BREAKING: Kraken moving from ROOT Sports, will air games on KONG/KING 5 and Prime Video

by Darren Brown | Apr 25, 2024 | Kraken

The Seattle Kraken will have a new TV broadcast home for the foreseeable future, the team announced Thursday morning. After three seasons with ROOT Sports as the flagship television network for the team, the Kraken will partner with TEGNA (KING 5 and KONG) in a “multi-year agreement.” All games that haven’t been picked up for national coverage will be viewable on KONG, and a handful of games will also be simulcast on KING 5.

Additionally, the team has entered into a new first-of-its-kind partnership with Prime Video, which will allow streaming of all locally broadcasted games to Prime members for no additional cost.  

These new deals should make games more accessible for local viewers, who will now be able to watch Kraken hockey “over the air,” even without a cable subscription (a simple cheap antenna should get you access to both KING 5 and KONG), or with a more economical streaming option than before.

“ROOT has been a terrific partner for us; we have appreciated their support as we determined our broadcast plans moving forward,” said Kraken owner, Sam Holloway in a press release. “Today’s announcement is a game changer for our fans. Our goal is to increase the ways they can watch our games – whether they’re cheering us on at home or on the go. To have both TEGNA and Prime Video as trusted partners is a dream come true. I can’t wait for more fans to fall in love with Kraken hockey.”

The viewing area for both the over-the-air option and the streaming option will cover Washington, Oregon, and Alaska (KGW in Portland and KREM in Spokane will carry the games, since KONG and KING 5 are not readily available in those markets).

Why move away from ROOT?

The broadcast team at ROOT did a fantastic job. We’ve watched plenty of local broadcasts from other markets, and we can honestly say (biases aside) that the Kraken broadcast has been one of, if not the best in the business over the past three seasons.

But there were barriers for fans or potential fans to access games on TV, and limited streaming options made games on ROOT difficult to find without some sort of significant financial investment from viewers.  

The content wasn’t the issue. The issue was simply that for fans to watch ROOT, they not only needed a cable subscription like Xfinity, they also got an added kick recently of having to pay even more for an elevated tier to access the sports network.  

For those that had switched out of cable, Fubo TV was a fine solution, but to get ROOT, “cord cutters” still had to pay north of $100 per month.

Now, there are more economical (and even free) options available to viewers, a huge win for Kraken fans.

What’s happening with the broadcast team?

Up to now, games have been produced mostly by ROOT employees and/or contractors, with some Kraken personnel factoring in. Moving forward, production of the games will not be handed over to TEGNA, though their employees will certainly be involved.

Instead, a lot of the production will now be done “in house” by the Kraken, meaning more of the individuals working on the show will be team employees, and they will use some of TEGNA’s existing infrastructure. This is a shift from how things were being done previously and (we assume) gives the team a bit more control over branding, graphics, visuals, etc.

The difficult piece here is that there are good people at ROOT who did a great job on broadcasts for three seasons that are now facing uncertainty. On the flipside, we wouldn’t be surprised to see the Kraken hire some of these individuals who have already been part of the show.

As for the on-air broadcast team, all the Kraken employees that you became accustomed to seeing will be around next season. So, we expect John Forslund, Eddie Olczyk, JT Brown, Alison Lukan, and Nick Olczyk to continue participating in 2024-25.  

Other on-air personalities that appeared on games previously are ROOT employees, including Piper Shaw. Currently, there isn’t much that we can share on this front.

Good news for Kraken fans

Whichever way you slice it, this is a positive move for Kraken fans. Our hope is that it will truly allow the team to reach more new fans and get hooks into more casual fans to turn them into diehards. The franchise has done a solid job of building its brand locally, but we have wondered about the true reach beyond the Seattle metro area. This is a huge shift that should really help on this front.

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.

