In Elmont, Phillip Grubauer made 19 saves and the Seattle Kraken shut out the New York Islanders, 3-0, on Wednesday.
“It’s a great game from everybody,” Grubauer said. “I don’t think I had too many great chances (against) when you compare this to like other games we’ve played, like breakaways, 2-on-1s. I think like today it’s been like the least scoring chances we’ve given up like in a long, long time.”
After a scoreless 46 minutes of play, Jared McCann hit for the first goal of the contest in the third period at 6:04 of the frame.
“I just feel like things this year are going well and I’m getting put into good situations to score,” McCann said. “I’m just trying to take advantage of it. Obviously, I’m playing with two great players (Eberle, Marcus Johansson), and obviously, that helps a lot, too.”
Seattle improved to 15-27-4.
“At this time of year, these are the kind of games everybody’s going to be involved in,” Seattle head coach Dave Hakstol said. “Really, we had four in a row on this road trip. We knew that’s the kind of road trip it was going to be. For the guys, it’s a good reward. Really rewarding for them to finish off this road trip 2-2. We probably feel like we deserved a little bit better in the two games in-between, but you throw all of that aside. We had the opportunity in front of us tonight to get a good win, and we were able to do that.”
Less than four minutes after McCann’s goal, Vince Dunn doubled the lead to 2-0.
New York dropped to 16-17-6.
“To me, it’s one of the more disappointing games that I’ve coached as an Islander coach, to be honest with you,” Islanders head coach Barry Trotz said. “It was quite disappointing. We’ve had some games where we’ve got taken apart by a really good hockey team, but the effort’s there, maybe we made some mistakes, but I just didn’t think that our level of desire today was very good.
“I’m [ticked] off right now, plain and simple, and I’ll let the emotion hopefully go away. I’ll reassess our team. We’re going to need more. We’re going on the road, playing good teams and we’ve got to put in a better effort. We’ve had some great efforts and we didn’t get a win. I thought we had a really good effort obviously against Minnesota (a 4-3 loss on Sunday), but we didn’t get any points. But this one, we didn’t deserve any points. If we would’ve, we would’ve stole it.”
Seattle’s Mason Appleton added salt to the wound with an empty-net goal wiht two seconds left on the game clock.
“It’s been a good road trip,” Grubauer said. “I think we could’ve gotten a point or two points in New York (a 3-2 loss at the Rangers on Sunday) and gotten a point or two points yesterday. It would’ve been an unbelievable road trip, but we found a way to win and close it out today and got a couple of days off now.”
Semyon Varlamov made 28 saves in the Isles loss.
“We had an opportunity to win a hockey game with 20 minutes to go, and we go out there and there’s just a few minutes of dud hockey,” New York’s Anders Lee said. “That’s not good enough and our standards.”

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