DALLAS -- The Seattle Kraken were pushing. They were aggressive. Their pace was pretty consistent throughout and they looked prime to erase an early three-goal deficit and pull out a big road victory.
There was a lot of good there. So what went wrong?
"We've got to be a little bit more patient, so that we're not giving up a couple of the transition plays that we did," Kraken coach Dave Hakstol said after a 5-2 loss to the Dallas Stars in Game 5 of the Western Conference Second Round at American Airlines Center on Thursday.
"And we're going to have to be a little harder to generate more at the other end of the rink. They did a really good job tonight of making it hard to get inside and hard to get to their net. They were good in that area tonight."
The Stars took a 3-2 lead in the best-of-7 series. Game 6 is at Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle on Saturday (7 p.m. ET; ESPN, TVAS, SN).
Indeed, this wasn't a game where the Kraken were hanging their heads due to a nonchalant performance. It was just little mistakes here and there that led to big consequences against the Stars, who were opportunistic at every turn.
"The first one, it's just a quick play that we kind of stab at instead of being able to kind of take command of the puck and make a play on that. The second one off transition quick.," Hakstol said of Wyatt Johnston's goal, off a Jamie Benn pass from behind the net 3:57 into the game and Roope Hintz's snipe from the left circle at 5:35 of the first.
Although Hakstol said he thought the Kraken had a solid start to Game 5, defenseman Adam Larsson said he thought differently. Asked when he thought the Kraken got to their game, he said, "late in the first."
"Then carried over to the second," he said. "One thing with this team, we have never quit and we probably never will."
And they definitely didn't quit, using their balanced scoring to get back into this one. Larsson roofed a shot short side -- they've had good results with top-shelf shots against Stars goalie Jake Oettinger throughout this series -- to cut Dallas' lead to 3-1 barely two minutes into the second period.
The Kraken then got their 18th different goal-scorer of the Stanley Cup Playoffs when forward Jared McCann scored his first career postseason goal to make it 3-2 at 7:30 of the second.
Some of Seattle's players felt it was only a matter of time before that got that tying goal.
"Yeah, I mean, we had a push. You could feel it on the bench. you feel it coming," Kraken forward Jordan Eberle said. "Obviously, that fourth one was a bit of a dagger."
That fourth one, from Hintz, which needed a quick review while play was continuing to confirm it tucked under the top of the net, proved to be too much for the Kraken to overcome.
"It's hard this time of the year to come back from two goals (down)," Larsson said. "They're a veteran team too, so those timely goals have been costly for us.
"I don't know. I mean we've just got to keep finding a way to keep those out of the net and try to keep pushing forward to score one and tie the game up. That probably cost us the game tonight."
The Kraken will now head home, where they'll try to stave off elimination in this, their first trip to the Stanley Cup Playoffs in their second season in the NHL. Seattle isn't done. As Stars forward Tyler Seguin said prior to Game 5, the Kraken are "the real deal," the group that knocked off the defending Stanley Cup champion Colorado Avalanche in the first round.
They liked most of what they did in Game 5. They just have to fix what mistakes they did make in Game 6.
"We want to be a quick team, but we have to be smart about it, too," Eberle said. "We can't be diving in everywhere and giving them odd-man rushes and opportunities to score. It's just having the smarts and the veteran presence to know when to do that and when not to do it.
"I think even if you're 98 percent sure and two percent off, the two percent are the ones that end up in the back of your net. We have to find a way to just continue to play that way but limit the chances they get."