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How Joey Daccord and his dad, Brian, helped Sharks goalie Devin Cooley make the NHL

by Darren Brown | Apr 17, 2024 | Kraken

After San Jose Sharks goalie Devin Cooley stole a 3-1 win from the Seattle Kraken last Thursday, making a whopping 49 saves for just his second NHL victory, the lanky netminder was visibly elated to have had one of the best performances of his life. Jovial as can be, Cooley said during the game he had been reciting wonky phrases to himself like, “There are no thoughts, there is no future, there are no thoughts, there is no future,” and, “Nothing matters, nobody cares, nothing matters, nobody cares.” 

The 26-year-old said those little sayings keep him “grounded” in net, as he tries to clear his mind during games. 

That line, “Nobody cares,” rang a goalie-related bell. It’s one we’ve heard from Seattle Kraken backstop Joey Daccord when we’ve talked to him about his mindset in the crease. And it is not a coincidence that the two players say similar things to themselves to stay focused on the task at hand. 

Cooley and Daccord—who faced each other that night for the first time in the NHL—are good friends who have trained together in offseasons since they were teenagers. But it’s more than just a training partnership. In a way, Cooley says he owes a big portion of his success to Joey and his dad, Brian Daccord. 

Raw talent

Joey Daccord and Cooley met in the USHL when they became batterymates for the Muskegon Lumberjacks. Daccord said Cooley arrived in the middle of the 2015-16 training camp and wasn’t expected to be his goalie partner for the season. But Cooley got a chance to show what he could do in a game against one of the USA NTDP squads and earned his way onto the Lumberjacks. 

“He stood on his head,” Daccord remembered. “He played awesome, and I remember he was so big and so athletic, but I just was thinking, ‘This guy needs some real goalie coaching. He’s so talented.’ You could just tell he had that raw athletic ability.”

That was the rub for Cooley at the time. Born in the hockey not-so-hotbed of Los Gatos, Calif.,  and a product of the San Jose Junior Sharks program, he arrived in the USHL without having ever received full-time goalie coaching. 

Unsurprisingly, 2015-16 was a rough season for Cooley, who posted a 4.28 goals-against average and .873 save percentage in 19 games for Muskegon. But as Cooley floundered, he and Daccord formed a close friendship and began working together after practices. 

“During that year, I was really struggling,” Cooley said. “I think I was last place in save percentage and goals-against average, and Joey kind of took me under his wing and was like my coach during juniors and just gave me a lot of tips and stuff.”

Daccord said he thought that with Cooley’s size and agility, there was something there for him to become a special goalie. 

“I saw a real opportunity,” Daccord said. “He’s a great goalie, a great kid. We were just buddies, and I could see how much potential he had. We had a lot of fun doing that, and he’s always been a very curious kid. Like, he always wanted to get better, always wanted to improve, always asked questions, that kind of thing.”

It so happened that Joey knew a guy who could help Cooley more than even he could. Daccord’s father, Brian, is a pro goalie coach and founder of Stop It Goaltending in Massachusetts. 

“Towards the end of year, [Joey] was like, ‘Hey, what are you doing this the summer?’” Cooley recalled. “He’s like, ‘You want to come train like with my dad in Boston?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, absolutely. That’d be great,’ so I went one summer, and I absolutely loved it, and then I’ve been going ever since.” 

The right coaching

Enter Brian Daccord, who played seven years in the Swiss National ‘A’ League, and has since held such roles as Boston Bruins goalie coach, director of goalie operations for the Arizona Coyotes, and goalie coach for Boston University. Brian has taught countless elite-level goalies at his camp over the years, from Cory Schneider to Chris Driedger to his son, Joey. 

Brian immediately saw in Cooley what Joey had seen. 

“If you look at baseball players, when they go into training camp, they always go back and they start hitting off a tee,” the elder Daccord said. “And I think what we had to do was have Devin take a step back and work on some of the mechanics and the muscle memory that goes into either making saves or through his structure, and then kind of pulling him back a step so we can move two forward.”

