The Seattle Kraken will try to extend their winning streak to three games Saturday when they host the Minnesota Wild, who have lost the first two games of a five-game road trip.
Minnesota fell 4-3 in a shootout Tuesday at Edmonton and 2-1 Thursday at Calgary, dropping to 0-1-1 on its road trip. The Wild visit Vancouver on Sunday and Utah on Tuesday to complete the trip.
“That’s two games in a row we lost the special teams battle and it cost us,” said Wild forward Blake Coleman, who was in the penalty box for Calgary’s first goal. “You’ve got guys sitting on the bench that need to be on the ice. Three penalties in a row in the first period is not the recipe and I’m certainly part of that. I’ll clean it up. I know we all will and we’ll go from there.”
Michael McCarron scored the lone goal for Minnesota in the third period and goalie Jesper Wallstedt made 20 saves.
“We battled back and gave ourselves a chance, but ultimately, it wasn’t good enough,” Minnesota coach John Hynes said.
Kirill Kaprizov, the Wild’s leading scorer with 17 points in 11 games (11 goals, six assists), saw his seven-game point streak (eight goals, six assists) and four-game goal streak snapped.
Minnesota defensemen Jared Spurgeon and Olli Maatta returned Thursday after missing four and three games, respectively, with upper-body injuries. Forward Maxim Shabanov (upper body) was a late scratch and Hynes said he’s day-to-day.
“If you give up two goals and you’re trying to chase the whole game, it’s tough playing that way,” Maatta said. “Kudos to them for defending hard, but also I think we got our chances and that just showed the way we’ve got to play the full 60.”
The Wild will face a surging Seattle squad that’s 5-1-1 over its past seven games, including a 5-3 win over Utah on Thursday, with Mackie Samoskevich scoring the tiebreaking goal at 14:35 of the third period and goaltender Philipp Grubauer making 33 saves.
Jordan Eberle and Brandon Montour had a goal and an assist apiece and Matty Beniers and Frederick Gaudreau also tallied for the Kraken, who are 2-0-0 on their four-game homestand that wraps up next Wednesday against Toronto.
It was the second straight game Seattle overcame a blown multi-goal third-period lead. The Kraken surrendered a 3-1 advantage against Utah after allowing Detroit to erase a 3-0 deficit Tuesday before winning 4-3 in a shootout.
“If you want to look at it from a positive standpoint, we’re getting into a position where we’re able to give up a multi-goal lead and still win,” Kraken coach Lane Lambert said. “We’ve got to continue to play the game the same way that got us the lead, and that comes with a little bit of experience, a little bit of time. What it says about our team’s resilience in these situations, it says a lot.”
Beniers wasn’t as sympathetic.
“We got to learn from it,” the forward said. “We have to get better playing with leads and shutting teams down and not letting them push back.”