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By Claude McGyver, Hellcats beat writer for The Athletic

COLOGNE — For three weeks now, the question around the MühlenArena am Dom has been some version of how is this team losing? The answers had been frustratingly consistent. Goals in clusters. Leads not held. The same fingerprint, game after game, in different handwriting.

Tuesday's 4-2 loss to the Sundsvall Dragons broke that pattern. Cologne didn't blow a lead — they never had one. They didn't unravel after a single goal against — they were down two before the building had finished sitting down. This one had a different signature entirely, and it was somehow worse: the Hellcats lost their fifth in a row because they couldn't stay out of the penalty box.

Seven minor penalties to Sundsvall's one. Two power-play goals against in the opening four minutes. Kirill Kaprizov's 47th of the season at 2:32, three seconds after Zach Werenski's stick caught him. His 48th at 3:41, on the resulting power play. Johnny Kovacevic's wrister from the point at 9:28, with Stefan Noesen in the box, made it 3-0 before the first period was half over.

The game, in any meaningful sense, was finished there.

"We couldn't stay out of the box in the first," head coach said afterward, sounding like a man who had run out of new ways to say the same thing. "You give a team like Sundsvall that many looks with the man advantage and you're going to pay for it."

<h2>A skid that keeps changing shape</h2>

The most alarming thing about Tuesday isn't the result — Cologne remain first in the conference, four clear of Stuttgart and Mulheim. It's that the Hellcats have now lost in three meaningfully different ways inside the same five-game streak.

Against Radnor, it was a collapse — five goals on 17 shots, the goaltender chased before the second period was done. Against St. Jerome and Stuttgart, the problem migrated to lead protection — Cologne scored first in both, gave up goals in tight clusters, watched the lead disappear before the second intermission. Now, against Sundsvall, the problem moved again: not to the middle of the game but to the very start of it, and not to system breakdowns but to a discipline issue that handed a top-three goal scorer in the league two open looks before he'd touched the puck five times.

That is not one problem. That is three problems wearing the same jersey on consecutive nights.

Mika Zibanejad — who scored Cologne's second goal to cut the deficit to 3-2 in the third, and then took a cross-checking penalty barely two minutes later — was the sharpest with himself.

"I score, I get us back in the game, and then I take the dumbest penalty I've taken all year," he said. "We had momentum. I gave it away. You can't do that. Not now."

The cross-check didn't lead directly to a goal, but Elias Lindholm's strike at 13:21 — the one that ended the night for real — came against a team still trying to find its legs after another wasted moment. There is no obvious roster lever left to pull, either: the Bastian-Vaakanainen call-ups have produced one extension of the losing streak and one knee strain. Filip Forsberg returns next week, but Forsberg cannot keep Werenski out of the box.

<h2>The GM, out of words</h2>

Of everyone who spoke after the game, the quietest voice belonged to general manager Sebastian Horn. The man who, three weeks ago, told this paper "this was just a bad night" stood in the corridor outside the dressing room and offered something very different.

"I don't think there's much I can say tonight that the standings aren't already saying," Horn said. "I don't have a speech for this one."

No defense of the room, no message to the players, no reassurance for the fans who had just watched a third straight home loss. Just an acknowledgment, and a man who looked tired of finding new ways to frame the same thing.

It was, in its own way, the most honest the Hellcats have sounded in three weeks.

Sunday brings a rematch with Stuttgart, the team that beat Cologne 3-2 here last Friday and runs one of the most efficient power plays in the conference. If the discipline problem travels with them, Sunday is going to look a lot like Tuesday did.

For three weeks, Cologne's problem was the second period. Tuesday, it started at 2:32 of the first.

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