Brian said he remembered Cooley showing up that first summer, getting himself an eight-week-long AirBNB rental, and going to work every day on his game. He said Cooley is a guy that has to be pulled off the ice because he is always working hard to improve. 

“A nice thing about Devin is that he recognized where he needed to work, and that was more on the technical part of his game, the structural part of the game,” Brian said. “He’s a tremendous athlete, but he hadn’t maybe spent as much time on the technical game as he would have liked.”

Part of what gets discussed at camp is the mental side of the goalie position, which explains where Joey and Devin got that “nobody cares” mantra.

“That’s a me thing, I say it all the time,” Brian Daccord said. “If you walk into a rink, no one cares if your flight was late, and you didn’t get in until three o’clock in the morning. No one cares that your pads got stuck somewhere, and you had to use your backup pair of pads. No one cares if you’ve got a cold, no one cares if your girlfriend just broke up with you, no one cares. When you step on the ice, it’s time to perform, regardless, so you can’t use anything that happens to you as a crutch.”

High praise for the Daccords

Joey didn’t have to help Cooley. Teenage goalie tandems can be quite competitive with one another, as they grapple with tension-creating issues like uneven playing time. But Daccord didn’t see it that way. Instead, he went out of his way to help mold his buddy into a future pro, and Cooley has not forgotten this. 

“If you were to ask me in juniors, ‘Hey, how do you play this situation?’ or, ‘How do you make this save?’ I had no idea,” Cooley said. “I was just going out there and winging it. I had no clue what I was doing, but I had a lot of size, I was quick, I was mobile, and so I think they saw that raw talent. With the right coaching, [they thought] I could really make a lot of progress.

“Without them, without Joey and his dad and his family, I definitely wouldn’t be standing here right now. So there’s a lot of credit to him. I’m super thankful for him.”

Joey was flattered to know that Cooley had said that about him, but he sent the praise right back to the Sharks goalie. 

“I think it’s really cool to be included in something like that, but at the end of the day, he put in the work, he put in the effort, and I think that’s the coolest part about the whole thing is he grinded,” Daccord said. “He put in the work, and he’s earned what he’s gotten.” 

Two buddies in the NHL

The game on Thursday wasn’t the first time Cooley and Daccord had crossed paths in competition. They faced each other in the AHL Western Conference Finals last season and both backed up for their respective NHL teams in a 4-2 Kraken win at the Sharks on April 1. 

But this was the first time the two had actually played one another in the world’s best hockey league, so it was a special moment for both. 

“It’s just the coolest thing ever that we’re getting to play each other in the NHL,” Daccord said.

The two exchanged text messages before the game, wishing one another good luck, and although Daccord was not pleased with the outcome, he was happy to see his buddy succeed, and the feeling has been mutual from Cooley’s side. 

“It’s been awesome to see [Joey] this year,” Cooley said. “He’s been absolutely killing it, so it’s been really cool to see. I’ve been getting a little jealous, though, especially at the beginning of the year; I wanted to do that. He’s been a blast to watch.” 

Header photo: Joey Daccord and Devin Cooley pose before an April 1 game between the Seattle Kraken and San Jose Sharks. Photo courtesy Seattle Kraken.

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.

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Beautiful chaos – Understanding how NHL teams operate within their systems

by Darren Brown | Apr 16, 2024 | Kraken

You know how NHLers sometimes appear to have eyes in the backs of their heads? Well, they don’t, but they can often make educated guesses without looking behind them that one of their linemates will be there if they make a drop pass at the top of the slot or fling a blind backhander across the blue line. 

It’s not a perfect science, but it is all by design. Hockey looks chaotic at times, but on every inch of the ice, teams have a plan. Players are supposed to be heading to specific places, skating in specific directions and routes, and covering specific areas to make themselves “predictable” to their teammates. 

