Those cheers from the home fans as Philipp Grubauer skated off the ice with 56 minutes still to play Friday night was as ominous a sound as any Kraken supporter wants to be hearing or making.
But there was no mistaking the sentiment; a combination of anger and frustration directed at a No. 1 goaltender who will end the 2022 calendar year much the same way he did 2021. Grubauer wasn’t the main reason for an embarrassing 7-2 loss to the Edmonton Oilers, but his three goals allowed on the only five shots he’d face signaled the improved Kraken still haven’t fully left their goaltending issues behind.
Kraken coach Dave Hakstol was asked postgame whether his decision to pull Grubauer was due to his performance or a bid to wake his slumbering team up.
“A little bit of both,” he said. “I mean, regardless of the situation we need a goaltender to make some saves. But at that point in time, our team wasn’t going. So, you make a change in net, take a few seconds for everybody on the bench to reset and hope you go back and push in the other direction. And we didn’t do that.”
Daniel Sprong and Brandon Tanev scored for the Kraken, who at times trailed 4-0 and 6-1, but there was little for the announced crowd of 17,151 fans to cheer for beyond the goaltending pull. The Kraken fell to 18-12-4 with their eighth loss in 11 games and now trail the Oilers by two points – tumbling into fourth place in the Pacific Division.
Though Connor McDavid closed out the scoring with just more than nine minutes to go on a five-point night for him, this game was effectively over just before the four-minute mark of the opening frame. That’s when Darnell Nurse scored a third Edmonton goal at 3:55 of the first period to make it 3-0 in front of the shellshocked fans on a still quite early night.
And while Nurse’s wrist shot was from a dangerous high slot area – one of a plethora of such chances allowed by porous Kraken defenders – it was also unscreened from 32 feet out and one Grubauer really needed to stop. But he didn’t and that meant a reeling Kraken side that already had given up early goals by Zach Hyman and Klim Kostin were in one of those vintage 2021-22 holes they couldn’t dig out of.
“Yeah, I’m sure we want a stop there,” Hakstol said. “But that’s about the fourth place I’m going to look at on that. We got beat up the ice in a couple of different cases there at a time where our full mentality should be to shut it down and settle the game down and work our way into it.”
The first two goals saw Grubauer hung out to dry by his defense, initially on a tic-tac-toe passing play while short-handed and then when Kostin was left all alone in front to take a pass and deke the goalie point-blank. But after stopping 41 shots in a 3-2 loss to Calgary two nights prior, Grubauer didn’t look to have the same mojo this time and Hakstol got him out of there before things got worse.
And they quickly got worse for Martin Jones not long after he skated onto the ice serenaded by a partial ovation from the home fans. As with Grubauer, there wasn’t much Jones could do once the defense went AWOL and fired shots at him from all angles.
Right before the opening period’s midway mark, Jesse Puljujarvi was left all alone in front and easily beat Jones to make it 4-0. It could have been worse had Jones not made a point-bank, final-minute save off trail man Nurse on what had become a 4-on-1 break.
“I think lately we haven’t been playing our best hockey and tonight was just a big slap in our face,” said Yanni Gourde, one of two players singled out by Hakstol — along with Tanev — as those that never stopped working despite the shellacking being unleashed. “We didn’t come out the way we wanted. They were opportunistic and they scored three goals in the first three or whatever minutes it was. At this time of year, it’s really unacceptable to have a performance like this.”
The first period ranked as one of the worst ever played by the Kraken – right up there with home disasters early last season against the Colorado Avalanche and Pittsburgh Penguins. They were outshot 15-7 and out-chanced by a gap even bigger than the Kraken defenders kept giving the attacking Oilers.
While the Kraken woke up in the opening two minutes of the middle frame, with Vince Dunn winning a fight against Dylan Holloway and Sprong scoring seconds later when Oilers goalie Stuart Skinner muffed his shot, things quickly went downhill again.
Kostin scored his second of the night by redirecting a Nurse point shot fewer than four minutes after Sprong’s goal. Then, just a minute later, with the Kraken again killing a penalty, McDavid waltzed into the slot and fired a shot that Hyman ticked in for his second of the game.
Down 6-1, Tanev did some nice work digging out a rebound and poking home a second Kraken goal. But it was too little, too late by that point.
“Obviously we needed a better start,” Kraken defenseman Adam Larsson said. “But tonight was more of a 60-minute issue. It just wasn’t good enough.”
Larsson added that the issue “just wasn’t one thing tonight” and that the team can play much quicker and sharper.
Grubauer has struggled to live down his reputation from some poor starts the opening months of the Kraken’s debut season last year.
And while Grubauer has played some stronger games to start this season, he’s yet to get in a consistent winning groove after missing more than a month following a lower body injury Oct. 21 against Colorado. For that to happen, the team around him also has to play better than it did in this one.
“That’s where we have to take a close, hard look at ourselves,” Hakstol said. “All of us.”