Before turning their season around and rattling off a nine-game point streak (7-0-2) and five-game winning streak, the Seattle Kraken temporarily sunk far out of the playoff picture with a miserable eight-game stretch from Nov. 24 through Dec. 10. During that time, they went 0-6-2, and dressing room morale fell to a nadir we hadn’t seen since Seattle’s inaugural season.
There were nights during that stretch where the Kraken seemed to be working their tentacles off and doing what their coach wanted them to do, but it just wasn’t giving the desired results. Seattle could not find the back of the net consistently enough to win games, and mistakes and sloppy puck management in its own end would cost the team defensively.
“I think we were getting looks, and we could say we couldn’t score and goalies were hot or whatnot,” Vince Dunn said. “But we were giving a lot more chances up than we needed to do… I think we were working hard, but maybe trying to do too much and do other people’s jobs. So that can kind of make you take yourself away from the game a little bit.”
After last season, when defensive mistakes were so regularly covered up by offensive success, it was perplexing to see Seattle play so inconsistently for the first half of the season, only to flip a switch and get right back in the race starting with a 4-0 win over the Florida Panthers on Dec. 12.
So what happened?
After the Seattle Kraken defeated the Vegas Golden Knights 3-0 in the 2024 Discover NHL Winter Classic on Jan. 1—the team’s fifth straight win—coach Dave Hakstol was asked if this season’s team has a different identity than last year’s team. His response was enlightening.
“This team is different. In order to gain some traction and push the right direction here, we’ve had to do it with a defensive mindset and a real grinding type of mindset. We haven’t been able to score our way to wins. We were able to do that at times last year. We became very confident in that type of mindset… Every year is a little bit different, the makeup of our group is a little bit different. But yeah, I would say that it’s a different mindset. We’re working towards it. We still have a lot of work left to do, but we’ve… look at it from where we were a couple weeks ago to where we are today. We’ve given ourselves a chance and an opportunity to keep climbing and keep working towards something.”
Altering the identity
This coaching staff has shown on several occasions over the past three seasons that it is capable of making in-season adjustments to better specific areas. Case in point, last season’s penalty kill dramatically improved when Seattle simplified its formation at the turn of the calendar year from 2022 to 2023.
There are other such examples, but changing the entire mindset of the team from “Outscore the opponent” to “Stay structured and patient” seems like a big ask, right?
“Honestly, not really,” Yanni Gourde said. “This team was always defense-first oriented. [We just] needed to make sure that details of the game were a little bit better, and we weren’t giving as many free chances to the other team. And I think that’s what it came down to. Everybody knows how to defend, we just made it more of an emphasis on each game.
“Every season is different. Last year, scoring goals just was a second nature. Every single night there was someone stepping up and scoring a goal, and we could outscore a team in various ways, different ways. And this year, it’s coming much harder to score goals, so you have to defend better.”
Data bears out that Seattle has been stingier since the losing streak turned into the current point streak.
Post-game meeting
Based on how Gourde described it, a change like this sounds simple enough, but altering the collective mindset requires open communication from the coaches to the players and from the players to one another.
Dunn couldn’t remember which game it followed, but he did recall a “quiet” meeting, led by the coaches, after one of Seattle’s many losses in early December.
“[We were] really chatting about our team identity, not looking at video and things like that,” Dunn said. “I think since that meeting, we’ve all been a lot more accountable. And we’ve been taking every game and our jobs a lot more personally and making sure that if we work hard and work smart and care for each other out there, then things should fall into place for us.”
Gourde took a similar message out of that meeting. “I think it was mentioned holding each other a little bit more accountable, making sure that we take care of one another, and that we can make a switch as a group, as a team. We kind of started building from that point on.”
Dunn added that the shift in mindset was reinforced by the players in the room, and collectively they decided it was time to start battening down the hatches.
“When you hear from your teammates, and then you hear from your coach too, I think the balance of the two really makes guys understand and take it personally,” Dunn said.
While Dunn and Gourde saw the post-game meeting as a key moment in Seattle’s turnaround, Hakstol viewed the adjustment to a more defensive structure as more of an evolution over time.
“It’s not as easy as having one conversation,” Hakstol said. “Several weeks back, we just started talking a little bit more about just, ‘Hey, we’ve got to do more of the little things. We’ve got to tighten up. We have to find ways to— instead of looking for a way to score one more, until that starts happening, we’ve got to make sure that we’re really buckling down and doing some of the things that are necessary to get the puck back.’ And our guys have worked very hard at that.”
Outstanding goaltending doesn’t hurt
Of course, a team’s defense tends to look a lot better when its goaltender catches fire, and that is what has happened for Joey Daccord over this stretch. Daccord leads the league in save percentage (.956) and goals-against average (1.35) since this streak started with his Dec. 12 shutout of the Panthers.
“I mean, all our goalies have been playing really well,” said Will Borgen. “[Chris Driedger] when he stepped in there [for one game against Calgary], unbelievable. Joey’s obviously been a brick wall back there, you saw… two days ago. So, I mean, that gives us a lot of confidence.”
Borgen also comically deflected when we asked him about the shift in mindset.
“That’s not really my realm,” Borgen said. “I always try to not let the other team score. I play defense. If our forwards score more goals, great. If they don’t, we’ll try to keep it tight.”
