Welcome back! We’re continuing on with our end-of-season Kraken Roundtable series, which we launched last week. This week, we’re getting a bit more tactical with our discussion to understand the missteps of the Seattle Kraken in 2023-24 and to look ahead to the offseason.
In this one, Blaiz Grubic, John Barr, and Darren Brown teamed up to give their thoughts.
Enjoy!
What went wrong
Darren – I’m going to get a little “hot takey” with this one, but the obvious issue for the team was scoring. We’ve talked ad nauseam about how the fourth line took a step back, but as the offensive woes dragged on throughout the season, I thought the Kraken missed the likes of Daniel Sprong and Morgan Geekie (and to a lesser degree Ryan Donato) more and more. There were so many times last season where the top two lines couldn’t score, and then all of a sudden, the fourth line would chip one in and get things going. Scoring is contagious, and when you only have a few guys that can put the puck in the net, slumps can sweep through the entire roster.
Blaiz – The Kraken could not get key wins when they needed them. During the Thanksgiving break, the Kraken held onto the second wild card spot and looked poised to turn the corner, but instead, they came back from the break with an eight-game losing streak. This losing streak included losses to bottom dwellers Ottawa, Chicago, and Montreal.
Later in the season, just before the All-Star break, the Kraken laid an egg against San Jose. A win that night would have put them in a tie for the final wild card spot, but they instead went into the hiatus on a three-game losing streak. The final gasp was the loss to Vegas on March 3 at home, when they blew a two-goal lead in the third period and lost in overtime. Following the Vegas loss, the Kraken could not break the cycle and rattled off seven more losses, essentially eliminating themselves from playoff contention.
John – I’ve mentioned it before, but for me, it was the way the season started that put the Kraken at a severe disadvantage. They scored one goal or less in five of their first six games, setting a challenging tone for the rest of the season. While they flirted with a playoff position at times, they consistently took a step back whenever they got close to solidifying themselves as a contending team.
Pleasant surprise
John – The goaltending performance this year was excellent. The team finished ninth in the league in save percentage overall, but since Dec. 1, the Kraken ranked third in the entire NHL. Given the challenges the goaltending position has presented in the first two seasons, this improvement was quite surprising. Joey Daccord really stepped up when the team needed a boost, especially highlighted by his performance in the Winter Classic. Additionally, Philipp Grubauer showed great consistency in the second half of the season, which bodes well for the team heading into next season.
Blaiz – The Kraken recently announced that most Kraken regular-season games will be broadcast on King/Kong and Prime Video, removing the need for an expensive cable/streaming TV package. This will allow fans to watch the Kraken for free and help continue to grow the fanbase for the Seattle Kraken. What a pleasant surprise!
Darren – I shouldn’t have been surprised by this, but I was a little surprised at how good Shane Wright looked in his call-up at the end of the season. He truly looked like a different player. For some reason, I expected him to come back up and still appear a little behind at the NHL level, but he showed me he is ready to make the team next season and potentially be an impactful player. That was exciting to see.
Reason to be optimistic
John – I believe the greatest strength of this franchise lies in its prospect pool, extending far beyond Coachella Valley. Numerous Kraken prospects playing in juniors or European leagues have been excelling in their respective teams.
Across the pond, Jani Nyman concluded the Liiga season in Finland by earning the Red Bull helmet, awarded to the top goal scorer under 20 years old. Oscar Fisker-Molgaard, drafted in the 2023 NHL Entry Draft, saw significant ice time as a second-line center in the Swedish Hockey League, one of the world’s premier leagues. Additionally, Niklas Kokko has served as the starting goalie for Pelicans, currently competing in the Liiga finals.
In the CHL, Carson Rehkopf, a 2023 second-round selection, capped off his OHL season with an impressive 52 goals. David Goyette, drafted in 2022’s second round, led the OHL in points. Meanwhile, Jagger Firkus dominated the WHL with an astonishing 61 goals and 126 points.
Blaiz – Andre Burakovsky had a terrible year with 16 points in 49 games. The Swedish winger is too talented to continue to remain off the scoresheet. I wrote about Burakovsky’s struggles earlier this year. Burakovsky was able to finish the season playing 22 games straight without injury and scored six of his seven goals during that stretch. Hopefully with some stable linemates, he can return to his offensive self and be a strong contributor to fixing the Kraken’s scoring woes.
Darren – In that same realm, Blaiz, it was good to see Matty Beniers get going a little more toward the end of the season. He’s still very slight in stature, so I’m interested to see what he can do with a full offseason of training. Can he put on some weight this summer and come back more prepared to handle the physical nature of the NHL?
