Tonight the Kraken begin their second round series against the Dallas Stars. This will be a tough series for the Kraken to come out of... but that was what everyone said and expected in the first round against the Avalanche and look how that turned out.

Seattle was able to beat Colorado because they had more depth scoring and at the end of the day they were able to hold off the top two players on the Avs (Rantanen and MacKinnon) to a reasonable degree and let their four lines take care of things from there.

That will be a key against the Stars as well. Roope Hintz and Jason Robertson are one of the top elite duos in the NHL and it will be tough for the Kraken to match that level of offensive production, particularly because Seguin was excellent on that line in the first round too. If the Kraken can find a way to limit those players, they will still need to contend with the likes of Joe Pavelski, who many return to the lineup tonight, Domi, Marchment, Benn, Dadonov, and Johnston.

Again, the Kraken had 15 different goal scorers in the first round. The Stars had 10. Seattle still has the edge in overall team offense but the Stars have more top end fire power. The Kraken need their role players to come out and score at least one goal in every game for this to reasonably go Seattle's way.

The biggest test for the Kraken isn't Hintz or Robertson, or Heiskanen on the backend. The biggest challenge will be figuring out Jake Oettinger who is quickly becoming one of the best goalies in the NHL and arguably the most dominant playoff performer, Oettinger is great during the season but he takes his game to a whole other level in the playoffs as he currently has a 0.929SV%.

Kaprizov and Boldy were high scoring players through the regular season. Between the two of them they managed just a single PP goal (Kaprizov) through 6 games. Seattle does not have anyone on their lineup with the same level of goal scoring as those two players. Seattle needs to get under Oettinger's skin early, take shots from odd angles, be aggressive on rebound chances, and overall prevent him from having the time to set up between shots.

Quick update on Jared McCann. As of right now the winger/centre is not with the team in Dallas meaning it's highly unlikely he will play in either of these first two games. Hopefully if he is deemed healthy he can join the team back in Seattle for Game 3 but even that may be a distant chance.

Andrei Burakovsky is still expected to miss at least this entire series against the Stars as he still recovers from surgery from a lower body injury. Do not expect him to jump in at any time to give Seattle some more firepower.

Hopefully the Kraken can continue to the high paced, quick transition game that was so successful for the team against the Avalanche. The Stars have the firepower that the Avalanche had but Dallas is a more disciplined and stronger team defensively. As is any series, this will be a great test for Seattle.

Thanks for reading and enjoy the game!

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