With their first two picks Friday and Saturday, the Seattle Kraken selected two Western Hockey League centers who won’t need to cross state lines to report to Kraken Development Camp this week. After selecting Berkly Catton of the Spokane Chiefs at No. 8 overall, the Kraken stuck around the Pacific Northwest and selected Julius Miettinen of the Everett Silvertips at No. 40.

This superficial similarity coincidence aside, the players are actually quite different. Catton has been in the WHL with Spokane for three years now and has long been scrutinized as a top prospect, whereas Miettinen just arrived in 2023-24, coming to Everett in the WHL import draft from Finland. Catton is a smaller, skilled transition dynamo capable of winning with complex maneuvers and high-end vision. Miettinen is a tall, physical, north-south player who prefers to grind in the corners and at the net front while playing a support role in transition.

Indeed, if you were to align their component skill grade profiles from Elite Prospects, you would find them almost mirror images of each other. One area of overlap, according to Kraken general manager Ron Francis, is their hockey intelligence; Francis was quick to compliment this aspect of Miettinen’s game after the draft Saturday. The Kraken certainly hope there is a future where the two compliment each other with Catton helping run the top of the lineup and Miettinen anchoring a bottom-six line.

Quick thoughts on the pick

Miettinen brings a player profile the Kraken system is currently lacking—a physically imposing, two-way forward who projects to stick at center long-term. Elite Prospects compares him to Charlie Coyle or Boone Jenner. Like those players, at first his game may seem overly simple, but with repeated viewings you start to understand how he intelligently puts himself in positions to win more than his share of battles and grind out the production a team needs to win.

It took Miettinen some time to transition to the North American game, after playing junior hockey in Finland through his age 17 season. But his scoring production trended upward as the 2023-24 season continued. McKeen’s attributes this development to improved skating skill: “He still looked like an appealing prospect overall early on, but that was in spite of his skating and pacing, not because of it… But give full marks to the Everett staff, who helped him work on his feet and his conditioning, while also instilling in him the importance of being able to play fast. Somewhere along the way it all clicked, and now Miettinen’s speed and mobility are legitimate assets for him, with explosive acceleration and the balance and edge work to navigate himself through traffic.”

For this reason, there’s certainly reason to believe Miettinen should continue his upward ascent during the 2024-25 season with Everett. This pick is a bet on that continued improvement. There were superior scoring profiles available to the Kraken at pick No. 40—forward Andrew Basha who went one pick later to Calgary is an example. I always hesitate when a team drafts a player who plays like a bottom-six NHL projection in junior because those players rarely actually materialize in the NHL. This is a bet on Miettinen’s traits.

Julius Miettinen player profile

Center | Everett Silvertips | Age: 18 | Height: 6-foot-3 | Weight: 201 lbs | Left shot

Season	Team	League	GP	G	A	Pts	PIM	Plus-Minus
2021-22	HIFK U18	U18 SM-sarja	25	9	11	20	14	–
2022-23	HIFK U20	UM20 SM-sarja	38	10	12	22	20	-2
2023-24	Everett Silvertips	WHL	66	31	36	67	32	27

Source: Elite Prospects

What does the Big Board say?

Miettinen was drafted in the range anticipated by the Sound Of Hockey Big Board, which had him at No. 41 overall. I had Miettinen as my 61st-ranked prospect in my adjusted NHLe ranking. Craig Button of TSN had Miettinen as his No. 22 overall prospect, as did HockeyProspect(dot)com. Central Scouting had Miettinen as their 16th-ranked North American skater.

How does he look on the ice?

What are scouts saying?

Strengths:

“[Miettinen’s] details shine. Positionally sound and physical, he’s always in the right spot to push attackers wide and then win possession along the wall. Offensively, he skates every route to push back defenders, creates chaos around the net, and perfectly times rolls off the boards to get open in the slot.

“An ability to link all of these details together in a single shift separates Miettinen from forwards in this archetype. He never deviates from his off-puck game, making a consistent presence.

“With the puck, Miettinen mostly plays a quick-possession game. He shoots off the catch when inside the slot and finds the open teammate when not. But there are flashes of more.” – Elite Prospects

“Miettinen is a well-built, strong, 6-foot-3 center who works, wins battles, plays hard and can skate. He’s got some soft skill and power to his game. He protects the puck well and can play along the wall or go to the front of the net and make plays around the crease.” – Scott Wheeler, The Athletic

“With good size and a fairly well-rounded game, Miettinen could potentially go in the first round. He scored 31 goals and had over a point per game in his first WHL season after modest production a year ago in Finland’s U20 league.” – Chris Peters, Flo Hockey

Weaknesses:

“There are times where Miettinen is a little too unnoticeable for a player of his size, but when he’s at his best there’s power in his game that can be hard to come by.” – Chris Peters, Flo Hockey

“The only pressing question that still remains is just how much value, precisely, does he have as a prospect? Even though his toolbox eventually reached the point of overflowing, he barely maintained a point-per-game average on the season, while some of his forward teammates did so handily. And then when the playoffs came and went, he was pretty quiet. Are his inherent vision and creativity good enough for him to become a top-tier offensive threat? And while he seems like someone who could be a very good shutdown center and penalty killer at higher levels, the Silvertips haven’t used him often yet in those sorts of ways, so there’s not really much of a resume that can back up that hunch. All that being said, he’s already shown the ability to make major tweaks to his game, so that’s a great sign that he’s capable of doing it again.” – McKeen’s

Final thoughts

With so much focus on Seattle’s blue line depth coming into the 2024 NHL Draft, the Kraken selected only two borderline top-100 defense prospects in Alexis Bernier (73 overall pick; 122 on the Big Board) and Jakub Fibigr (202 overall pick; 98 on the Big Board). Francis strongly implied that Berkly Catton was the player Seattle was targeting all along at pick No. 8, but did Seattle try to add a higher-profile defenseman later in the draft only to be beaten to punch by other teams? It is possible.

After the draft concluded Saturday, Director of Amateur Scouting Robert Kron indicated that Seattle may have had its eye on a few blue line prospects that were selected shortly before Seattle picked. Looking at how the draft played out, the most notable instance came when a cluster of blue line prospects went off the board from pick Nos. 34 to 39. Is it possible the Kraken had hoped one or more of those players would still be on the board at No. 40? We’ll likely never know for certain, but it’s a reasonable question to ask in light of Kron’s comments. As Miettinen’s career progresses, it will be interesting to compare it against the progress of the blueliners that went shortly before he did.