It took a little help from the opposing goalie to finally get the Kraken offense firing once again.

The Kraken were down a pair to the Vegas Golden Knights with under 14 minutes to go in regulation Thursday night when netminder Adin Hill misplayed a puck and gave Berkly Catton a wide-open net to score only his second goal in more than two months. That seemed to ignite the home side as Bobby McMann tied things up minutes later, and then Catton delivered a 4-3 victory in a shootout by scoring his team’s second goal in four breakaway tries that round.  

Mitch Marner opened the shootout round scoring for Vegas, but then Matty Beniers tied it with a fantastic deke move on Hill during the second Kraken try. Catton then scored in the fourth shootout round, and Joey Daccord stopped Pavel Dorofayev to snap his team’s six-game losing streak.

Kraken winger Jared McCann also sealed a fifth consecutive 20-goal season, but for the longest time didn’t seem like it would be enough to get his team back in this one. The Kraken had scored two goals or fewer in six consecutive defeats and seemed well on their way to doing so for the 15th time in 22 games since the Winter Olympic break before goalie Hill took his walk on the wild side behind his own net. By that point, a pair of goals by Mark Stone in the first and second periods, and then a Brett Howden marker early in the third, seemed more than enough to help the visitors to a fifth straight win since firing coach Bruce Cassidy and replacing him with John Tortorella. 

The Kraken were already down two Stone goals by the time McCann wound up from the right point and rifled a shot behind Hill with just more than two minutes to play before intermission. McCann reached as many as 40 goals in a season three years ago, but the 20 this time around came under duress as repeated injuries have limited him to only 51 games thus far.

That’s a 33-goal pace over a full season and something McCann can hopefully build off as he strives to get completely healthy this summer. 

Kraken players and head coach Lane Lambert were questioned by media members pregame about the pending departure by team president Ron Francis at season’s end. The mutually-agreed-to move between Francis and the team was announced on Wednesday, followed by a Thursday morning press conference at Climate Pledge Arena in which Kraken CEO Tod Leiweke promised a full-fledged audit of hockey operations.

Part of that audit will undoubtedly look at the team’s offensive struggles and what can be done to address them this summer. Leiweke took time to mention the team’s ample salary cap space and draft capital to trade during the press conference, as well as saying the Kraken “want this to be a prolific off-season.”

He then added, “This isn’t about mitigation. This is about getting aggressive and getting after it.”

For this night, at least, they got some mitigation from the opposing goalie and then played aggressively enough to get back in it from there.