Aside from a shooting‑percentage bender in 2022–23, the Seattle Kraken haven’t exactly been known as a high‑scoring team. But last season’s offensive output felt particularly challenging. Lane Lambert arrived with a reputation for structure and defensive responsibility, and the Kraken have certainly leaned into that identity. Now that we have a full season of Lambert hockey to look at, it feels fair to ask how much his coaching impacted the team’s goal scoring.
There are a few questions I want to explore: how did Lambert’s teams score before and after his tenure with the Islanders? How does Kraken scoring compare across their three coaches? And what happens to individual players’ goal rates when they play for Lambert? Maybe we’ll find a pattern. Maybe we’ll find nothing at all. Either way, these are the questions worth poking at.
As always, there are caveats and known limitations baked into this kind of analysis. For starters, this is a high‑level, simplified approach to measuring offensive impact. I might expand on shots, shooting percentage, and shot attempts, but even then we’ll be missing a lot of contextual factors. One obvious example: teams playing with a lead in the third period tend to score less because there’s no urgency to push offense. Over the first two months of the 2025–26 season, Lambert’s Kraken looked perfectly content prioritizing defensive structure over offensive generation in third periods.
Another caveat is personnel changes from season to season and coach to coach, whether through injuries or roster turnover. I’ll call out some of those changes as we move through the exploration.
Lambert’s Islanders tenure
Lane Lambert was named head coach of the New York Islanders in the summer of 2022 and lasted roughly a season and a half before being let go on Jan. 20, 2024. He finished with a 61‑46‑20 record and guided the team back to the Stanley Cup Playoffs in his first season. With the Islanders, we can compare both his predecessor, Barry Trotz, and his successor, Patrick Roy.
It’s a little surprising to see Lambert’s Islanders posting the highest average goals‑for per game of the three coaches, especially considering the scoring dip we saw in Seattle. Breaking it down by season gives us a bit more context.
When Roy took over mid‑season in 2023–24, he squeezed out an additional 0.12 goals per game from the same roster. That’s not a huge bump, but it’s enough to swing a couple of standings points. For fun, let’s also look at shots on goal per game and shooting percentage.
Again, nothing materially different between the three coaching tenures.
Islanders roster changes and player production
To paint a fuller picture, here are some of the more notable roster changes across the three regimes:
- Trotz → Lambert subtrations: The biggest offensive subtraction was Jordan Eberle, who left a season before Lambert arrived. Eberle had been one of the Islanders’ top scorers before being selected by Seattle in the Expansion Draft.
- Additions under Lambert: Bo Horvat joined mid‑season in Lambert’s first year. Pierre Engvall, Hudson Fasching, and Simon Holmstrom also arrived — serviceable forwards, but not major offensive drivers.
- Lambert → Roy subtractions: Zach Parise and Anthony Beauvillier played portions of Lambert’s tenure but not Roy’s.
- Roy additions: Anthony Duclair, Tony DeAngelo, Emil Heineman, and Matthew Schaeffer all contributed offensively under Roy but not Lambert.
Here’s how goals per game shook out for players who overlapped at least two of the three tenures. (Red = higher goal rate; blue = lower.)
There’s nothing particularly significant here, with the possible exception of Brock Nelson, who scored roughly 0.06 more goals per game under Lambert than under either Trotz or Roy, about five extra goals over a full season.
The Kraken’s three‑coach history
As mentioned above, there’s no denying the Kraken struggled to score last season. They averaged 2.73 goals per game — 28th in the league — down from 2.99 under Dan Bylsma in 2024–25. That was the sixth‑biggest drop in the NHL.
We already know the offensive decline from Bylsma to Lambert was steep, but zooming out to include the Hakstol era gives us more information.
The drop from Bylsma to Lambert was significant but still better than the non‑playoff Hakstol years. The falloff from 2022–23 to 2023–24 was also substantial, but the roster got noticeably worse over that span. Pierre‑Edouard Bellemare and Kailer Yamamoto were expected to replace the 44 goals lost from Ryan Donato (14), Morgan Geekie (9), and Daniel Sprong (21).
Now let’s look at shots on goal and shooting percentage by coach.
One insight to consider might be the relatively low shot volume under Lambert compared to previous coaches. But when Lambert coached the Islanders, they had the highest shot volume of the three tenures. And again, shot volume is tricky; teams shoot less when they’re winning, and that’s exactly what we saw early in 2025–26.
To illustrate the point, here’s a breakdown of average shots on goal in 10‑game increments with win percentage in those 10 games noted at the bottom of each bar. In three of their coldest stretches (shown in blue), they actually averaged their highest shot totals.
Kraken roster changes and player production
As with the Islanders, here are the notable roster changes across Kraken coaches:
- Hakstol → Bylsma subtractions: Alex Wennberg, Ryan Donato, and Morgan Geekie were the biggest offensive losses.
- Additions under Bylsma: Chandler Stephenson, Brandon Montour, and half a season of Kaapo Kakko.
- Bylsma → Lambert subtractions: Oliver Bjorkstrand, Andre Burakovsky, and Yanni Gourde were all traded before Lambert arrived.
- Additions under Lambert: Mason Marchment (29 games before being traded), Freddy Gaudreau, and rookie Berkly Catton.
Here are the average goals per game for players who played significant minutes under two or more coaches.
Vince Dunn, Brandon Montour, Jaden Schwartz, Eeli Tolvanen, and Shane Wright all saw their goal production dip under Lambert, while Jordan Eberle and Jared McCann saw increases. To really understand the root causes, we’d need to dig into ice time, power‑play usage, and shot rates and that is beyond the scope of this analysis (for now).
The Lambert scoring impact
After walking through all of this, I’m not convinced we can pin the Kraken’s scoring issues squarely on Lane Lambert’s systems. The numbers just don’t support a clean, tidy narrative. Yes, Seattle’s goal scoring dipped in his first season, and yes, several individual players saw their production slide. But Lambert’s Islanders teams didn’t show the same pattern, and in some cases even scored more under his watch. That inconsistency suggests the Kraken’s offensive struggles are likely a blend of system, roster construction, usage, and plain old variance, not a single, coach‑driven cause.
If anything, the broader takeaway is that the Kraken have been living on the edge of their offensive talent pool for a while now. When the roster thins, the scoring dries up. When the roster deepens, the scoring rebounds. Lambert’s structure may tighten the margins, but it doesn’t appear to inherently suppress offense the way some feared. That gives at least a little hope that the 2025–26 scoring woes aren’t permanent fixtures of the Lambert era.
The more interesting question might be what happens next. With Mackie Samoskevich arriving, Bobby McMann stepping into a full season, and Berkly Catton entering his sophomore year, the Kraken have a few upward‑trending pieces who can tilt the ice offensively. If those players hit, and if Lambert’s system continues to stabilize the defensive side of the puck, Seattle could find a healthier balance, one where structure doesn’t come at the expense of scoring.
The system isn’t the ceiling, and the Kraken’s offensive future probably depends more on who’s wearing the sweaters than who’s standing behind the bench.