ELMONT, New York — Among the bigger challenges for the Kraken during this four-game road trip through some of the NHL’s tougher buildings was demonstrating consistency in their give-no-quarter play.
Throughout the season’s opening few months, they’d shown the ability to surprise some quality teams, only to revert to their prior disjointed form the very next game. That wasn’t the case on this now-concluded trip, including Wednesday night’s 3-0 victory over a New York Islanders team that mirrors the Kraken’s desired style of playing tight, defense-first hockey.
That defense-first plan got the Kraken the first shutout in franchise history.
Jared McCann snapped the scoreless draw six minutes into the final period by banking a puck in off the shoulder of Islanders goalie Semyon Varlamov from a tough angle on the right side. Jordan Eberle, making his return to play an Islanders team he’d spent the past four seasons with, did the hard work behind the net before shoveling it out to McCann for a quick shot that caught Varlamov off-guard.
McCann’s team-leading 19th goal of the season, tying his career high, was followed just over two minutes later by defenseman Vince Dunn doing his Paul Coffey impersonation. Dunn maneuvered the puck in the New York end, faked Islanders’ captain Anders Lee out of his skates, then moved in and backhanded a puck past Varlamov for the all-important insurance goal.
Mason Appleton finished things off with an empty netter with 1.5 seconds to play.
In this affair — played at the new UBS Arena developed by the same Oak View Group that overhauled Climate Pledge Arena — the Kraken rolled up an early 6-0 shots lead and served notice they wouldn’t sleepwalk into the All Star Game break. Instead, they limited the Islanders to just 11 shots the first two scoreless periods and kept things tight enough that Kraken goalie Philipp Grubauer didn’t need to do much beyond making an initial save.
Down at the other end, the Kraken had their chances to break the scoreless duel, but Varlamov came up big when he needed to. That was true in the first period when Ryan Donato and Appleton got a couple of chances on a bang-bang play that Varlomov managed to keep out of his net.
Then, in the second period, McCann got a close in chance along the left side but fired the puck wide of the net. Not to be left out, Grubauer remained on-his-toes throughout and made a nice stop early in the third on Jean-Gabriel Pageau as he raced down the right side toward the Kraken net.
Kraken coach Dave Hakstol has talked in recent days of his team needing to learn to win close games in which it only scores a goal or two. The Kraken had scored two goals or fewer in 24 of 45 games coming in — winning just two of those, including last Thursday’s contest in Pittsburgh — so Hakstol’s message comes from necessity as much as anything.
The Kraken’s struggles to score goals are evidenced on the power play, where they entered 1-for-13 on the road trip and had just one shot here in two initial chances. Over their prior eight games, the team had gone just 3-for-31 with the man advantage.
