Kraken's Schwartz lights the lamp twice, while Daccord secures a shutout, ending the Jets' winning streak in a low-scoring affair.
Forget the melatonin, the Winnipeg Jets/Seattle Kraken Thursday night affair was all Jets fans at Canada Life Centre needed.
If nothing else, the game was sleep inducing.
Falling behind 1-0 on an early second period goal, Winnipeg just wasn't able to muster anything in the form of a quality scoring chance, and as the game wore on, so did the Jets' offensive success.
Entering the night winners of five-straight, Winnipeg saw its lengthy streak come to an end at the hands of Jayden Schwartz, Joey Daccord and the Kraken.
Schwartz scored two goals for the visitors, while Daccord picked up the 3-0 shutout on the night.
"Hopefully we can be a mature group here and take what we can from that game and not get too down on ourselves for not getting one there," forward Kyle Connor said post-game.
The most excitement of the opening frame came in the final 15 seconds. A crossbar and a mad scramble for the loose puck in the goal mouth was as close as the Jets would get to finding a goal in the first period. Winnipeg led the shot chart 11-9 through 20 minutes of play.
Thanks to a back-door tap-in from Schwartz just 2:28 into the second period, the Jets found themselves down 1-0 entering the final frame. The silver lining? Winnipeg had previously found itself in that same position in its Monday night affair with the Calgary Flames. They came back with two thirds period goals to win that game 2-1.
On Thursday, the Kraken took a minimal first period shot deficit and turned it around in the middle stanza, to which they owned a 20-19 shot lead to begin the third.
Winnipeg, which had looked rather sluggish for the majority of the game through 40 minutes, had its work cut out for it in the deciding period.
The Jets turned up the heat in the third, pulling ahead to an 8-1 shot lead through the first 10 minutes, but had nothing to show for their efforts.
“I thought it was coming. We were pressing hard," Connor said. "They just keep their D’s really close to the net there and just a lot of times in the second, we just tried to do too many cross-ice seams and they just knocked it down. We were a lot more direct and played a lot faster in the third. At times in the first two we just got away from it a little bit. They covered the ice really well and had a patient decent goaltender to back them up.”
Hellebuyck left the net twice for the extra attacker, with the Kraken quickly putting the puck into the yawning cage on both attempts. The first was a Josh Morrissey blunder on the blue line, while the third goal came on another broken play in the offensive zone.
Hellebuyck finished the night with 25 stops on the 26 pucks directed his way, while Daccord turned away all 32 shots he faced for Seattle.
“I liked a lot of what happened in the first, I liked a lot of what happened in the third," head coach Scott Arniel said.
"The second was loose. We didn’t get any zone time. We got cute, kind of trying to stickhandle our way through the neutral zone. In the first, we got it deep and got it back. In the third period, we did the same thing."
Next up for the Jets is the second game of the back-to-back, which also doubles as the second game of a stretch featuring three games in four nights. The Flames are in town on Friday, before the Utah Mammoth make their first trip to Canada Life Centre on Sunday.