Kraken streak ends at eight in 4-1 loss

In Seattle, the Kraken’s eight-game winning streak came to an end on Monday night in a 4-1 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Andrei Vasilevskiy made 22 saves in the Tampa win.

The Lightning moved to 28-13-1, and have won four straight.

“Theyre a good hockey team and are going to get some chances, but I thought we limited them pretty well,” Tampa Bay coach Jon Cooper said. “They pushed, as to be expected, but we weathered it and [Nicholas Paul‘s] goal was a big one for us. It was a tight-checking game, special teams wasn’t a big factor. It was just two pretty good teams going at it.”

The Lightning took a 1-0 lead in the first period on a strike from Pierre-Edouard Bellemare .

“I thought we came out flying.” Tampa Bay forward Ross Colton said. “We knew they were on a big winning streak. We wanted to set the tone, and I think we did a good job of doing that. Second period wasn’t great, we kind of took our foot off the gas, thought it was going to be easy like the first. Obviously a good team over there and they took it to us, but credit to the leaders and the coaches.”

The score remained there until the third period where the Bolts hit for three markers.

“It’s all about managing the game and we don’t need another [goal],” Cooper said. “We just needed to prevent them from getting one. It’s not like we sat back, we were feeling pretty good about our offensive game, at least the possession part of it.”

Vince Dunn scored for Seattle to cut the deficit in half at 2-1.

“I think we could have been a lot better with our execution right out of our zone,” Dunn said. “I think we had our chances and our looks. I definitely think we turned down a couple of shots, but for the most part our execution needs to be better.”

Seattle dropped to 26-13-4.

“They’re tough team to get inside on, they box you out early,” Kraken coach Dave Hakstol said. “You’ve got to find a way to get inside and win that race inside early and then shoot pucks inside, and you know, we weren’t able to do that.”

Brandon Hagel and Victor Hedman hit empty nets for the 4-1 final in the final two minutes of the game.

Philipp Grubauer made 27 saves in the loss.