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.
Devin Cooley in net against the Seattle Kraken on April 11. (Photo/Brian Liesse)
“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.
Joey Daccord facing the Sharks on April 11. (Photo/Brian Liesse)
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Regardless of the playoff picture, I still enjoy watching the Kraken right now, especially when they win. The Kraken completed their California swing with wins against the Sharks and Ducks and a loss to the Kings in between. Sure, the victories were against two of the weaker teams in the league, but wins are wins, and you certainly wouldn’t want to see them lose to those teams, would you?
Shane Wright looks good
In my limited viewing of Coachella Valley Firebirds games and discussions I’ve had with people inside the Kraken, Shane Wright’s development has been very positive this season. The 20-year-old center has looked impressive since being called up on March 31, though I understand it has only been a few games. While I am excited about Shane, I remain cautious with prospects, knowing there’s an inherent bias in valuing something you possess. Nonetheless, we can appreciate what we’ve seen from him so far.
He scored a goal in his first game against the Sharks and added two against the Ducks on Friday night. However, his contributions extend beyond goal scoring. Wright plays sound defense, delivers quick, creative passes, and consistently positions himself well for scoring. He did make a few mistakes in his three games so far, but these should serve as learning opportunities.
When he was called up for three games in November, Wright appeared competent but cautious, often opting for the safe play to avoid errors. Although he wasn’t on a line with Jordan Eberle and Jaden Schwartz that time, which might have altered his current role with the big club, he now exudes more confidence and poses a greater threat on the ice than before.
Tremendous give and go between Wright and Schwartz in the neutral zone and then another that ends in a royal road feed from Eberle to Wright for the goal pic.twitter.com/pn3bs2wj9I
When evaluating Shane Wright’s development, I often compare it to the development path of Quinton Byfield, the Los Angeles Kings’ centerman. Their paths are not identical, but Wright and Byfield share similarities. Byfield, drafted second overall in the 2020 NHL Entry Draft, was an OHL player. Due to the pandemic, he was allowed to spend his draft-plus-one season in the AHL and began playing most of his games in the NHL from the 2021-22 season onwards. However, it wasn’t until this season, four years after his draft year, that Byfield began to hit his stride at the top level, just as pundits were speculating that he might be a bust.
Shane is currently in his draft-plus-two season and, by all indications, will become a regular in the NHL next year, his draft-plus-three season. If he follows Byfield’s trajectory, we might not see his full capabilities in the NHL until 2025-26. The broader point is that we still need to be patient. What we should look for is progress in his development, which we have undoubtedly observed since he joined the franchise.
Other Musings
Friday’s win against the Ducks was Seattle’s eighth regular-season win against Anaheim since the inception of the Kraken, the most wins they have posted against any one team. The Kraken have the chance to beat the Sharks for the eighth time on Thursday in Seattle.
Logan Morrison and Ryan Winterton were scratched from games this week, a strategy often deployed when developing players to provide them with a different perspective of the game. This allows them to apply what they have learned from the handful of NHL games they’ve experienced at ice level and observe it from above. We would expect the duo to get another game or two at the NHL level before being sent back to Coachella Valley.
I would not pencil Morrison or Winterton into the lineup next year. Both show promise, but I am not convinced they will be ready to be regular NHLers next season.
Congratulations to Lleyton Roed on scoring his first professional goal on Sunday, just a week after signing his first professional hockey contract.
— x – Coachella Valley Firebirds (@Firebirds) April 8, 2024
After experiencing lots of challenges this season, Matty Beniers has been finding the net more often, with goals in four of his last six games. Below is his 10-game moving average of goals scored per game, which shows his scoring trend over 10 games at a time.
The IIHF Women’s World Championship kicked off last week, and one of the marquee games of the opening round is Canada versus USA at 7 p.m. PT, airing Monday on the NHL Network. Check it out if you are so inclined.
Speaking of international tournaments, it will be interesting to see how many Kraken players will participate in the men’s version of the IIHF World Championships in Czechia, which kick off in May. One player expected to represent Denmark is Kraken prospect Oscar Fisker Mølgaard. I’ve discussed him extensively this year, but this will be an opportunity to see how he fares against a number of NHL players.
The Kansas City Mavericks, the Seattle Kraken’s ECHL affiliate, clinched the Brabham Cup over the weekend, an award given to the top team of the regular season. In full transparency, I had never heard of the Brabham Cup before.
We alluded to it last week, and now it has been confirmed: Jani Nyman is joining the Coachella Valley Firebirds.
