SAINT PAUL, Minn. — Kraken goalie Joey Daccord was his team’s feel-good story in their third season of franchise existence, so it was almost inevitable he’d be tasked to salvage the Thursday night finale of a disappointing campaign.
They didn’t need Daccord as much as usual in a 4-3 win over the Minnesota Wild, but he still made some huge saves in a third period that saw the Kraken finally break out with three late goals. But even as the rare strains of the team’s “Runaround Sue” victory song blared once more in the postgame dressing room for only the sixth time since March 5, the lessons from a season gone awry were sinking in fast.
“There’s a lot to learn, I think,” Daccord said. “When you go through tough times like this, I think that’s just going to make us stronger. We obviously have a big core of guys coming back next season again. So, I think we’ll just look at this season, take it for what it is. Accept it. Learn from it. Try to take as much as we can from it positively and things that we can work on and go from there.
“Starting from day one in training camp.”
That first day of camp is largely where things went sideways for the Kraken this season, when they preached a strong start but wound up scoring just one goal or fewer in five of their first six games while winning just three of the opening 10. A season that ended in Minnesota with Yanni Gourde scoring a pair of short-handed third-period goals — one into an empty net with goalie Marc-Andre Fleury pulled — along with a Tye Kartye deflection goal that same frame won’t be remembered for too many nights when the Kraken scored more than three goals.
Matty Beniers had also scored on the power play in the second period, bringing his season total to 15, as opposed to the 24 he netted during his Calder Trophy rookie campaign. Beniers will be in for a hefty contract extension this summer and likely have to bulk up a bit more as he goes about absorbing opposition blows and perfecting other aspects of his game.
Lessons he hopes the team absorbs include “being more connected as a team” next fall.
“Obviously, this feeling’s not great,” he said. “So, obviously take that into next year with a little chip and get back to work.”
Of solace for the Kraken: They are likely not as bad as their 34-35-13 record suggests. But the 19-point drop from a season ago is also an indicator they weren’t nearly good enough to repeat their playoff showing.
Kraken coach Dave Hakstol, whose status should be clarified in coming days, said the lessons to carry forth aren’t just recent ones from the team struggling to motivate itself once already eliminated from playoff contention.
“It’s not just the past two weeks, it’s the entire season,” he said. “That’s why you have to step back for a little bit of time and make sure that you take it all in. Because yeah, there’s an awful lot from this year that we have to walk away with. But it’s not quite that simple. We’ve gone through, you know, some of the stress of the last couple of weeks, it’s not a fun stretch to go through.”
Indeed, a season that began basked in hope after last spring’s playoff run, which ignited mass Kraken interest throughout the Puget Sound region, ended with the Seattle sports spotlight on anything but the men in skates. They’d spent the season’s final quarter playing out the string in sometimes ugly fashion.
Effectively out of contention five weeks ago, the remaining schedule quickly became a motivational challenge for players still reeling from the reality of their situation. There were ample times they admittedly played less than a 60-minute game, though they rallied with stronger efforts the past two weeks.
Hakstol addressed his players one final time postgame, thanking them for playing hard through the final games.
“What I just told our guys is I appreciated their will to continue fighting and battling,” Hakstol said. “Including right down to the wire tonight. Now we have to take a step back and make sure that we do everything that we can to make sure we’re not in this situation a year from now.”
Kraken veteran Yanni Gourde had said much the same earlier this week before finishing his final two games with three goals and an assist. But the reality is not enough Kraken players came ready to play nightly as Gourde did.
In a season with few highlights, journeyman center Pierre-Edouard Bellemare — who battled his way from France to the NHL, where he debuted just before his 30th birthday — played his 700th career game against the Wild at age 38. Oliver Bjorkstrand also collected two assists to reach a career-high 59 points, while he and defensemen Will Borgen and Jamie Oleksiak each appeared in all 82 games.
But there were too many near misses as a collective to ever really recover from the poor start.
Instead, the Kraken will head into summer wondering about an offense that went largely AWOL the final 20 games, and that wasn’t much to crow about during the prior 62. From the very first week up until the final road trip, the Kraken could barely count on two or three goals per game at best.
They scored just once in each of their first three games and got blanked in the other.
They finished the season averaging just 2.6 per contest, fourth-worst in the NHL and nowhere near enough for Daccord or counterpart Philipp Grubauer to bail them out. Daccord, of course, spent most of mid-December through mid-February keeping a leaky Kraken ship from sinking.
Highlighted by his MVP performance in a 3-0 shutout of Vegas at the NHL Winter Classic outdoor game on Jan. 1, Daccord helped pull the Kraken to the edge of contention.
But his team could never seem to take things from there. The Kraken would keep backsliding, then win just enough to remain on the fringes of contention. Then, having left themselves with little margin for error, they lost 3-0 at home to Winnipeg the day of the trade deadline to begin the eight-game losing streak that finished them off.
The Kraken could not beat a playoff-bound team from there, going 0-8-1 against Vegas, Dallas, Winnipeg, Nashville, Washington and Los Angeles. They scored one goal or fewer in half of their final 20 games.
So, Daccord getting supported by four to finish things Thursday was rare indeed. And he appreciated how teammates tried to stay competitive to the very end.
“It was just one of those seasons where things weren’t bouncing our way,” Daccord said. “And it takes a lot of mental strength and character to keep bringing your best every night.”
They’ll just need to bring a lot more of it, a lot earlier next season. In games when a playoff berth is actually still up for grabs.
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