In Seattle, the Kraken took a big step in ending a stretch of stinkers on Sunday night when they defeated the New York Islanders, 4-1.
The Kraken had lost three in a row and eight of 11 games coming into the match.
Martin Jones made 18 saves for the Seattle win.
The Kraken improved to 19-12-4.
“We got back to it tonight. Really, that’s the bottom line,” Seattle coach Dave Hakstol said. “From the start, we were ready to check, we played with a lot of purpose. Specialty teams did a good job. Our goaltender made a couple of big saves in the last five minutes when it counted. Those are all the little pieces and you know, everything mixed in between through the 60 minutes was a solid, not spectacular, just a solid 60-minute performance.”
It’s no longer good enough to be “better than expected” for Seattle.
Mathew Barzal was the lone striker for the Isles.
“We weren’t clean on our breakout,” New York coach Lane Lambert said. “You can’t play with speed if you can’t execute or exit your zone cleanly, and we didn’t do that. Give them credit, they had good gaps all night and we didn’t execute the way we wanted to, and when we did have the puck in the neutral zone at times, we turned it over instead of getting it deep and establishing our forecheck.”
New York dropped to 21-15-2.
Seattle took a 1-0 lead midway through the opening period on a marker form Adam Larson.
“They wanted us to compete more,” Kraken forward Oliver Bjorkstrand said. “Have better awareness out there, how we need to reload and coming back and finding that balance between offense and defense. I thought we executed better”
Barzal tied seven minutes later.
“That wasn’t great, not a lot of possession,” Barzal said. “A lot of errors and some ugly hockey out there. Fast game, played up-tempo. Seemed like they came at us in waves all night.”
Eeli Tolvanen, claimed off the waiver wire from the Nashville Predators, gave the Kraken a 2-1 lead with four minutes gone in the middle frame.
“It felt really good,” Tolvanen said “It’s been a while since I played my last game (Nov. 19), so it’s nice to get the first goal out of the way in the first game. … It’s just the power play. Before we go we’re talking about just getting pucks on net and shooting it right away when we got it in zone.”
Bjorkstrand scored at 13:04 of the third to give the Kraken some breathing room at 3-1.
“We faltered two nights ago (7-2 loss to the Edmonton Oilers),” Hakstol said. “It was an embarrassing night. That’s a hard one to play in this building, yet we’re able to recover from that today and get an important two points.”
Brandon Tanev added an empty-net goal with 35 seconds left for the 4-1 final.
Ilya Sorokin made 31 saves in the Isles loss.
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