If you’ve ever gone on a trip, maybe a week or two long, chances are there usually comes a point where you’re just ready to go home, even if you have a few days remaining. For the Seattle Kraken, that couldn’t have been more the case when it fell 8-3 to the Florida Panthers on Saturday night at Amerant Bank Arena in Sunrise, Florida.
The Panthers got the pressure going early, with Sam Bennett batting in a puck that was up in the air at 1:05 of the first period. While Shane Wright, with his third of the year, was able to knot things up midway through, the onslaught came in the last five minutes of the frame.
A Ryker Evans delay-of-game and an Adam Larsson high-sticking penalty led to Florida’s Carter Verhaeghe scoring twice near the end of the first. The Panthers pounced on the open areas the Kraken were giving them, and as head coach Lane Lambert points out, Florida’s the type of team where if you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile.
“There was a stretch of five minutes that turned the game on the wrong side,” Lambert said of the collapse towards the end of the first period. “We have certain situations that we have protocols for. Didn’t do a good enough job of executing and that’s what happens when you’re playing against a good hockey team like that. They have a tendency to take advantage of situations when you make mistakes.”
From there, it was all Panthers. Dueling hat tricks from Carter Verhaeghe and Sam Bennett marked the first such occurrence in team history. That also marked three straight games for the Panthers in which a player recorded a natural hat trick, the first such occurrence in league history. A natural hat trick occurs when a player scores three consecutive goals, which do not have to occur in the same period.
Still, the Kraken finished its first long road-trip of the season 3-1-1, securing seven out of a possible 10 points early on. While there are certainly positives to take away, there’s still a lot of work for the team to do. Here are the three takeaways from the Kraken’s loss at the Panthers.
Takeaway 1: Getting outmatched by better teams
Don’t let last season fool you. The Panthers still possess the bones of the teams that won back-to-back Stanley Cups. The Kraken’s four losses thus far all came at the expense of teams that either won or were in the Stanley Cup Final within the 2020s (EDM, VGK, TB and FLA), and all of which considered among the model organizations in the league.
While signs of improvement are there, especially on the road-trip, performances against the likes of Florida and Vegas suggest Seattle still has a long way to go before being serious contenders.
“We got beat in every area tonight,” Lambert said. “You ask me what I needed to see, a lot more of everything.”
Even when the Kraken tried to get things going, the Panthers were quick to spoil a lot of rush chances for the Kraken, halting forward progress in the neutral zone and using their sticks to get into puck lanes.
“The last two teams [were] some of the best teams in the league,” Kraken forward Shane Wright said. “The level we want to get to and need to get to, that’s kind of the pace, speed, and intensity that we need to get to. We’ve shown that we can play with those teams, just got to do that [on a] consistent basis.”
Takeaway 2: Quite a bit of puck-watching
Florida has so many pure shooters who frustrate opposing defensive units, and the Kraken were no exception. The Panthers won puck battles and capitalized with goals from long range.
It’s hard to put sole blame on anyone in a blowout loss, but the second line of Jordan Eberle, Chandler Stephenson and Bobby McMann were quite an outlier. The group together garnered a plus-minus rating of minus-14 in this game. While guarding quality players like Bennett, Verhaeghe and Matthew or Brady Tkachuk isn’t exactly a walk in the park, the Kraken didn’t exactly make it any easier on themselves tonight.
Florida was efficient at getting to the quality scoring areas. It’s also important to mention the performance of Joey Daccord, who saved 29 of 37 shots on the evening. That was two blow up starts out of his last three appearances.
Takeaway 3: Overall, a solid road trip
This trip definitely didn’t end on the note the Kraken wanted, but that’s how it goes sometimes. The Kraken won just one game in regulation in 2025-26 when visiting Eastern Conference venues, and this season the team has already surpassed that with three wins on the trip.
If you were to show somebody at the beginning of October that the Kraken would go 3-1-1 on this trip and come out relatively unscathed, minus the injury to Brandon Montour, they would take that in an instant.
“I mean it’s seven out of 10 points so not everything’s bad news,” Wright said. “Obviously it sucks to end that way but I think overall as the whole, the road trip was good for us.”
The Kraken are ready to get home. The team will now fly the 2,000-plus-mile trip home and begin a stretch of seven of eight games at Climate Pledge Arena, starting with the Utah Mammoth on Tuesday night.