In Seattle, Philipp Grubauer made 33 saves and pitched his first shutout of the season in a 2-0 win for the Kraken over the visiting Pittsburgh Penguins on Thursday night. 
“When you have that type of goaltending, it builds confidence because it erases mistakes,” Seattle coach Dave Hakstol said. “Mistakes happen all the time in this game, and when a goaltender takes one of those off the board, all of a sudden, it’s a little easier to focus on the positive things.”
Seattle is 5-1-1 in their last seven matches and improved to 26-22-11 overall.
“I think [the third] was our best period,” Seattle’s Alex Wennberg said. “Obviously, there’s momentum in the game, but I feel like the third period, we were determined to win this game, and that’s all that matters.”
Oliver Bjorkstrand scored at 12:25 of the opening stanza to stake the Kraken to a 1-0 lead. He scored by batting the puck in midair.
“It doesn’t always look pretty,” Wennberg said. “Sometimes you’ve just got to find a puck up in the air, and obviously [Bjorkstrand] has that sense for scoring goals.”
The Penguins dropped to 27-22-8, snapping a three-game streak.
“I thought for a lot of the night, we were the better team, we just couldn’t find a way to finish,” Pittsburgh coach Mike Sullivan said. “It’s hard to win when you don’t score goals. I don’t think it was from a lack of opportunity. We had a lot of pucks at the net, we just didn’t finish tonight.”
Wennberg hit off the power play at 15:02 of the third period for the 2-0 final.
“It’s been a while for myself, but obviously it’s more important to get those points than to get the shutout,” Grubauer said. “It’s huge for the team too, because everybody played their part.”
Tristan Jarry made 26 saves in the loss.
“I think we played two-thirds of the game pretty well,” Jarry said. “We had a really good first period, I thought we had a pretty good second period, and obviously they brought it to us a little bit more in the third. And they were able to capitalize on a weird bounce and one net drive.”
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