Three Takeaways – Montour injury, Kraken mistakes prove costly in 4-3 OT loss at Lightning

If hockey is a game of mistakes, the Seattle Kraken made one—or maybe two or three—too many on Thursday, costing themselves a standings point against the Tampa Bay Lightning. But to their credit, they very nearly overcame those mistakes again and did rally back to force the game into overtime. “[It was] skating,” coach Lane Lambert said of what made the game feel different from period to period. “We weren’t moving our feet. We weren’t making quick enough plays, so when we don’t do that, we look very average. When we do it, we look above average.” The overtime defeat meant the Kraken are now 3-0-1 on what many viewed as a very tough early-season test of a road trip, with an opportunity to come home Saturday night with as many as nine points out of a possible 10. “That’s a good point for us to get, certainly being down like that in the third period,” Lambert said. “So at the end of the day, you start getting into Game 4 and Day 8 or 9 of a road trip, and it starts to become fatiguing. I thought we had a little bit of fatigue tonight.” By the way, this loss may have come with an even bigger cost to the team, which we’ll touch on in Takeaway 3. Here are Three Takeaways from a 4-3 Kraken overtime loss at the Lightning. Takeaway 1: Costly mistakes After Freddy Gaudreau pressured Andrei Vasilevskiy and Emil Lilleberg into a costly turnover, Ryan Winterton opened the scoring on the doorstep. Seattle returned the favor 11 minutes later. Off a rush that looked like Seattle had plenty of manpower back, both Brandon Montour and Ryker Evans shaded toward puck carrier Brayden Point. That meant Brandon Hagel was cruising down the right flank uncontested. Hagel shot, got his own rebound, and chipped it over Philipp Grubauer’s shoulder. Brandon Hagel gets his own rebound and ties it. #SeaKraken had numbers back, but both Montour and Evans went for Brayden Point, and Evans seemed to lose track of Hagel. 1-1 https://t.co/scnN3iZ0jo— Sound Of Hockey (@sound_hockey) October 15, 2026 To be fair to Evans, I do believe he read that Berkly Catton had Hagel marked on the backcheck, but as Evans moved toward Point, Hagel pulled away from Catton and found himself with plenty of time and space. Later, with the score tied 2-2 thanks to a Jared McCann power-play goal at 2:54 of the third, Ilya Mikheyev was gifted a go-ahead goal by Ville Ottavainen around the midway point of the frame. The 24-year-old rookie defenseman, who scored his first NHL goal Tuesday in Philadelphia, briefly lost the puck at the side of the net. Ottavainen regained control momentarily, but rather than quickly swatting it into open space, he instead tried to stickhandle right through Grubauer’s crease. He lost it again, but this time he did so right onto Mikheyev’s stick, and although Mikheyev didn’t get good wood on his shot attempt, the puck popped up in the air and fooled Grubauer. Oh, no, Ville! 😬 Ottavainen stickhandles right in front of Grubauer and coughs it up to Ilya Mikheyev. The puck pops over Grubauer and in. 3-2 Lightning. https://t.co/jIIcXfVt4n— Sound Of Hockey (@sound_hockey) October 16, 2026 The cherry on top of the sundae came in overtime. With Victor Hedman rushing through the neutral zone 1-on-3, Shane Wright, Evans, and Mackie Samoskevich got too spread out at the blue line and left a big gap right up the gut for Hedman to exploit. Indeed, the former Norris Trophy winner saw the opening and pushed the puck ahead. He then powered his way right past all three Kraken players before poking it under Grubauer and stealing back the second point for Tampa Bay. #SeaKraken lose 4-3 in overtime. Victor Hedman pokes it ahead and then powers between Shane Wright, Mackie Samoskevich, and Ryker Evans before slipping it under Grubauer. Kraken did well to pull a point out of that one, though. Now 3-0-1 on the road trip. https://t.co/6oEJb0nvFQ— Sound Of Hockey (@sound_hockey) October 16, 2026 A standings point in Tampa Bay is never reason for a team to hang its collective head, but a win was within reach for the Kraken in this one. They just shot themselves in the tentacle with a few sloppy plays that proved to be the difference. Takeaway 2: Matty Magic Lambert mentioned fatigue being a factor, and it definitely did not feel like Seattle had its best mojo in this one. Of course, Tampa Bay is still a great team, so seeing the Lightning tilt the ice in the second period and take a 2-1 lead into the third in their building wasn’t terribly surprising. While a Kraken win was within reason, had they avoided some of the aforementioned mistakes, it would have been a regulation loss if it weren’t for an excellent individual effort from Matty Beniers in the dying minutes of the game. He cleanly won an offensive-zone face-off back to Vince Dunn at the point, then did the smart thing and hustled straight to the front of the net. While battling there with Hagel, he kept his eyes up and showed off his hand-eye coordination to get a piece of Dunn’s shot just before it reached Vasilevskiy, deflecting it past the superstar netminder and tying the game with 4:19 left on the clock. MATTY MAGIC! 🚨 Beniers wins the face-off and goes straight to the net. Vince Dunn drags and shoots, and Matty gets the tip. 3-3 #SeaKraken https://t.co/v54BdKhftE— Sound Of Hockey (@sound_hockey) October 16, 2026 “Obviously, it’s a big goal for us,” Lambert said. “He did a really good job of winning the face-off and going to the net. We drew it up that way. We felt we could beat their centerman to the net, so he did exactly that.” The goal, by the way, was Beniers’ 200th NHL point. “It’s very, very cool,” Beniers said. “Yeah, I don’t know. It’s a sweet thing to think about, but I think I’m just more focused on the team winning at this point.” Takeaway 3: Brandon Montour goes down One reason for optimism coming into this season was good health for key players like Jared McCann—who came through again with his third goal and eighth point in eight games—Kaapo Kakko, and Chandler Stephenson. And lest we forget, perhaps the most important of all those “hopefully more healthy” players is Brandon Montour, who was limited to 64 games last season due to a bursa on his ankle, a broken hand, and the tragic passing of his brother. He also told Sound Of Hockey that injuries lingered for him all season long. Now, there’s reason for concern for Kraken fans once again. The Kraken Hockey Network mentioned during the game that Montour had gone missing from the bench midway through the first period. Having gone back and watched his last shift before that brief disappearance, I didn’t see anything obvious, and he did return after a few minutes. But then, a few minutes into the second, he fell awkwardly going over the blue line and left the game for good due to what the Kraken officially deemed a lower-body injury. #SeaKraken are without Brandon Montour right now. The KHN broadcast said he’s gone missing twice tonight, but here is his most recent shift. He did have an awkward fall going over the blue line… https://t.co/ZyJLAo9bLp— Sound Of Hockey (@sound_hockey) October 16, 2026 Montour going down left the Kraken with five defensemen rotating for more than half the game. Remember, they already are without Ryan Lindgren and have both Ottavainen and Josh Mahura in the lineup, with Cale Fleury still serving as a healthy extra. There’s a chance all three will be in the game Saturday at Florida. Here’s hoping the injury is nothing serious, because Montour is a player the Kraken cannot afford to be without for any significant period. Darren Brown Darren Brown is the Chief Content Officer at soundofhockey.com and the host of the Sound Of Hockey Podcast. He is a member of the PHWA and is also usually SOH’s Twitter intern (but please pretend you don’t know that). Follow him @DarrenFunBrown and @sound_hockey or email darren@soundofhockey.com. Read more from Darren The post Three Takeaways – Montour injury, Kraken mistakes prove costly in 4-3 OT loss at Lightning appeared first on Sound Of Hockey.