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More than five periods into his team’s latest scoring drought, Kraken forward Kailer Yamamoto found himself in alone with a chance he couldn’t afford to miss.
Riding on the Spokane native’s back with him Tuesday night as he shifted from backhand to forehand against Florida Panthers netminder Sergei Bobrovsky was the weight of eight consecutive Kraken losses in a season slipping away. As Yamamoto hoisted the puck top-shelf, breaking the night’s scoring ice and keying a 4-0 streak-snapping Kraken victory, the Climate Pledge Arena crowd leaping to its feat was quite visibly surrounded by ample empty seats that have accumulated as the prior losses piled up.
Pierre-Edouard Bellemare added some crucial insurance six minutes into the final period, one-timing a pass to the slot from behind the net by Ryker Evans — who drew his first-career point on the assist. Then, just three minutes later, Alex Wennberg beat Bobrovsky with a short side laser to put the Kraken up by three and leave little doubt as to the game’s final result.
Eeli Tolvanen added an empty-net goal with 3:51 to play and Bobrovsky pulled for an extra attacker as the Panthers desperately tried to get back in it.
Kraken goalie Joey Daccord kept his team close all night at times when they were being badly outshot, posting the first shutout of his career in his 27th start.
Nothing came easy for the Kraken on this streak or in this game and the team, judging by those unfilled seats, still has a long way to go to undo damage inflicted by the losing skid. But they’ll take the long-sought victory on a night they’d managed just three shots in the opening period and snapped a scoreless deadlock on their fourth attempt of the game early in the second thanks to Yamamoto’s breakaway stickwork.
It was the first win all season for the Kraken, now 9-14-7, when they’ve scored fewer than four goals, having lost 21 prior times in such situations. That they pulled it off in this one was largely due to goalie Daccord, who stopped all 24 shots faced and has now allowed two goals or fewer his last three starts.
Problem is, his team hadn’t scored any goals in Daccord’s prior two starts, so, he had little margin for error as last season’s Stanley Cup finalists poured it on early — outshooting the Kraken 9-3 in the opening period and limiting them to one good scoring chance by Yamamoto from close range.
Then, after Yamamoto gave the Kraken their first goal in 106 minutes, 4 seconds of regulation and overtime play, Daccord had to be equally adept the remainder of that middle frame as the Kraken ran into penalty trouble. At one point, the Panthers held the puck for one minute, 35 seconds of a delayed penalty call, forcing the exhausted Kraken to scramble around with the Florida goalie pulled for an extra attacker.
But they killed that off, then an official two-minute power play right after and another penalty only a few minutes later.
Protecting leads has not been a Kraken strength this season, so the third period looked to be tight-collar time. They’d taken a 2-0 lead against Florida on the road back in October, only to lose 3-2 when Daccord — who stopped 35 shots that game — misplayed a puck off the glass stanchion with 5:52 to play in regulation.
The Kraken’s skid could also have been halted at six last Saturday, but the Kraken failed to protect a 3-2 third period lead. The Tampa Bay Lightning scored once on Daccord — who’d come on in relief of injured Philipp Grubauer that frame — to tie it, then beat him again in overtime for a seventh consecutive Kraken defeat.
That loss was the sixth for Daccord beyond regulation this season, four coming in overtime and two others via shootout. So, it became increasingly clear as the third period ticked onward that his margin for error on this night would be somewhere approaching zero.
Six minutes into the third, he almost got scored on twice by his own defender as Vince Dunn deflected a puck Daccord had to make an acrobatic stop on. Dunn then tried to play the rebound back to Daccord a little too quickly and the goalie again had to alertly smother it.
Barely a minute later, Bellemare pounced on a rebound for his third goal of the season and the Kraken had their first multi-goal lead in nearly three weeks.
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