With just one more round of Stanley Cup Playoff hockey left to go, it’s challenging to wrap one’s head around the fact that the Seattle Kraken have not been in contention for the Stanley Cup Final since April 3. That’s two full months since Seattle was mathematically eliminated, during which the Edmonton Oilers and Florida Panthers have continued on in battle and now stand one step away from hockey’s pinnacle.

General manager Ron Francis surely wants his team to at least be relevant in 2024-25, but to avoid another early bow out by the Kraken, there are a lot of levers that need pulling. As the NHL season nears its official close, things will start to get busy again in front offices across the league, and offseason wheeling and dealing will commence.

While Francis has shown to be conservative in his approach to roster building, we do think he’ll make some notable moves this summer. Here’s everything we think Francis and his Hockey Operations staff have on their to-do list.

No. 1 – Hire a head coach (COMPLETE)

Promoting Dan Bylsma from Coachella Valley made all the sense in the world. He comes with an NHL pedigree, a Stanley Cup win, and a renewed passion for the job with these two extremely successful seasons with the Firebirds now under his belt.

We won’t analyze the hire too much here, since we’ve done that ad nauseam over the last week (read this article and listen to this podcast for more), but it was certainly at the top of the list for Francis.

No. 2 – Figure out contracts for Matty Beniers and Eeli Tolvanen

What a team does with its restricted free agents is always interesting. This summer, the Kraken have just three RFA’s, but two of them are key players in Matty Beniers and Eeli Tolvanen. The other is Kailer Yamamoto, who never found a good fit with Seattle under coach Dave Hakstol and was largely mired either on the fourth line or in healthy scratch territory.

Remember, a team must extend a qualifying offer to an RFA by the end-of-June deadline to maintain the rights to the player. Once that happens, it’s almost guaranteed that a deal gets done, but sometimes it ends up being only a one-year contract. An added wrinkle can be arbitration rights, where a player has the option to bring in a neutral third party to determine a fair contract. Arbitration rights can sometimes scare a team off from extending a qualifying offer, which is what happened two summers ago with Ryan Donato (though Donato ultimately re-signed at a lower dollar value than he would have gotten, had he been qualified and filed for arbitration).

In the cases of Seattle’s current RFA’s, Tolvanen and Yamamoto have arbitration rights, whereas Beniers does not. With that in mind, we expect that Yamamoto does not receive a qualifying offer and is made an unrestricted free agent.

As for Tolvanen and Beniers, we suspect the Kraken will try to get extensions done with these players even before the deadline for qualifying offers. Tolvanen is due for a significant raise after racking up 32 goals and 36 assists since Seattle claimed him from the Nashville Predators in the middle of the 2022-23 season. He made $1.45 million this past season, and we would expect that annual average value to at least double on his next deal.

With Beniers, there are many factors at play. First, he didn’t have a great sophomore season in the NHL. After winning the Calder Trophy in 2022-23, perhaps the expectations for Beniers as a 21-year-old were a bit unfair. Heck, he still put up a respectable 15 goals and 22 assists, but he surely would have wanted more to put himself in a position for a monster payday this summer.

Since he didn’t achieve more this year, the Kraken will likely use that as leverage to try to get Beniers under a long-term contract at a more reasonable cap hit. But if they won’t go to a number that Beniers is willing to sign for seven or eight years, then that may lead to a shorter-term bridge deal. In that case, Beniers would be betting on himself to take huge developmental steps in the next couple of seasons and really cash in on his next contract.

No. 3 – Find more diamonds in the rough

The Kraken hold the No. 8 overall pick in the NHL Draft, which will take place June 28 and 29 at the Sphere in Las Vegas. While this draft is expected to have a steep drop-off after the first few picks, there could be a stud defenseman available at No. 8, and that would certainly help the organization.