The Everett Silvertips closed out their first-round series against the Vancouver Giants on Sunday. They will face the Portland Winterhawks in the second round, which kicks off on Friday in Portland. The Winterhawks won six of the eight regular-season games between the two teams.
Player performances
Niklas Kokko (PEL/SEA) – Since last Monday, the Kraken goalie prospect won a decisive Game 7 in the opening round of the Liiga playoffs and then won the first two games of the semifinal matchup against his former team, Karpat. He has a .925 save percentage in those two games.
David Goyette (SBY/SEA) – The Kraken’s second-round selection from the 2022 NHL Draft had nine points, including four goals, in the Sudbury Wolves’ first-round series win against the Mississauga Steelheads. The Wolves won the series in five games and will now face Ty Nelson and the North Bay Battalion in Round 2.
Shane Wright (SEA) – We’ve talked about him a lot lately, but he has four points in his three games with the Kraken since he was called up.
Goal of the week
The goal of the week comes from the semifinals of the SHL playoffs, Växjö Lakers vs Rögle BK.
The analytics community has long understood that outhitting an opponent in a hockey game does not necessarily lead to more wins. The overarching idea is that if you’re outhitting an opponent, it likely means you don’t have the puck. Recently, I’ve noticed a broad group of media outlets highlighting hitting as if it were a key component of success on the ice. This has made me somewhat uneasy, so I decided to investigate how well the Kraken perform when outhitting opponents versus being outhit this season.
When the Kraken are “close” with their opponent in terms of the number of hits delivered, or they deliver at least four fewer hits than their opponent, their winning percentage is significantly higher.
The week ahead
The Kraken will play their last two home games this week, taking on the Coyotes on Tuesday and the Sharks on Thursday. Despite the challenges of the past six weeks, I’ll be sad to see the season end. I still love watching the team play, and if it weren’t for the unrealistic expectations created by last year’s team, I would have been content with this season. The Kraken are laying the groundwork to become a perennial playoff contender, rather than a team that gambles too early and risks having to rebuild. In short, while I would have been thrilled to see them in the playoffs, I appreciate the direction they’re heading.
I have a personal backlog of offseason analysis and investigation, but please let me know if there’s anything specific you’d like me to focus on as the season winds down.
It’s been two weeks since the last installment of Monday Musings, and while I won’t delve into the details of each of the seven games that have since passed, it’s safe to say it’s been quite the roller coaster ride. We witnessed some lackluster performances against the Sabres and the Canadiens, hard-fought battles versus the Coyotes and Golden Knights, two victories against the Ducks, and a game where Seattle showed heart but ultimately fell short against the Stars. Emotionally, I’m coping a bit better with the losses now, but there’s no denying the joy that comes with the wins, regardless of their significance in the grand scheme of things.
Player signings and timing
The Seattle Kraken recently inked one of their second-round selections from the 2023 NHL Entry Draft, Lukas Dragicevic, following the conclusion of the Tri-City Americans’ season. This aligns with the Kraken’s strategy of signing many of their draft picks a season after their selection. Likewise, we anticipate Oscar Fisker-Mølgaard to follow suit over the next couple of weeks, now that HV71’s season has ended.
HV71 secured its spot in the SHL for next season after a crucial Game 7 victory, sparing themselves relegation against IK Oskarshamn. Mølgaard, another second-round pick from the 2023 draft, showcased his talent with an impressive season in the SHL. While we anticipate Mølgaard’s signing, unlike Dragicevic, we don’t foresee him joining the Coachella Valley squad for the remainder of the season.
European prospects typically make the transition to North America at the end of their respective seasons if the Kraken intend to have them play in North America the following campaign. Our projection suggests Mølgaard will spend another year honing his skills in the SHL before potentially making the move across the Atlantic.
Similarly, Jani Nyman wrapped up his season last week when his team, Ilves, bowed out to KalPa in the Liiga quarterfinals. Nyman showcased his talent throughout the season, tallying an impressive 43 points in 48 games, earning him the under-20 scoring title and the coveted Red Bull helmet. Having signed his standard entry-level contract (ELC) last year as part of the 2022 Kraken draft class, there’s speculation about his future plans. While nothing is certain, there’s a growing anticipation that he may transition to North America for the upcoming season, potentially joining the Coachella Valley Firebirds to finish out the current season.
Here is a look at the status of all the Kraken draft picks by year and round.
In addition to Mølgaard, I would anticipate Carson Rehkopf to sign whenever the Kitchener Rangers season is complete.
