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Kraken 6, Flyers 2: Sloppy in Seattle

If you stayed up for the entirety of this game, we feel bad for you.

The Philadelphia Flyers visited the Seattle Kraken on Thursday night and although they had periods of looking like a team that wanted to score some goals or play the game of hockey, they were heavily defeated because their opponent simply took advantage of their misfortunes.

Technically, the game finished with the Flyers have an advantage in 5-on-5 shot attempts (50-46) and in high-danger scoring chances (11-5) but those chances never truly looked like they had more power behind them compared to the chances that the Kraken scored on.

It is just a lack of talent and some incredibly sloppy plays that caused the Flyers to lose 6-2 in Seattle.

In the opening minutes, both teams were extremely flat-footed. Barely any shot attempts were made as they were just warming up — flirting with the idea of trying to score some goals.

That quickly led to Kraken forward Ryan Donato taking a penalty and gifting Philadelphia a power play to (in theory) get some juice flowing and get comfortable putting pucks on net. Well, within just seconds of the top unit stepping on the ice, Jared McCann was gifted a shorthanded odd-man rush and snapped the puck past Carter Hart to open the scoring.

Usually you can’t solely blame one particular player on goals against, or even on these shorthanded goals it was a full team effort to give up the goal. Well, Kevin Hayes really thought he his possession would not be challenged on the man advantage. That’s all we’ll say on that.

There is nothing like giving up a shorthanded goal within the opening minutes to take the wind out of your sails. And this is the Philadelphia Flyers we’re talking about; so there isn’t even a gust of wind to start with. After McCann scored his 26th goal of the season, the Flyers could not get a shot on goal for so damn long. Seattle went on to have a total of eight shots through he first 12 minutes — the Flyers had zero.

Before Philadelphia caused Philip Grubauer to make a save, they had a fight as Nic Deslauriers dropped the gloves with Jamie Oleksiak and danced a fairly even dance. Got some decent jabs in early but then went on defense to get the towering Kraken defenseman make his punches not count.

Again, a fight before a shot on goal.

Joel Farabee got the Flyers’ first shot 13 minutes and 41 seconds into the game. Great job guys!

And speaking of great jobs, the Kraken got their second goal of the game shortly after that first shot.

On a delayed Flyers penalty, the Kraken got the extra skater on the ice and Yanni Gourde tipped in his seventh goal of the season past a Hart that had bodies upon bodies to battle with and could clearly not see the puck coming.

Anyways, the Flyers finished the second period clutching on to that single shot on goal, compared to the Kraken’s 12.

Philadelphia starts the second period with a whole lot more jump than they had in the first 20 minutes. Maybe John Tortorella yelled at them a bunch to just shoot as much as they could but nevertheless they got two more shots on goal within the first 90 seconds of the second frame.

Somehow, after taking the first 20 minutes off, the Flyers appeared to be an even match for this Seattle team in the first half of the second period. No goals were scored (of course) but they got real scoring chances that made them seem like they had a chance to make this a respectable game.

Oh, and then the Kraken scored again.

In the middle of a power play, Justin Schultz let it rip and the puck just slit right through the Flyers penalty kill and into the back of the net. Just a game-deciding goal — but even after the first goal, we knew how this game was going to end up.

After the third goal, the Flyers were simply demoralized and they returned to their first-period performance of letting Seattle trounce and tread all over them. In an effort to get some offense on the board, Kieffer Bellows attempted to stickhandle along the offensive blue line, lost the puck, and then Oliver Bjorkstrand was handed a breakaway.

Because of this goal, Hart was pulled and in came  Samuel Ersson to … try and save more unsaveable goals?

Oh, and what do you know — the Flyers are sleeping in their own end and let the Kraken pass the puck all around them on the power play. Gourde went on to score his second of the game on a beautiful play and shot to make it 5-0.

(Sorry if you don’t want to read a game recap full of opposing goals, but there’s nothing else to talk about.)

By the way, at this point of the game the Flyers still haven’t hit double digits in shots on goal. With 90 seconds remaining in the second period they finally got to 10 shots. What an achievement! That’s basically like scoring a goal, kind of. Somehow, Seattle only had double that amount by the end of the period.

To open the final frame, the Flyers decided enough was enough and they broke Grubauer’s shutout effort thanks to Travis Konecny getting back on the score sheet.

As Quigs mentions, Konecny set a new career-high in goals scored with this tally being his 25th of the season. There are still plenty of games left to hit more milestones.

And just when we were able to take something positive away from this game, the Kraken came storming back to take advantage of some extremely poor play from our Flyers.

It is goalscorer Konecny’s turn to cough up the puck on an attempted pass in the offensive zone that leads directly to an odd-man rush for Seattle.

Maybe it is just what we should be used to but the Kraken have gotten a considerable amount of these types of scoring chances in this game alone, and they’ve scored on them as well. Something is up — it is probably just Philadelphia being so damn bad.

And just to make it look like they weren’t absolutely horrid in this game, Konecny put the team on his back like it was last year, and scored his second of the period.

In the classic Konecny way, the winger gets the second chance after the Flyers’ initial shot rebounds off the back boards and careens perfectly to Grubauer’s side and a place that Konecny can rifle it into twine.

Luckily for all of us, the game ended without any more goals to really care about or think about and time just trickled on for the final minutes. We’re tired and don’t want to think about the Philadelphia Flyers playing the Seattle Kraken anymore.

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