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

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.