Kraken finish off disappointing season on a high, winning 4-3 in Minnesota

SAINT PAUL, Minn. — Kraken goalie Joey Daccord was his team’s feel-good story in their third season of franchise existence, so it was almost inevitable he’d be tasked to salvage the Thursday night finale of a disappointing campaign.

And though the Kraken took a while to get their offense going, they played a tight enough defensive game for Daccord and company to emerge with a season-ending 4-3 victory over the Minnesota Wild. A solid road effort in which the Kraken held the Wild to just 12 shots the opening two periods also enabled the visitors to avoid ending their campaign on a five-game losing streak.

Tye Kartye scored with 2:40 to go in regulation on a net front deflection of an Oliver Bjorkstrand blast to put the visitors ahead to stay. Yanni Gourde then scored his second short-handed goal of the game on an empty net with the goalie pulled for an extra attacker — finishing the season with three goals and an assist in his final two contests.

That turned out to be the actual game-winner as Brock Faber would get one back for Minnesota on the power play with a minute to go.

Earlier in the period, Gourde had given the Kraken a 2-1 lead, taking a breakaway pass from Brandon Tanev off a turnover and snapping a puck past goalie Marc-Andre Fleury six minutes into the final period to put the visitors on top. But Mats Zuccarello tied it on a breakaway of his own with 8:47 to go.

In a season with few highlights, journeyman center Pierre-Edouard Bellemare — who battled his way from France to the NHL, where he debuted just before his 30th birthday — played his 700th career game against the Wild at age 38. Bjorkstrand also collected two assists to reach a career high 59 points, while defensemen Will Borgen and Jamie Oleksiak each appeared in all 82 games.

But Jared McCann fell just one goal short in his bid for 30, while Eeli Tolvanen wound up two shy of his career high of 18, ringing a puck dead off the goal post late in the second period.

There were too many near misses for the Kraken throughout a season in which they never quite recovered from a tough opening 10-game start, seven of those contests against teams now going to the Stanley Cup playoffs. In similar fashion, their Minnesota opponents, having made the playoffs a season ago, are also sitting this postseason out after a dreadful start in which they fired their coach, recovered with a prolonged stretch of wins, but never made it all the way back.

The Kraken fell behind 1-0 after a power-play goal by Kirill Kaprizov in the opening period, but then a flurry of Wild penalties in the second helped them gain some momentum and tie it up. Matty Beniers, who struggled often his second season, notched his 15th goal of the season on a redirection of a Justin Schultz shot.

Beniers finishes with 15 goals, well off from his 24 in last season’s Calder Trophy campaign.

For the Kraken, the end of their season could not have come quickly enough.

It began basked in hope after making it all the way to Game 7 of last spring’s Western Conference semifinal against Dallas and igniting mass interest throughout the Puget Sound region. But it ended with the Seattle sports spotlight on anything but the men in ice skates, who’d spent the final quarter of the season playing out the string in sometimes ugly fashion.

With the Kraken effectively playing themselves out of contention five weeks ago, the remaining schedule quickly became a motivational challenge for players still reeling from the reality of their situation. There were ample times the team admittedly played less than a 60-minute game.

Of solace for the Kraken: They are likely nowhere near as bad as their 34-35-13 record suggests. But the 19-point drop from a season ago is also an indicator that they weren’t nearly good enough to repeat their playoff showing.

Instead, they’ll head into summer wondering about an offense that went AWOL the final 20 games, and that wasn’t much to crow about during the prior 62. From the very first week of the season up until the final road trip, the Kraken could barely count on two or three goals per game at the best of times.

They scored just one goal in each of their first four games and got blanked in the other.

They finished the season averaging just 2.6 per contest, fourth-worst in the NHL and nowhere near enough for Daccord or counterpart Philipp Grubauer to bail them out. Daccord, of course, spent most of mid-December through mid-February keeping a leaky Kraken ship from sinking.

Highlighted by his MVP performance in a 3-0 shutout of Vegas at the NHL Winter Classic outdoor game on Jan. 1, and then a 3-1 victory over the Bruins at TD Garden Arena in his Boston hometown in mid-February, Daccord helped pull the Kraken from the brink and back to the very edge of playoff contention.

But his team could never seem to take things from there. The Kraken would keep backsliding, then win just enough to remain on the fringes of contention. Then, having left themselves with little margin for error, they lost 3-0 at home to Winnipeg the day of the trade deadline to begin the eight-game losing streak that finished them off.

From then on, the Kraken did not win another game against a playoff-bound team. They had nine of them total, going 0-8-1 against Vegas, Dallas, Winnipeg, Nashville, Washington and Los Angeles. They scored only one goal or fewer in half of their final 20 games, forcing their goaltenders to register a shutout to win — which neither of them did.

Over the season’s final three months, following the end of a nine-game win streak that catapulted them back from obscurity, the Kraken went just 15-21-4 — securing only 34 points of a possible 80. They managed only six wins in their final 20 games, securing three against Anaheim and one apiece facing San Jose and Arizona before prevailing in Minnesota.