From the goalie out, “keep it tight” has been the name of the game for this Kraken team of late, which will go for its 10th straight game with points and its sixth straight win against the Ottawa Senators Thursday at Climate Pledge Arena.
Darren Brown
Darren Brown is the Chief Content Officer at soundofhockey.com and the host of the Sound Of Hockey Podcast. He is a member of the PHWA and is also usually SOH’s Twitter intern (but please pretend you don’t know that). Follow him @DarrenFunBrown and @sound_hockey or email darren@soundofhockey.com.
This is great inside confirmation of what we are seeing on the ice.
Thanks! This one was fun to put together.
I think this analysis sells short what Daccord has been doing… and the one game Driedger provided.
While it’s true the difference in average high-danger shots against is significant at almost two goals a game, this is really skewed by the small sample size. If you remove the two extreme outliers at thirteen against and two against, suddenly the difference is .125 shots per game… an eighth of a shot per game. The effect those two games have on this seventeen game sample is tremendous.
But even more surprising, for a team that has suddenly become “defensively responsible”, they sure are giving up a ton of shots. They went from giving up an average 25.875 (which would be 2nd in the league) to 32.222 (which would be 26th)
I know not all shots are created equal, but like Yanni said, “This team was always defense-first oriented.” While I don’t disagree they have been giving up less high quality chances, it’s nowhere near enough to explain cutting the goals against in half, and apart from a few exceptional games, it’s marginal at best.
And to be clear, I’m not saying this is all the goalies… I’m not saying it’s just Joey. The team certainly seems to be much better with both puck handling and passing – two areas they’ve been dreadful at for much of the season. Those improvements alone should absolutely lead to less high-danger shots against. But to me, the idea that they’ve suddenly become a “defensive minded” team feels like an effort to let – what has been – below average goaltending off the hook.
Watching the Sens/Kraken…
13 shots against…
3 high-danger chances against…
1.02 xGA…
In the first period!
That doesn’t read like “great” defense.
But nonetheless… 0 goals against.
13 shots in the first but how many were at 5v5? A lot less because the Sens got most of those on the PP. Got to look at the situation, not just the shots.
Yeah Matt… if not for the penalties, we would have won this game.
Well… in the end… only 31 shots against.
Solid defense allows only 9 high-danger shots against and 3.55 xGA.
Easy to see why Daccord only allowed 1 goal. Just imagine how good this team could be if they just had their No.1 netminder.
They do have their #1 net minder it is Joey. Gru should be sent down and if possible traded. His salary is way out of line for how he performs. I’m so sick of you non-knowing hockey people who think Gru is a good goalie. Flash news he has ranked at near the bottom for NHL goalies since he signed with the kraken.
I was being ironic… I think by far the biggest difference in this team is the goaltending, not some sudden commitment to playing defense.
I got what you were saying! Darren is a goalie apologist, but it is interesting that I still haven’t heard or read serious criticisms of Grubauer after more than 2 seasons of legitimately bad goaltending (granted I only discovered this site/podcast a year ago). I was re-listening to old Sound of Hockey podcasts when they first started the inaugural season, and John and Andy (*stick taps*) talked about how Grubauer has historically needed a good number of games to adjust to a new system, and that his struggles shouldn’t last. Welp, so much for that!
If nothing else, Joey’s hot streak has showed Kraken fans what great goaltending actually looks like, because many haven’t seen it outside of maybe one playoff series. He’s making routine saves, he’s making spectacular saves, he is an excellent puck handler, and an awesome humble interview to boot. Joey for president!
I also haven’t heard much professional analysis of Grubauer. The person I keep waiting to hear from is Kevin Woodley, but oddly, I haven’t heard or found hardly anything from him on Grubauer since he came to Seattle. He did mention briefly in a playoff preview panel last season that Gru isn’t as bad as his numbers might suggest, but he said nothing more. Woodley has said many, many times that not every goalie fits with every team and it’s not a question of the quality of play but the style of play. As a self professed “card carrying member of the goalie union”, his silence feels a bit like the Thumper rule, “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say nuttin’ at all.”
Back in December, Jeff M posted a link to a goalie “deep dive”. In reading that I found out the xGA his Vezina finalists season was the lowest of any team in the past 10 years! I think that has to benefit any style of play. I do feel like if you have a $5.9m goalie, he shouldn’t need an “elite” defense to be above league average.
One thing I heard recently from Frank Serivelli (not a fan, but he talks to a lot of hockey people) was speculation about a transition in goaltending going on between an older style of goaltending and the newer goaltenders who’ve come up in this recent era. I’m assuming he means the speed and skill of the game vs say 10 years ago. One thing I found in the numbers comparing Gru and Joey… it’s the medium-danger shots where the biggest separation is… and its been huge lately. I wonder if the increasing lateral nature of the game is something Grubauer is having a hard time with. If he’s not reading or tracking the cross ice action that could certainly leave the backdoor open for those “medium-danger” chances. It does seem like a fair number of the impressive saves Joey has been making have been from getting across the crease.
And then there’s injury, of course… but who knows on that front?
I don’t know, but it’s getting hard to dismiss the numbers and this has been a good defensive team all along. Not No.1 out of more than 300… but solid nonetheless.
Go Kraken!!!
Oops… one more thing. I don’t subscribe to In Goal magazine. There might be something there from Woodley I’ve missed. I’d be curious to hear from someone who does subscribe if there’s been any Grubauer content there in the last few seasons.