I’m also excited about what this team might do to improve this offseason. It has cap space and an improving prospect pool, plus plenty of motivation to get better. When you look at how this season played out, Seattle is not that far from being a scary team again, but it will need an injection of offense from the front office. These should be a few interesting months ahead.
Reason to be pessimistic
John – It’s highly unlikely that Tomas Tatar, Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, Kailer Yamamoto, and Justin Schultz will return to the Kraken next season. I expect Shane Wright to claim one of the vacated spots and Ryker Evans to become a regular in the lineup next season. This leaves only one starting forward position available, and it’s unclear whether one new addition to the lineup can make a significant impact on such a key position.
Blaiz – There could still be a lack of scoring next season. I was glad to see general manager Ron Francis acknowledge this issue in his end-of-season presser. There are many players that scored below their career averages this year, although next season, Burakovsky, Beniers, and Jaden Schwartz should rebound a bit and add somewhere between 18 and 23 goals. The prospect pool is impressive, but those players are also not fully baked, and outside of Wright, the prospects are all still one-to-two seasons out. It would be a nice surprise if one of them could contribute meaningfully to the Kraken scoring, but that is a lot to put on any rookie.
Darren – It was painfully obvious to me that the Kraken needed to add a weapon or two last offseason, and I would argue they iced a significantly worse roster this season. I’m just afraid Francis might be a little too cautious for his own good again this summer at a time when some bigger swings feel necessary.
Prospect you are most excited about
Blaiz – Shane Wright has been the prospect I am most excited about since Seattle drafted him fourth overall in 2022. Due to his lost season during the pandemic, Wright was developmentally one year behind Beniers when he was drafted. Now with the two years under his belt in the Kraken development system, Wright looks poised to make the jump full-time to the Kraken. My hot take is Wright will be the Kraken first-line center within the next three years. This is nothing against Beniers, who I think will also rebound and continue to develop next year, but the offensive ceiling is higher for Wright. I am super excited to have Beniers and Wright be the Kraken’s one-two punch for years to come.
Darren – Yeah, Wright is the obvious answer here, and you may be onto something with him as the top center. Either way, Beniers and Wright should serve as a very nice top-two center duo a couple seasons from now. BUT… since you went with Wright, I’ll go in a different direction here and say Jani Nyman (leaving Carson Rehkopf for you, John). I think Nyman will need a year in the AHL to work on his skating and getting used to the North American game, but his size and shot are pretty exciting attributes. If he can get a little faster working with Jess Campbell, I think he could be a player in a couple years.
John – I am excited about Shane, but I am particularly enthusiastic about Rehkopf (thanks for the layup, Darren). I’ve been consistently impressed by his knack for scoring goals from all areas of the ice throughout the season. He appears to be one of the most talented shooters ever in the Kraken’s prospect pool. In my view, the Kraken should seriously consider giving him an opportunity to make the team next season. At the very least, he deserves a chance to start the season with the team and play some regular-season NHL games.
I agree with Darren, I’m wary about what changes RF won’t make this off season.
I love all the optimism but until this team parts ways with Hakstol, they’ll never realize their true potential. Your thoughts?
As everyone at SOH is doing their deep dives on “what went wrong” I would like to suggest everyone take a look at… overtime.
I’ll start with this tidbit… half the teams in the league had a 3-on-3 shooting percentage of 20% or more. According to Natural Stat Trick* the Kraken had a league worst 3-on-3 shooting percentage of 6.5%! Over 19 overtime games the Kraken scored just three goals and had a overall shooting percentage of 7.9%. On the eye test side, the shot selection and decision making seemed to lack consistently during the season. The worst example being the St. Louis game, but there were examples throughout the season.
It’s hard to blame 3-on-3 on injuries and it takes a lot more than “bad luck” to be multiple degrees worse than half the league. It takes a systematic failing to be that bad… or the players must have absolutely no “heart” and no “passion”… especially in overtime.
More than 20% of NHL games go to overtime, it appears this team was not prepared for those games.
*NST actually shows a SV% of 3.23 at 3v3, but I was so shocked by this I couldn’t believe it, so I did an audit and they did not count the 3v3 goal against the Flyers. Even with that added in, they are still league worst 6.5%. Of the three overtime goals, one was 4v4.
Seconding this. So many points were lost in overtime this past season. One problem that has dogged the Kraken for all three seasons has been the poor play whenever the other team is icing fewer than five guys. Oddly, they looked more sharp on the penalty kill than they did 4 v 4 or 3 v 3. The problem has been so consistent that I have to think that it is a function of special teams coaching. If there is a coaching change that needs to be made, I say that is where it is.
