The Need To Knows
- The Time: 6pm PT
- The Place: Climate Pledge Arena in beautiful Seattle, Washington
- Place to Watch: ROOT Sports Northwest, Bally Sports Ohio, Sportsnet, ESPN+, Sportsnet+
- Place to Listen: KJR 93.3 FM
- An Opposing Viewpoint: The (Jackets) Cannon
Know Your Enemy
- The Jackets are not good, and they are likely not going to get better. They’re currently 15-23-20, have 39 points in the standings, are last in the Metro, are falling apart at the seams behind the scenes, and to top it all off, dropped a game they were up 3-1 against the Canucks last night. It is a rough life in Columbus right now.
- The Jackets’ leading scorer so far is once again Kirill Marchenko, who has 14 goals in 45 games, and is by far the most dangerous player on their god-awful power play; with 6 goals tallied for a team lead on the man-advantage.
- Johnny Gaudreau might be having a season from hell by his standards, but he’s still pretty good at some things; he’s the points leader for the Jackets with 29 in 47 games, but an overwhelming amount of them are from assists.
- Elvis Merzlikens, their starter in net, wants out. To do this, he has desperately tried to get some wins in order to make himself enticing to the greater NHL-sphere. He’s got a .903 SV% on 26 starts…and not a whole lot of wins to back it up.
Game Preview
Tonight’s game features a measure of revenge the Kraken need to get, and points they need to collect.
Thanks to an unforgivable effort late against the Blues on behalf of Seattle, they are now in extremely delicate territory where they can theoretically get into a playoff spot before the break, but it will require them to face their previous trap game that took an absolutely stunning number of Kraken with it in a victory. They need to do more than just tune up Cole Sillinger for his crimes, they need to get these points.
Columbus has been getting dumptrucked in just about every game they’ve played in the last month with specific noted exceptions, of which Seattle very much was not one of. They are without Patrik Laine. They are seemingly completely incapable of recognizing their own talent. This should be an open and shut kind of game; they show up and win big in order to get off the schneid…but it doesn’t feel like it.
Why?
Because St. Louis felt like that too.
They gotta earn some trust back tonight and that starts by absolutely pounding on the Jackets’ net-front and skating them into the dirt. It starts by showing up on time, not sleepwalking through the first period, and winning battles along the board. All very standard things that they should be able to do. Then they have to keep doing it until the score resembles something of what it did back when they last played. Win this game, and then we can talk about what happens.
Should be a good game, though. That’s where it counts.
LET’S GO KRAKEN!