Kraken vs. Leafs PREVIEW: Endure and Survive

The Need to Knows

• The Time: 6pm PT
• The Place: Climate Pledge Arena, Seattle, Washington
• Place to Watch: ROOT-Northwest, ESPN+, SportsNet+
• Place to Listen: KJR 93.3-FM

Know Your Enemy

The Leafs, a team nobody in Canada pays attention to and where there’s absolutely no media pressure, are having an up-and-down season, currently sitting in top wildcard spot in a very tight Eastern Conference playoff race. Their offense has been good, but the defense has been real shaky recently. They’ve lost five of their last six games, blowing leads in four of those losses thanks to said shaky defense. Toronto is playing a back-to-back, having lost last night to the Canucks 6-4.

Auston Matthews, however, is not an issue. The former MVP leads the league in goals with 37 goals in 43 games and is an absolute terror while being a value add defensively. William Nylander, Mitch Marner, and John Tavares are very good forwards, and defenseman Morgan Rielly is having a nice season and is 7th in the NHL in points scored among defensemen with 37.

(Rielly’s stats are very similar to Vince Dunn’s this season. Rielly: 7 goals/30 assists in 44 games. Dunn: 8 goals/27 assists in 42 games.)

Three former Kraken play for the Leafs: forward Calle Järnkrok, defenseman Mark Giordano (the only captain in Kraken history), and goalie Martin Jones. Jones started last night against Vancouver, so one presumes we will see Ilya Samsonov tonight.

The Leafs did start Jones in both games in a back-to-back on January 2nd/3rd, but Samsonov was in the AHL at the time having just been placed on waivers, so it was kind of a weird situation. It is very unusual to start the same goalie in back-to-back nights that way and there were mitigating circumstances when Jones did so earlier this season. I expect Samsonov to start tonight, which is a good thing if you’re hoping for a Kraken win. Samsonov has been pretty bad this season (as you may have inferred when you saw he was placed on waivers), with a league-worst .863 save percentage with the worst goals saved above expected/60 of any goalie in the league per Moneypuck (minimum 10 games).

(I do however expect a Martin Jones tribute video. He really came through last year to get the Kraken into the playoffs when Grubauer was injured. Nothing but love for that man.)

Toronto is reeling, they’re on a back-to-back on the road, and we are likely to see the worst goalie in the league tonight. This would be a good spot for Seattle, but…

The Kraken are one injury away from putting you (yes, you) in the lineup

• Matty Beniers is on injured reserve not practicing and is almost certainly not available.
• Pierre-Édouard Bellemare is on injured reserve not practicing and is almost certainly not available.
• Yanni Gourde is suspended for two games and is definitely unavailable.
• Philipp Grubauer is on long-term injured reserve although he was a full participant in practice yesterday. He has missed the last 17 games.
• Vince Dunn missed practice yesterday for an undisclosed reason. He’s missed the last 3 games.
• Jordan Eberle missed practice yesterday for an undisclosed reason.
• Jaden Schwartz missed practice yesterday for an undisclosed reason.
• Kailer Yamamoto missed practice yesterday for an undisclosed reason.

What’s going on with Eberle, Schwartz, and Yamamoto, who did play in Seattle’s last game on Thursday?

Could be a maintenance day. Could be an injury. Could be the flu. Could be aliens. Hakstol never gives up more information than he has to. Nobody’s been called up from Coachella Valley as of this writing, so I’m leaning toward maintenance or something minor (or aliens). Since Grubauer is on LTIR, the Kraken have the cap space to call up players from Coachella Valley, so cap constraints are thankfully not an issue there if they do need to call a player up at some point before Grubauer returns.

Half the team came down with something according to Jordan Eberle. If it is an illness that’s running through the locker room, even some of the players on the ice aren’t going to be at 100%. (For example, Adam Larsson left the game last Monday against the Penguins with an illness but played the very next day against the Rangers. It’s pretty unlikely he was 100%.) It’s just a horrible situation right now.

The good news comes in two forms:

• After this Leafs game, the schedule lightens up considerably. They’re at home against the Blackhawks, Blues, and Blue Jackets; then go on the road against the Sharks. The Kraken have the 6th easiest remaining schedule. They’ve had, to date, the 6th hardest schedule.
• After those four post-Leaf games is the all-star break, during which the Kraken will have a nice long chance to get healthy with no games between February 1st and February 9th.

The Kraken, who were pretty healthy last year, are going through it this season. Seattle was absolutely rolling with a franchise-record nine-game win streak before the injuries derailed things and have lost three in a row since.

With this many players potentially injured and/or sick, it’s just a matter of surviving and getting through this brutal stretch and hoping that it doesn’t derail the whole season and the playoff push. If they can somehow steal a point from the Leafs, that would feel like a huge victory.