ST. PAUL, Minn. — There were moments before the surging Kraken opened the scoring floodgates here Thursday night when goaltender Martin Jones was the only thing standing between them and a second-period deficit.
And then, after second-period goals by Morgan Geekie, Jamie Oleksiak and Alex Wennberg stunned the home crowd at Xcel Energy Center arena, it would be Jones coming through again with two huge stops late in the frame to keep his team’s sizable lead heading to intermission. That lead stood up from there and Wennberg would add a second goal in the third period of a 4-0 win over the Minnesota Wild for a Kraken team that’s now captured three straight and four of its past five.
Jones had missed a game two nights prior in Calgary, staying in Seattle while tending to a personal matter. He rejoined the team here and was back in goal for the fourth shutout in team history, as he has been for all but one of six matchups missed by No. 1 goalie Philipp Grubauer after he suffered a lower body injury two weeks ago at Colorado.
The Kraken have been on quite a roll starting with their surprising road win over the Avalanche, sporting a 5-2-0 record during that span. Five of their six victories in a 6-4-2 start to the season have come against playoff teams from last season, including an injury hampered Wild squad that nonetheless entered the night on a bit of a roll itself.
The Wild were missing four key players in Jordan Greenaway, Marcus Foligno, Ryan Hartman and Brandon Duhaime. But they’d also won four of their last five to reverse an early season slide and climb back near the top of the Central Division standings.
After a scoreless opening period in which the Kraken held the home side without a shot for the first 11 minutes, the Wild came out firing to start the second. They registered the first four shots of the period, three of them in dangerous, rapid-fire succession by Matt Dumba, Tyson Jost and Marco Rossi right around the three-minute mark, but Jones held firm.
Then, just two minutes later, Daniel Sprong would fire a harmless looking shot toward the net from the right side boards. Geekie was parked in front and got his stick on the puck to redirect it behind Wild goalie Marc-Andre Fleury to open the scoring.
Then, with just more than eight minutes to go in the frame, hulking defenseman Oleksiak would help lead a rush into the Wild zone before positioning himself directly to Fleury’s left. That positioned him perfectly to take Yanni Gourde’s cross-ice pass through the goal mouth before tapping the puck home for a 2-0 advantage.
The Kraken have struggled this season to build off two-goal road leads, blowing a pair of them in an overtime loss at Anaheim and then a regulation defeat against Chicago. They’d also botched a two-goal lead against the Avalanche in Denver but managed to rally late for an eventual winning goal by Karson Kuhlman.
This time, they did capitalize off a power play but needed a little video review help. An apparent goal by Wennberg was initially waved off when it was ruled he’d headed the puck into the net soccer-style.
But the replay showed the puck never touched Wennberg’s head and that it went in instead off his body. That made it 3-0 for the Kraken with just more than five minutes remaining in the period, a lead they badly wanted to carry into intermission.
But the Wild didn’t make things easy.
It would be Jones once again bailing the Kraken out, this time with a big stop off Joel Erikssonn Ek right on his doorstep with only a few minutes left in the period. Then, with 47 seconds to play until intermission, he came up huge off Mason Shaw from point-blank range to keep the three-goal margin intact.
The psychological advantage of a three-goal cushion instead of two enabled the Kraken to tighten up considerably in the third and limit opportunities by the Wild.
Wennberg would increase the Kraken’s lead to four goals midway through the frame, this time redirecting an incoming Will Borgen shot with his stick and not his body for his second goal of the night.