What went wrong? Lets Start with Ron Francis’s choices on Free Agerncy and not keeping Carson |Soucy, who broke the NHL hits record for a season. Soucy signed a three-year, $9.75 million contract with the Vancouver Canucks on July 1, 2023. We could have and should have signed him. And Morgan Geekie a 6’3″ 200lb forward that is now playing on the top 2 lines for Boston. Size, Speed and agressivness. Daniel Sprong signing in Detroit. Kraken lost more size and a 20 goal scorer (18 with red wings). Donato with his grit and teamwork gone as well. Replacements from Free Agency>Pierre-Edouard Bellemare 4 goals, Kailer Yamamoto and his 8 goals and all of his 153 lbs, an aging Tomas Tatar at 173 lbs and his 8 goals. Last but not least is Eeli Tolvanen whose 16 goals were the saame as last except he got those in 82 games this year and he had 15 goals in 48 games last year. Downward trend in most every player on the team. Finally the defence, where the loss to injury of Vince Diunn showed that Adam Larson diminishing stats could not step up to replace him. It also showed that Vince Dunn is a top of the league defenceman that has yet to get his due.
Every team in the playoffs this year are much bigger in size than the Kraken. There are fasster than the Kraken and they have more balance than the Kranken. If these issues are not addressed, the Fans will probably suffer from more mediocre seasons to come. The game has changed and Ron Francis hasn’t.
Just simply put, Geekie and Soucy should have been resigned and they are now top players on their teams who are now in the playoffs. Not recognizing their talents is a big flaw in the Kraken. The kicker is that they had the money but chose to hold out and grab to waiver wire players and use Kartye, a rookie with no scoring skills.
Ok this is a little interesting to me, first off Soucy was horrible on the kraken. Maybe it was coaching and system related but he was horrible. I am still trying to understand why RF let Geekie go, he was just coming into his prime and learning how to use his size more effectively. RF clearly didn’t have a good grasp on Evans development and prioritized adding a defender to our cap hit rather than resigning existing players or getting good replacements. It almost seems like he thought our 4th line didn’t matter? I blame this on Gru and his horrible performance the last few years, I feel that it put RF in a position that he prioritized keeping pucks out rather than scoring.
Speaking of Gru I really don’t think we can do a lot until Gru and his cap hit are gone, what we could bring in one somewhat decent forward? We have a lot of players who are going to need contracts in the next couple of years. Is it really worth trusting RF on picking up another FA just so we can possibly scrape into the playoffs?
Uh, Soucy didn’t set a hits record – he played only 40 games and had 65 total hits. And he scored a whopping 6 points in 40 games. You think that’s worth $3+ million a year?
https://www.hockey-reference.com/players/s/soucyca01.html
You’re thinking of Jeremy Lauzon who was traded at the deadline in Season 1. I have no issue with trading away Lauzon – he may hit but he’s also brutal playing the puck and takes some horrible penalties. Francis grabbed a second round pick for Lauzon back in 2022… that was a great piece of business.
Defense wasn’t the chief problem this season. The defense was better this season than last season and much better than the first season. They went from 24th in goals allowed, to 15th to 9th. Even with the injury to Dunn. Not sure that Lauzon (or Soucy) makes this team much better defensively and they both sure as hell do nothing offensively.
Sprong… yeah, I agree he should have been resigned. He was the one pure “shoot first” player on the team and that was something they could have really used this season. That was a miss.
Geekie… eh, I could have gone either way on him. He has some nice tools and size but his skating is pretty rough. If you wanted a faster team, Geekie isn’t your player. He went from 28 points in Seattle to 39 with Boston in seven more games played, which was all due to getting a lot more power play time. But it’s not like he made some kind of huge development jump (his points/60 actually went down this season).
Donato weighs 190lbs. So he wasn’t going to make Seattle a bigger team. He only had 109 hits, too. I liked Donato but I think it was perfectly reasonable to not re-sign him.
Tolvanen increased his assists from 11 to 25, had a career high in points (all while his shooting % was on the lower end for him), and he played a nice two-way game. If you’re into hits, he was also second on the team in hits at 210 (behind Kartye’s 245… But I sure hope Francis doesn’t sign a guy because of how many hits he has.)
On what John was saying… one forward position available.
–
If they do add Wright – as expected – then after that and resigning Eeli and Matty they should still have something around $13m to sign a seventh defenseman and three forwards. Two of those four are going to be league minimum.
