up from behind Chicago’s net to slip a pass to Jared McCann, Jordan Eberle turned another of many brief offensive zone shifts into something the Kraken could actually use. McCann lobbed the puck at Arvid Söderblom, eluding him entirely.
But the opening goal was soft, had only an 8.7% chance of scoring and more so was the product of shaky goaltending than the culmination of any grand stratagem.
Scoring came easily– suspiciously easy. Even for as malleable a defensive structure as Chicago deployed, the Kraken could not string together strong offensive shifts nor apply consistent pressure. Rewards came anyways; the control Tatar spoke of existed solely on paper.
André Burakovsky banked a shot in off Jaden Schwartz’s skate, a distracted Kraken defense allowed an unmanned Joey Anderson to sneak net-front for a successful tip-in, and the Blackhawks scored an own-goal all before the halfway point of the game, sparking fear of an inevitably devastating turn of events. Sustainable leads are not built accidentally, as the Kraken’s seemed to be.
Head coach Dave Hakstol hesitated before divulging his own evaluation as if struggling to reconcile the on-ice product and outcome in real time. “It wasn’t– you look at the game and it’s not a clean game. But I like some of the maturity that we showed at the right moments in the game.”
Seattle took a step back in the second period and Chicago, 31st in the league in every major offensive and defensive stat category as of Wednesday morning, surged in response. Despite missing Taylor Hall, Andreas Athanasiou, Anthony Beauvillier, and league darling Connor Bedard, Chicago held a lead in shots on goal and ended up controlling only 54.44% of the shot quality. Undoubtedly, theirs was the better net-front presence.
A late second period power play opportunity expired without much noise, as had their first attempt on the man advantage, but Seattle kept with their newfound momentum. A blind pass from Brian Dumoulin cross-ice set up Brandon Tanev with a lane to score from inside in a dazzling display of skill and deception, the Kraken’s strongest scoring sequence all night.
Nick Foligno slipped undetected to the crease on the power play, halving Seattle’s lead 39 seconds into the final frame, and suddenly a comeback didn’t feel so impossible. But that maturity Hakstol mentioned kicked in, and Seattle responded twice more with a couple of solid scoring sequences.
The most impressive of the two started with a breakaway save on Ryan Donato by Joey Daccord, catalyzing a successful breakaway chance the other way for Tatar.
“I was hoping Joey was going to make a save and he did,” he said with a smile. “I had full trust in him. We broke the puck and I was just there– Ebs made a nice pass to me and I had a breakaway… I was very fortunate to find the net.”
“He’s an intelligent player. He finds a way to make guys he’s playing with a little bit better. We’ve really liked his competitiveness on the puck, his poise in every situation, and the ability to mesh with a couple of different linemates,” Hakstol said. “He really helped us put this game away with the breakaway goal and then the late goal.”
“There’s some good points in there where the game could swing the other direction but we were able to keep it under control.”
Timely goals, timely saves, timely momentum swings, and the Kraken escaped with two points for the first time since Jan 13. It’s best not to let the grimy details slip from memory, but maybe we can let Seattle have this one.
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