Inside the NHL
VANCOUVER, B.C. — A noticeable but needed change has descended upon the Kraken just before a Christmas break that follows Thursday night’s game here against the Canucks.
The Kraken had compiled a shiny, pretty, holiday jewel of a 15-5-3 record until a couple weeks ago, when they dropped five of six games. Naturally, such a skid prompts retrospection and underscores the importance of these next few weeks.
Growing up in Montreal, my hockey friends and I referred to this as the point in a season where “the gloves come off” — which, in ordinary hockey parlance refers to what players do when preparing to fight. They drop their gloves and get down and dirty, even rolling around on the ice grappling with combatants oblivious to how it might appear. It’s uncouth, inglorious and a good metaphor for a Kraken team that’s been dirtied a bit and needs to drop any pretense about what it is and get back to grinding out wins to leave that slump behind.
That began with a 3-2 victory over the Winnipeg Jets on Sunday and continued with a 5-2 victory over the St. Louis Blues on Tuesday night. It didn’t erase all that went sideways during the losses, or even prior victories that were goal-scoring bonanzas in which defensive play was abandoned.
But for now it restores some luster.
Let’s face it: This team was never finishing No. 1 overall. That might have been fun to dream about for a millisecond as Kraken piled up points in a 10-1-1 month of November against mostly the league’s tougher teams.
But there’s a danger in focusing too much on a stellar record — and players do it just like fans — where you want to nurture and grow it so obsessively you almost become fearful of losing. Play becomes tentative and too cute, as players fearful of ruining what they’d built seek perfection on every shift and stop doing the simple things that made them successful.
Jared McCann, who leads the Kraken with 15 goals, alluded to it indirectly after the victory over Winnipeg when asked about his team’s recent scoring struggles.
“We kind of got away from shooting the puck a little bit,” McCann said. “We tried to make the extra play, backdoor tap-in, that kind of thing. Sometimes … you’ve just got to shoot the puck.”
Shoot the darned puck, and stop pretending they’re the 1977 Montreal Canadiens, 1985 Edmonton Oilers or even the 2022 Colorado Avalanche. This Kraken team will never overwhelm opponents with elite offensive skill, no matter how good its record. They’ve always been a hardworking group that excels by keeping things simple and honest.
And acting otherwise by abandoning their two-way game wasn’t doing them any defensive favors, either.
“Some of those wins when we were rolling there, I think we were a little bit loose,” Kraken defenseman Vince Dunn opined following Tuesday’s morning skate before the St. Louis game.
Well, the gloves are off now.
As boxer Mike Tyson once famously said: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
What he meant was, once the jaw gets rattled you drop the fancy pretension and get back to your basic, brawling core — relying on instinct that gets the job done even if not stylistically pretty.
Not that the cute stuff was entirely why the Kraken began losing. Missing their second defensive pairing on a team that wasn’t a touted blue line standout to begin with didn’t help.
The losses could also be attributed to strength of opponents. And plain old regression, as absolutely nobody picked the Kraken to finish top five in the league.
Heck, even the New Jersey Devils — who coasted through November on pace to shatter the season NHL points record — have been jolted back to reality by losing six in a row and seven of their past nine.
In any event, there’s no longer a need for the Kraken to be fearful of losses blemishing their pretty record. The gloves have come off. All the cute and fancy stuff that creeped in as the record soared can be set aside. The Kraken are now in a scrap and must revert to the instinctive basics of what they are hoping to remain a playoff contender.
Kraken coach Dave Hakstol said after Monday’s practice that he didn’t think his team was going through a midseason lull. Like many NHL coaches, Hakstol approaches the season as a series of five-game, short-term segments to make things “simpler” on players.
“We try to worry about a short-term focus with some of the short-term goals, knowing where we want to end up at the end of the regular season,” Hakstol said.
And for the Kraken, once again, simpler is usually better.
Playoffs are undoubtedly part of that longer term focus and that won’t change even with the record now a lesser but still quite respectable 18-10-3. The strong start built enough cushion to absorb the recent losses without torching the season.
They also have multiple games in hand on most teams before them and are clinging to third place in the Pacific Division and the automatic playoff berth that entails.
But they’ve also fallen back among the middle-tier teams, only three points up on the Calgary Flames — a much higher-rated squad than the Kraken when the season began and currently chasing the final Western Conference wild-card spot.
It’s no longer about the Kraken padding their record in a quest for postseason home-ice advantage. Now, it’s about winning any way they can and proving they can still be a playoff team of any kind.
A good place to start proving it will be right here Thursday night against a Canucks team they’ve never beaten. The last time they played in October, it was a fight-filled affair with all the makings of a supposed rivalry.
But it’ll never be a true rivalry until one team stops beating the other with impunity.
So yes, the gloves truly are off for the Kraken in a metaphorical sense. And they will likely start dropping in a literal sense as the Kraken and Canucks quickly dispense with any pretense of holiday goodwill.
The pretense is over for the Kraken. What comes next is tough, messy and sure won’t be cute. But it might prove rewarding if they embrace it with no further shortcuts.