How would you spend $11m on two forward positions? Personally, if you can’t move Tanev, I think he should be the thirteenth forward and they should try and pick up a couple solid middle six options like Chandler Stephenson and Anthony Duclair. I’m assuming this is for future consideration… but since you brought it up… I think they need two forwards… not just one.
I think you nailed it – Tanev is the guy that I think you move if you can. Tough to move a fan favorite but they need to shed a bit of salary.
I doubt they would move Gourde since they are pretty thin at center right now and I would think Francis wants to keep McCann at wing. But not a ton of options to trade other than Tanev. Maybe Schwartz but that won’t help the offense any.
Last season, 52 players scored 70 or more. And none played for Seattle. Adding a player that could score 70+ would help to cover some of those scoring droughts. Not all of it, but at least some of it. Unfortunately, those players are expensive, either in FA or draft capital in trades.
I probably should have worded it a bit better. Of course they can improve at the top that will bump everyone down and like you, Tanev seems to be the likely candidate to put in the press box, provided you can replace his penalty killing (Kartye maybe?). Additionally, I might be in the minority here, but I still think Rehkopf has an opportunity to make the team. I like Duclair and also wondering about someone like Toffoli. Wouldn’t mind if they move a couple pieces to shake things up a bit.
I thought McCann at center could be an option, but I get the impression the team would rather have him on the wing so if Yanni takes the fourth line they’re gonna need to bring someone in as a middle six center.
I also like the idea of Rehkopf making the team but maybe more likely if they move someone… like Tanev.
I wish that Francis had re-signed Wennberg to be our third-line center. The guy is perfect for the job, and he is not so old that he will be declining soon. His teams have been trying to make a 2C out of him his whole career, and that just is not his game. Hopefully New York will play him in the role for which he is best suited.
Let’s assume good things happen, they get at least one higher end F, add Wright and Evans, Matty bulks up, the injuries abate, and one of the prospects surprisingly makes the team. But then you still have the lack of emotion, protecting roughed-up teammates, and lack of a defining image. What to do?
I think this is where you make a coaching change. While I think Bylsma would be a good coach in the right circumstance, I think Hakstol has kind of soiled the bed with the missing team personality. What the Kraken desperately need is a coach to become that image, to be emotional and bigger than life to be the face of the team while waiting for the prospects develop.
That is where I see a Berube type of coach as being essential. He would certainly bring the necessary emotion and get on players for disappointing engagement. A big personality is just what the franchise needs now, as there really is no one else of the players who fits that profile. Bylsma just is not that type of coach.
I think those are the two choices, more emotional or more sedate. After Hakstol, Berube seems the better choice, to be followed on by Bylsma a few years later, if he sticks around.
Guys started sticking up for each other later on in the season. It was inconsistent, I think, for a number of reasons. Now that we know what happened to Eberle’s hand, it’s no wonder that he hadn’t been getting into scrums. That was no fault of his, although the illegal hit that he delivered in the playoffs in the season prior that brought on the fight certainly was. Of course Jaden Schwartz and Andre Burakovsky are never going to be type to get rough in the extra-curricular; that’s not their game. Early in the season, it was Jared McCann who was getting physical, and I am glad that stopped. He is just too valuable to be doing that; he should be getting protected, not protecting other, bigger guys. We saw Dunn throw down a couple times. Same deal as with McCann, he is way too valuable to risk, as we saw plainly during that dark time when he was out. Of course there are Yani Gourde and Brandon Tanev mixing it up as they always do, but they play on lines where the other guys (eg. Tye Kartye and Eeli Tolvannen) can take care of themselves. Maybe what is needed is as simple as making Kartye a permanent fixture in the top-six. The guy can score well enough, so I do not imagine that it would be too big of an offensive sacrifice. Or maybe Tolvannen will take that next step that he appears capable of making. And, hey, toward the end of the season we got to see Matty jump into the fray and mix it up, and he didn’t look half bad doing it despite being so lean and wiry.
As for defensemen, I am surprised that Will Borgen has not become that enforcer type. He has the nastiness for it. Adam Larson can be that guy, but, like Dunn, he is not someone who you want to have sitting in the box on a penalty kill. Jamie Oleksiak just didn’t do much mixing it up (not just fighting) this season, and I am not sure why. He seemed to be not quite himself all year, and I wonder if, like Eberle, he was dealing with an injury that never got disclosed. Oh, how I missed the guy who punched Brendon Lemeiux half-way down the ice.
On the bright side, I bet that Jani Nyman is going to be nasty when he finally makes it to the big league. I cannot wait to see him in Coachella Valley for the playoffs. Too bad his development will probably keep him out of the NHL for at least another year, because he looks to be just what the doctor ordered.