(Montreal) The beginnings of the season for the Seattle Kraken follow one another and are not the same. And in the same vein, the Kraken’s performances since the start of the current campaign have been uneven to say the least from one match to the next, a situation which saddens Yanni Gourde.
The Quebec striker does not hide the fact that the team from the northwest of the United States is having a frustrating start to the season, marked by a lack of consistency.
“I think that consistency is really the biggest problem, the biggest adversity that we are facing this year,” mentioned Gourde on Monday noon, a few hours before the match against the Montreal Canadiens at the Bell Centre.
“Game after game, we have difficulty having the same effort, putting together 60 minutes and having a good performance from one game to the next. That’s a bit of the problem we have this year,” he continued.
About seven months ago, the Kraken surprised the Colorado Avalanche in the first round of the Western Conference playoffs. In the next round, the Kraken gave the Dallas Stars a good scare before disappearing in seven games. All this, in his second year of existence in the NHL.
However, so far this season, the Kraken looks more like the 2021-22 vintage, its first season in the NHL, than a team in progress.
After its first 25 games in 2021-22, the Kraken posted a record, all in all respectable for an expansion club, of 9-14-2 for a total of 20 points.
Two years later, after the same number of games, Dave Hakstol’s squad had a dismal record of 8-11-6 and a total of 22 points, good for 11th place in the West.
However, at the same stage last year, the Kraken had amassed 15 wins and 33 points, en route to a 46-win, 100-point campaign.
One would think that the Kraken’s performances last year caused their rivals to raise their level of play a notch when the Kraken faces them this season. However, Gourde does not see things that way.
“I think it’s more in the group here. We don’t need to worry too much about the other teams. The solution is here, it’s in this locker room,” he said bluntly.
The Kraken showed up at the Bell Center in a slump, with four consecutive losses. Two of his defeats came in Chicago and Ottawa, home to two of the worst teams in the NHL.
Despite the team’s recent setbacks, Gourde was convinced that the Kraken would turn the tide.
“Lately, we’ve been playing good games, we’ve had better games. It’s just that we lack a bit of detail sometimes. But in general, I think we’ve been playing better lately. We’ll find a way to win a couple of games and get back on track,” he said.