Kraken ‘do-or-die’ Game 6 on tap Saturday at Climate Pledge Arena

DALLAS –

Seattle needs a win Saturday or the playoff run ends in front of a crushed home crowd.

With a 5-2 win Thursday in Game 5, the Dallas Stars went up 3-2 in their NHL Western Conference best-of-seven semifinal against the Kraken.

“I’m confident we can come back in this series. It’s far from over,” said Kraken defenseman Adam Larsson, who scored the first goal in Thursday’s loss.

In the first round, the Colorado Avalanche forced a deciding Game 7, the only time the Kraken have peered over the edge. Seattle had a chance to pull ahead of Dallas on the road, where it has enjoyed better results all season, but started slowly. The Stars were up 2-0 before the game was 6 minutes old. A comeback attempt fell short.

“It’s do or die next game,” Kraken forward Jordan Eberle said. “This is when it gets exciting. These are the games we want to play in.”

They got a pair of goals to rally around in the second period. In his second game back after missing six due to injury, Jared McCann scored his first career playoff goal and became the 18th Kraken player to score during this postseason. According to NHLstatistics, the 1989-90 and 1992-93 Los Angeles Kings are the only other teams in league history to have 18 unique goal scorers through the first 12 games of a playoff run.

It took awhile for McCann to experience his first postseason goal, and after all he’s been through in the past few weeks, he didn’t even get a proper celebration.

McCann appeared in three playoff games each in 2019 and 2020, then six in 2021. All were part of short postseasons for his Pittsburgh Penguins, who didn’t make it out of the first round or the qualifying round, in the case of the 2020 bubble.

The Kraken’s 40-goal scorer in the regular season went without one through the first three games of the Seattle’s opening-round series before he left Game 4 with an injury, widely assumed to be a concussion. Less than 3 minutes into Tuesday’s return to the lineup, he nearly got his first playoff goal.

But it didn’t land, and the milestone took one more game. Yanni Gourde left a drop pass Thursday for McCann, who spun along the boards and fired from the top of the faceoff circle. Larsson was right there and the cameras zoomed toward him, but the puck was determined to have bounced off the skate of Dallas’ Joel Hanley and not Larsson’s stick blade, so the goal remained McCann’s.

The 17th Kraken player to score this postseason, Larsson, bagged one earlier in the second period.

“We had a push. You could feel it on the bench,” Eberle said. “You’re like, keep going – you could feel it coming.”

Thanks to McCann’s strike, the Kraken were on the Stars’ heels for 24 minutes of play, until midway through the third period. But Roope Hintz’s blink-and-you’ll-miss it fourth Dallas goal of the night was the “dagger,” according to Eberle.

“Now it’s on us to go there and end this on the road, which we did in the (first-round) Minnesota series,” Stars coach Pete DeBoer said later. “Hopefully, we have the same result.”

The Kraken, of course, have a say in that. Larsson estimated the visitors didn’t start playing in earnest until late in the first period of Game 5, when they were in a 2-0 hole. In his view, however, the Kraken have been playing “pretty good hockey.”

“Just going to regroup here and keep pushing forward,” he said.