SEATTLE — Of all the “Original Six” franchises the Seattle Kraken have played host to for the first time this season, the Boston Bruins are arguably the most enduring.
A team led by Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand and Davd Pastrnak is once again a playoff contender, as the Bruins have been for most of the past half-century with limited interruption. So, for the Kraken to salvage a point in this 3-2 overtime loss Thursday night is somewhat of an accomplishment, though the team still dropped its sixth in a row.
Jake DeBrusk scored his second of the game at the 33-second mark of the extra frame, beating Philipp Grubauer with a wrist shot to the far corner from the left faceoff circle.
The announced crowd of 17,151 at Climate Pledge Arena had previously seen Grubauer do all he could to keep the Kraken in the game, stopping 36 of 39 shots.
Grubauer was especially sharp in the first period when his team ran into penalty trouble and got outshot 17-8. While killing one of those penalties, Mark Giordano was sent in alone down the left side by Riley Sheahan and beat Linus Ullmark with a wrist shot to open the scoring at the 3:29 mark.
It was Giordano’s second short-handed goal in the past three games and for a long while looked enough to get the Kraken to the intermission with the lead despite the huge shots disparity. Grubauer was at his best, stopping Bergeron point-blank when sent in alone and also making several sharp leg saves.
But he couldn’t stop Boston from tying it 1-1 with 2:27 to go in the period after Kraken defenseman Jeremy Lauzon tried batting a puck out of midair and inadvertently swatted it right to his own goal line. DeBrusk was standing right there and smacked it in the net.
Boston continued pouring things on in the middle frame, winning a faceoff cleanly in the Kraken zone and seeing Charlie McAvoy feed Pastrnak with a nice cross-ice pass. Pastrnak unloaded a one-timed slap shot from the left faceoff circle that Grubauer had no chance on.
The Bruins had chances to build on the 2-1 lead from there, but Grubauer stood strong. Then, after a neutral zone turnover, Jordan Eberle led the Kraken on a 3-on-1 break, carried the puck in alone himself and then beat Ullmark with a quick deke to tie the game anew.
The Bruins, founded in 1924, won three of their six Cup titles overall before the “Original Six” era even began in 1942. But during that subsequent six-team era, dominated by Montreal, Toronto and Detroit, the Bruins were mostly an afterthought along with Chicago and the New York Rangers in a bottom half of a league where they lacked the territorial rights of the Canadian squads and the border city Red Wings.
It wasn’t until after the “Original Six” era ended that the Bruins’ glory years truly began, with Bobby Orr, Phil Esposito and Johnny Bucyk ushering in a pair of early 1970s championships followed by three finals appearances in five seasons later that decade.
In fact, the Bruins lost five straight championship series they appeared in before finally beating Vancouver for the Cup in a seven-game series in 2011. Since then, they’ve lost two more finals, to Chicago in 2013 and St. Louis in 2019.
But their 10 appearances in the finals are the second-most of any “Original Six” team since the NHL’s 1967 expansion, only two fewer than Montreal. And the Canadiens have only been to the finals twice in the past 29 years — including a somewhat fluke appearance last summer — whereas Boston continues to be a perennial contender.
The Kraken won’t be going to any playoffs this season. But thanks to Grubauer, they hung around longer in this one than they did against either the New York Islanders or the Vancouver Canucks in recent contests. Still, it wasn’t enough to avoid their third streak of at least six consecutive losses this season.
