After the Kraken dropped their fifth of eight goals on the Arizona Coyotes on Monday night, the game slid the rest of the way off the rails.
Seattle took out the basement-dwelling Coyotes 8-1 at Climate Pledge Arena. The fists flew in the final minutes as the Kraken didn’t let off the gas.
“We said in the dressing room, 'We have to stay on them. We can’t let up,'” Seattle’s Jared McCann, who scored twice, said. “We have a tendency to back up a little more and play defensive, and that puts us in the soup sometimes.”
It was the first meeting of the season between the teams, who will face off two more times in the next week.
In his 500th NHL game, McCann made it 37 goals on the year. The first came while the Kraken were killing off a penalty to Yanni Gourde. Matty Beniers relieved Arizona’s Travis Boyd of the puck as soon as Boyd carried it across the Kraken blue line, then dropped it off behind his back for McCann. McCann sent it whizzing past Arizona goaltender Ivan Prosvetov’s glove for a 2-0 lead.
McCann has scored the Kraken’s last three short-handed goals. The entire team has five this season.
“Jared’s killed in the league for a lot of years,” coach Dave Hakstol said. “For the first half of the year, before Christmas, we didn’t have him involved in the kill as much, trying to spread some minutes out.
“We changed the structure of our kill a little bit. He fits the structure of this kill very well and he’s done a nice job.”
McCann’s second of the night was even strength, with about five minutes left in the second period. The puck popped off a body in the Kraken end and McCann charged up the boards with it. He struck iron — left post, cross bar, then in off the right post.
Jordan Eberle opened the scoring and gave the Kraken power-play goals in three straight games. He planted himself in the slot and redirected a Daniel Sprong (two assists) feed past Prosvetov to make it 1-0. It was Eberle’s 100th point since joining the Kraken, and the only player to reach that mark before him — McCann — scored next.
Carson Soucy (one goal, one assist) made it 3-1 and was a fight away from a Gordie Howe hat trick. It looked like he might go with Lawson Crouse, who scored the Coyotes’ only goal, but it didn’t materialize. Soucy’s fellow defenseman Will Borgen scored Seattle’s fifth goal just over a minute into the third period. Oliver Bjorkstrand threw another on the pile with nine minutes left.
Jamie “Big Rig” Oleksiak and Liam “Big Tuna” O’Brien dropped the gloves in the third period. Listed at 6-foot-7 and 6-foot-1, respectively, they locked together right in front of Kraken goaltender Philipp Grubauer until O’Brien hit the ice to end the fight.
Josh Brown went at Gourde and earned himself a double minor for roughing, plus a 10-minute misconduct.
“We’ve got guys that can play that kind of game as well. We’ve got some pretty big boys on the team,” McCann said.
“When you’re down like that – I understand it, I’ve been on the other end of it as well, I get it – but at the same time, you’ve got to stay away from it.”
“Biggest thing is (to) stick up for teammates,” Soucy added. “Obviously we don’t need to do the running around. We just try to close out the game.”
Morgan Geekie scored the Kraken’s seventh goal, his first since Feb. 28. Ryan Donato added one more, then made his grand exit. Arizona’s Connor Mackey shoved Sprong down as the crowd roared. Donato went around the net and engaged Mackey instead of celebrating his goal, then headed down the tunnel 26.7 seconds early.
Sprong acknowledged that he’d taken an interference penalty against Mackey earlier in the game, but called the retaliation a “stupid play.”
“If he wants to come after me, he can hit me clean in the game, don’t do it there at the end,” Sprong said.
“It’s been a long year for them and they just lost 8-1. If the roles were reversed, I think we’d be pissed off too. But I don’t think that’s the time and place to do it.
“Donny scored a great goal there and then stepped up for me. I’ll get him a dinner.”
Grubauer made most of his consequential saves in the first 10 minutes and totaled 20. He even got on the scoresheet, registering an assist on McCann’s second goal.
Vince Dunn’s two assists held off McCann in the team scoring race and gave him 200 NHL points.
All three of Monday night’s games featured Western Conference playoff hopefuls, and two of them clinched playoff spots. The Vegas Golden Knights took the Minnesota Wild to overtime and beat them there, but the Wild only needed a point and a loss by the Nashville Predators to secure a postseason berth. The Dallas Stars had their backs, blowing out the Predators 5-1.
The Stars also clinched a playoff spot. The Los Angeles Kings put an "x" next to themselves in the standings Sunday in Vancouver, the night after beating the Kraken 3-1. There are three available spots in the West — the Colorado Avalanche, third in the Central Division, have yet to clinch, plus the two wild-card teams. The Kraken strengthened their hold on the first wild-card spot.
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