SALT LAKE CITY — Kailer Yamamoto had a busy weekend.
The Utah Hockey Club forward was getting ready to leave the Delta Center on Saturday after Utah’s win over Winnipeg when he found out he had an early plane to catch to Tuscon. The Roadrunners were in a playoff chase, and the organization thought they could use some reinforcements for the Sunday bout.
“I was expecting a 7 p.m game, and then it was a 4 p.m. game,” Yamamoto said. “So I was like, ‘oof’ — but, no, it went all right.”
After recording two assists in Tuscon in a win, it was right back to Utah.
“It was long,” Yamamoto said. “Getting up at 4:30, 5:30 — that was definitely long. Feeling it a little bit tonight.”
It didn’t help that he took a high stick early in Tuesday’s game, either. Still, the Seattle Kraken were probably feeling it worse after the buzzsaw they ran into at the Delta Center. Yamamoto scored a goal against his former team in Utah’s 7-1 bludgeoning of Seattle.
“I owed them one,” Yamamoto said. “They didn’t want me, so came in with little bit of vegence.”
He got that revenge in the first period when he returned from the high stick to extend Utah’s lead to 3-0, making it clear that it wouldn’t be Seattle’s night. But that wasn’t the lasting image of Yamamoto from the game.
In the third period, he skated into the attacking zone and saw Seattle’s Josh Mahura sizing him up. Instead of taking a hit, he delivered one. The 5-foot-8 (and that’s probably being generous) forward laid out Mahura, eliciting a loud appreciative cheer from the home arena.
“That was beautiful,” defenseman Mikhail Sergachev said. “The guy was bigger than him coming at him, and he just put his shoulder there. He skated by the bench and was kind of chipring a little bit — he’s fun.”
And he’s proven to be pretty good, too.
Yamamoto has 3 points (two goals, one assist) in six games since being called up from the AHL.
“He’s a hell of a player, like whenever we watch him in practice, he’s got the poise with the puck; he’s silky,” Sergachev said. “He’s got all the attributes of a great player … nothing fazes him.”
It’s fair to wonder then why Yamamoto was left in Tucscon for so long, especially with so many Utah forwards underperforming this season. His two-way deal likely hurt him in that regard; he was able to jump between the two leagues without Utah putting him on waivers and risk losing him to another team.
That’s something he hopes not to have to deal with next season.
“Obviously, working for that one-way (contract),” he said. “I think I’ve been playing pretty good so far.”
Yamamoto was on Tuesday — along with everyone else on Utah’s roster.
Heck, it felt like at times Utah could have pulled a random fan from the crowd and they would have found their way onto the score sheet. Utah’s seven goals came from seven different players and all came in the first two periods.
Sergachev got things going less than three minutes into the game when he found some free ice in the slot to score his 15th goal of the season.
Then Utah blew open the game with the help of a power play. Clayton Keller and Yamamoto both scored on the man-advantage, giving Utah a 3-0 lead before the first period was over.
The scoring avalanche continued in the second.
Lawson Crouse wasted little time keeping the party going once played resumed, scoring an unassisted goal 16 seconds into the middle stanza to make it 4-0. Logan Cooley, Nick Schmaltz and Michael Carcone also added goals during the period to extend Utah’s lead to 7-0.
In all, 12 Utah players registered a point in the rout, led by 3 points from Sergachev (one goal, two assists) and Dylan Geunther (three assists). With the playoffs likely out of sight (the win kept Utah mathematically alive for at least another day), they might as well try to empty the clip.
Utah outshot Seattle 41-19 and chased Seattle netminder Joey Davvord out of the game for the final period.
The Seattle backup was Victor Ostman, who had been called up on Tuesday on an “emergency basis.” It appears a 7-0 deficit is an emergency. Ostman made his NHL debut in the third period after barely even registering time in the AHL.
As it turned out, Utah couldn’t find the back of the net against Ostman.
Hockey can be a funny game.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
