The Carolina Kraken and St. Louis Scarecrows have had something akin to a rivalry this season. Granted it’s not been anything malicious with a past history of player ties between these two teams we’ve had a bit of fun jabbing at each other when it comes to cross Conference rivals. Let’s take a quick look at how these two teams matched up head to head throughout Season 71 of the SMJHL! But first a gaze into the past at how these teams fared in Season 70.


In Season 70 Carolina would sport a respectable 30-31-5 record, and while the Kraken were able to make it into the playoffs, this was still a team that was working towards the end of a rebuild. Similarly St. Louis in full rebuild mode only managed to muster 16 wins finishing 16-44-6 overall. That being said their management did a tremendous job of reaping and harvesting draft picks (insert scarecrow pun here) and have quickly turned their record around in Season 71. As it stands Carolina is 32-28-3 on the season, good for Conference 3rd, while the Scarecrows sit at an impressive 33-26-5 having more than doubled their win total from last season! Let’s see how these teams faced off in the regular season to get to this point.

First week of the season the Kraken got Kraken coming out hot with a 6-0 shutout against the Scarecrows, fortunately for St. Louis this wouldn’t be a true sign of things to come as in the next two games the Crow People would edge out two close 4-3 victories over Carolina. The league menace known as Gumbaman, a former Carolina Kraken alumni, but now current co-gm of St. Louis was quick to pick up the phone dial into the Kraken Locker Room following each of these close losses.  But what he didn’t know is these games were far from proving a trend of how this matchup would play out for the season, or would it be?

In the fourth matchup between these two teams on the season the game would go down to the wire with St. Louis leading 2-0 the Kraken would score an early goal in the third period to bring the score to 2-1. Both goalies mirrored each other in stats with 34 shots against but just 32 saves from the Kraken vs 31 for the Scarecrows. A late powerplay for Carolina would inevitably be shutdown and St. Louis would escape again with a single goal differential in victory.

In the final two matchups it would seem St. Louis had Carolina’s number in these showdowns for the season. Despite the heated rivalry and best efforts the Kraken squad just wasn’t able to overcome the odds and suffered two more losses by 3 goals or more to close out the matchups between these teams on the season. However! Despite the record being favored towards the Crows I wanted to highlight the matchup of these teams because I truly believe this will be the premier primetime rivalry over the next several seasons. With both teams trending upwards and rostering a number of promising rookies, don't be surprised if we see a number of close playoff faceoffs between these franchises in the years to come.

Approved, +5 TPE to @wizard_literal

credit to Flappy, ToeDragon, and Carpy