“If you know where your teammate’s going to be based on structure, it’s so much easier to play, and that’s where the skill will take over later on,” Seattle Kraken forward Tomas Tatar said. “But if you don’t have the basics in the structure, then you’re kind of playing without knowing where the other players will be, so that just makes it harder.” 

Systems are complicated, and the game is so fluid that it’s sometimes hard to decipher which one a team is deploying. For example, if the Kraken have the puck in the offensive zone, all five players have specific jobs they’re supposed to be doing. But those jobs can change in a flash, depending on where the puck is and what the defense is doing. Maybe the center goes to the slot and waits for a pass while the wing pulls it off the wall, like we saw when Shane Wright scored his second goal of the game against the Ducks last Saturday. 

But if the puck is contested along the kick plate in the corner, perhaps all three forwards should be cycling to create confusion for the defense. And once the puck gets turned over, now suddenly the Kraken shift to their offensive-zone forecheck, looking to win the puck back. Fail to do that? Now they’re backchecking, and those switches from system to system all happen instantaneously.

We were curious about how much of what we see at the NHL level is pre-planned and how much is improvised, so we chatted with several Kraken players to find out. 

Why systems exist

Systems exist in hockey for several important reasons. 

1. They help players know where their teammates will be in those moments when they have to make split-second decisions. And while it’s still not advised to truly make a blind pass, players can look like wizards by evading pressure with passes into areas where they expect their teammates to be, even if they don’t physically see them there.
2. When a team has the puck, the offensive systems are all designed to overlap with one another with the goal of creating chances. On the flip side, defensive systems in all three zones are designed to minimize dangerous chances against and win back control of the puck, but they also create redundancies. If one player misses an assignment or gets out of position, there should often be somebody there as a backup. 
3. By operating within the confines of these systems, a player with the puck should typically have multiple options that will allow them to work around what the opposing team is doing defensively. 
4. They take the thinking out of the game for players, because, as Jaden Schwartz said, “Hockey happens so fast, you don’t really have time to think.”

Schwartz succinctly explained the systematic approach to the game from a Kraken perspective. “We do have systems as far as breakouts and going through the neutral zone and guys knowing their roles, not only for them to get the puck, but for them to maybe take a defender with them, and maybe it leaves another guy open. So there’s definitely some parts that we try to do consistently to kind of use our speed and get going offensively.”

The pace of play in the NHL makes structure even more crucial than at lower levels, where players typically have more time to look up, find a target, and make a pass. When an NHL player doesn’t have enough time to do that, they can often rely on the team’s structure and their muscle memory to make a quick play and (hopefully) keep the puck heading in the right direction. 

Reading and reacting

Of course, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and that’s why NHL players also need elite skill to go with their understanding of their team’s structure. Rarely can a player simply follow a route as it’s drawn up on the whiteboard, make a pass to a linemate that is exactly where the coach told them to be, and watch them go in and score. It just doesn’t work that way. 

“It’s usually just a read-and-react, instincts kind of thing because we have gameplans, but it depends on where [the opponents] are and what they’re doing a little bit,” Schwartz said. “Usually you’re just kind of playing off instincts and reading and reacting and kind of taking what they give you. But that kind of affects what you’re going to do with the puck and where the guys are going to go.” 

So, within the systems, players have the freedom to make their own reads and try to create, based on what is happening in front of them. When you see a forward line that has “good chemistry,” it means that even when they aren’t following to a T what the team structure tells them to do, they’re still able to make an effective play by inherently knowing where their teammate is going.

“I think a lot of it for me is reading the play, understanding where the space is, and then obviously repetition of when you’re with guys and you’ve played with them for a while, that chemistry,” Jordan Eberle said. “[You learn] tendencies and things they like to do, and that kind of helps you make your thought process a little bit quicker and makes things predictable, which, for me, is how you play fast.”

It’s almost like the structure and the game plans give the players a loose roadmap to the ice, but then there are a million different paths they can take to get to the same destination, depending on what obstacles they face. 