Hitting on that top pick is important, but so too is uncovering value deeper in the draft, something Seattle has so far excelled at in its first three seasons. Carson Rehkopf, Oscar Fisker-Mølgaard, Jagger Firkus, Jani Nyman, Niklas Kokko, David Goyette, Ty Nelson, Ryker Evans, Ryan Winterton, and Ville Ottavainen (among others) were all selected in the second round or deeper in their respective drafts, and they all have a chance to be NHL players.

The Kraken have an extra second-round pick, acquired from the New York Rangers in the Alex Wennberg deadline deal in March, and an extra third-round pick from the Maple Leafs that was part of the package that sent Mark Giordano and Colin Blackwell to Toronto during Seattle’s inaugural season.

No. 4 – Find scoring

This to-do list is more of a chronological order than it is in order of importance, but if we had gone with importance ranking, then acquiring goal-scoring may be at the top. We believe Hakstol was—in a way—set up to fail this season after the Kraken shot the lights out of most arenas they played in during the 2022-23 season, thanks in large part to the depth offense that showed up almost every night.

In 2023-24, that offense dried up, and the bottom of the forward lineup provided little-to-no production. That needs to change this offseason.

Our hope is that Francis does what we wanted him to do last offseason, adding perhaps two 20-goal scorers who can slot into one of the top three lines. That would push a couple of players down to the fourth line and should have a major impact on the group’s goal-scoring output.

How Francis acquires said players remains to be seen. Will he make another Oliver Bjorkstrand-esque trade? Will he go fishing in the second tier of free agents, à la Andre Burakovsky? Will he make an even bigger swing (probably not)?

However he does it, we would very much like for the forward depth chart to look something like this going into next season:

Jared McCann // Matty Beniers // NEW 20-GOAL WINGER
Jordan Eberle // NEW 20-GOAL CENTER // Andre Burakovsky
Eeli Tolvanen // Shane Wright // Oliver Bjorkstrand
Tye Kartye // Yanni Gourde // Jaden Schwartz
Brandon Tanev

**AUTHOR’S NOTE: After talking about Eeli Tolvanen extensively in this very article, I stupidly left him out of my forward depth chart initially, as pointed out by Daryl in the comment section (thank you, Daryl). I’ve added him in, which pushes Brandon Tanev into a 13th forward spot. I also moved Jaden Schwartz down to the fourth line, which doesn’t quite make sense, but something like that would have to happen if they add two offensive forwards. However Bylsma slices it, this group of forwards would be tough for any opponent to stop.

We would also be ok if Seattle brings Tomas Tatar back, but he is an unrestricted free agent. His role diminished as the season went on, but he showed he still has some offensive panache that could be valuable depth, especially if he gets back to playing with more skilled players.

No. 5 – Add a depth defenseman

One of the narratives we heard from both Hakstol and Francis at locker clean-out was that the team’s defense was better in 2023-24 than it was in 2022-23. With that in mind, we don’t foresee a major overhaul to the blue line, although we can’t rule out a trade for a puck mover that could help create offense from the back.

We think the more likely scenario, though, is that Justin Schultz is allowed to leave as a free agent, opening the door for Ryker Evans to take on a more full-time role.

How the team backfills for Schultz could be interesting because any upgrade could theoretically push Brian Dumoulin into a seventh-defenseman role. Dumoulin was very solid in his first year with the Kraken, though, so perhaps Seattle finds a way to fill that seventh spot from within.

No. 6 – Round out the coaching staff

This one could be figured out sooner than other items on the list, but since there’s no real timeline for this, we’re putting it last. By bringing up their AHL head coach, the Kraken filled one vacancy by creating another. Once the Firebirds’ season ends, there will be no head coach in Coachella Valley, and there will still be an assistant job available in Seattle, assuming the team keeps the same structure for its coaching staff.

If we had to guess (and this is a complete guess), Jess Campbell will get the assistant coach job with the Kraken, Stu Bickel will get the head coach job in Coachella Valley, and then two new AHL assistants will be hired.