3-on-2 (or 4-on-2?) rushes

In these last couple Kraken games, a good example that you can look for to see players making reads in real time is when they get a 3-on-2 rush that starts in the neutral zone. When this happens, the puck carrier makes a decision, and the other two attackers try to do something that will increase the team’s chances to score.

There are a few options for the puck carrier on a 3-on-2 rush. For one, they can stay along the boards and buy time for the other attackers to go hard to the net, looking for a pass and a tap-in. The puck carrier can also cut hard to the middle, which can lead to a cross-and-drop, or another angle for a netmouth tap-in. Or, they could simply funnel the puck to the net, meaning the puck carrier stays wide and shoots from distance, hoping for a rebound to one of the other two attackers who are straight-lining it to the top of the crease.

As the puck carrier is making this decision, the other attackers need to be recognizing what the carrier is doing and moving in a way that either makes them an option for a pass or gives them body position to win a rebound. So, there’s a lot happening in a play that lasts under five seconds. It’s a good example, though, of how teams have general guidelines for what they’re supposed to do, but the players still need to make their own real-time decisions on the ice.

A 3-on-2 rush can often lead to chances, but a 4-on-2 rush tends to create even more dangerous opportunities. But there are only three forwards on the ice at any given time, so who is the fourth player in that scenario? Well, it’s a defenseman of, course. Activating a defenseman on the rush is something Seattle does regularly, but it can be risky. If the Kraken turn the puck over or even get a big rebound off the goalie’s pads, it can lead to an odd-man rush in the other direction.

“We like getting our D involved and keeping plays alive,” Jamie Oleksiak said. “It confuses coverage when there’s a lot of movement and guys kind of coming up and down, and depending on how the team is playing, it could create some confusion and some opportunities to create offense. I think it’s kind of a systematic thing, just in terms of where guys are coming, and a big part of it is the D-man as well as just knowing that you have that forward support coming back to back you up so you can take those chances down low.”

Indeed, if the defenseman jumps up into the play at the wrong time and doesn’t have their partner or a forward trailing that can get back and help, that defenseman can leave their goalie hung out to dry. 

“There’s so many different factors that go into it, like at what point in the game it is, what the score is,” Oleksiak said. “But I think for the most part, teams are so good defensively at getting coverage back that you kind of need that fourth or fifth guy to join in a rush and give you that option and kind of space things out a little bit. But it’s really up to [the defenseman’s] discretion. You’ve got to read the point of the game, the momentum, and if you’re up a goal or two, maybe you don’t take that chance. Maybe you play a little bit more conservatively.” 

Oleksiak added that facing a 4-on-2 rush is a “worst-case scenario” for a defenseman, who can only cover so much of the ice.

The Kraken were victimized by a defenseman jumping up in the play last week against the Sharks. Here, Seattle had even numbers back for what appeared to be a nothing play. But Kyle Burroughs jumped up and made himself available to William Eklund, and Burroughs potted the eventual winning goal.

Playing fast

The other thing we learned from these conversations about Seattle’s tactics was teams that execute the best within their systems are the ones that look the fastest. The margins of skill and physical speed are slim from player to player and team to team in the NHL, which is what makes execution so critical.

“I honestly think there’s not many teams left who are not fast,” Tatar said. “The league is getting faster and faster, and I feel like everybody wants to play fast. Some teams are faster than other ones, but the concept of playing fast is pretty much everywhere.

“The good teams just know, playing very structurally, and this helps the speed, and all of a sudden the team looks super fast.” 

This was the biggest difference we saw between the Kraken and some of their better opponents this season. When you saw the Dallas Stars (for example) cruise through the neutral zone with ease against Seattle in two recent matchups, they looked lightning quick. You would see a one-touch pass in the middle of the ice, in which a Stars forward would catch another one perfectly in stride, and suddenly Dallas was in perfect position in the offensive zone with Seattle on its heels. 

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.

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