Forecasting the draft picks
I recently received a thought-provoking question from a friend: How many players drafted by the Kraken will become regulars on the team in three years? It’s the kind of inquiry that tends to surface when your team finds itself out of playoff contention.
The data reveals an intriguing reality: only 80 percent of first-round draft picks manage to accumulate more than 100 games in the NHL. For second-round picks, that number drops to 50 percent, and it dwindles to less than 20 percent for those selected beyond the third round. Despite our enthusiasm for some of the draft picks, the odds remain steep for most of them to secure substantial NHL playing time. Assessing which players will succeed and stick in the NHL involves applying probabilities to all Kraken prospects. However, this method doesn’t offer a foolproof prediction of when they’ll make their NHL debut, and it’s worth noting that players may also be traded by the Kraken, further complicating matters.
Using a rough estimation based on the player’s draft round and potential, out of the current 28 drafted prospects, we project that approximately 8.2 will accumulate 100 games or more in the NHL. This rough proxy can help gauge the number of Kraken-drafted prospects likely to feature on the team in three years. While it may seem like the Kraken have excelled in drafting compared to other teams, this perception could be influenced by confirmation bias. To make a more definitive statement, we’ll need a few more years of data to validate this notion.
Shane Wright call-up
In case it slipped under your radar, the Kraken made a notable move on Sunday by recalling Shane Wright. This marks Shane’s second call-up to the Kraken this season, with his first stint occurring back in November for three games.
His performance in Coachella Valley this season has been impressive, fueling excitement about his potential at the highest level. From recent observations, particularly in terms of his two-way play, Shane appears to excel, demonstrating deft puck movement and a quick release, whether shooting or passing to teammates.
While I’d love to offer insights into how his skills will translate to the NHL, the reality is that there’s limited exposure to 20-year-old centers playing in the AHL. Nonetheless, my expectation is that he’ll remain with the team for at least five games, affording us the opportunity to witness his talents in action during the last two home games of the season next week.
Other musings
With the departure of Alex Wennberg and the absence of Vince Dunn, the power play has looked very different. There seems to be a greater emphasis on getting the puck down low for either a touch pass to the slot or sliding a pass across the crease. It seems to be working. The Kraken have a 22.2 power-play percentage since March 3. That is slightly better than the 21.2 percent they had prior to Wennberg’s departure.
One of the more noticeable elements of the power play recently is the change of shot location of Oliver Bjorkstrand and Jared McCann. They are still getting their shots; they are just getting it from different locations.
The Kraken goaltenders still have the second highest save percentage in the league since Dec. 1.
In case anyone missed it, the Kraken will be the only NHL team in the league without a home win on a Saturday this season, and I have no theories on why.
Goal scoring continues to be a challenge. The Kraken have scored two goals or less in seven out of their last nine games.
Alison Lukan beat me to it by five days, but the 10 power play opportunities against the Anaheim game on Thursday was a franchise record. The previous record was eight against Vancouver in the inaugural season.
The Ducks are far and away the most undisciplined team in the league, while the Kraken are one of the most disciplined.
The Kraken allowed their ninth goal of the season within five seconds of a face-off on Saturday. We commonly refer to these as ‘face-off goals against.’ They are second in the NHL at allowing face-off goals against this season. The second goal Dallas scored was nine seconds after a face-off.
I have watched a lot of Liiga (Finland) and SHL (Sweden) via their streaming platforms. The picture quality is so superior to footage of the AHL and most of the NHL Regional Sport Networks. Why can’t we get this kind of quality for North America? I understand why it might be a challenge for the CHL, but the other leagues have the money and viewers to make their products better.
Speaking of Scandinavian hockey leagues, Kraken goalie prospect Niklas Kokko will be playing an elimination game in the Liiga playoffs when his team, Lahden Pelicans, squares off against HIFK in a Game 7 matchup Tuesday evening in Finland. Kokko has a .935 save percentage and 1.58 goals against average in these playoffs. He just turned 20 years old.
Player performances
David Goyette (SBY/SEA) – The regular-season points leader in the OHL had a Gordie Howe hat trick in the Sudbury Wolves’ second OHL playoff game. The Wolves lead that series 2-0 and are headed to Sudbury for Games 3 and 4.
Joey Daccord (SEA) – posted a .951 save percentage over the last week with a goals against average of 1.01 in that stretch.
Visa Vedenpää (HER/SEA) – The sixth-round goalie selected in the 2023 NHL Entry Draft had a 39-save shutout on March 27 playing for Hermes in the second round of the Mestis league playoffs.
Goal of the week
Shooters shoot. Check out Goyette’s goal from a crazy game against Mississauga on Saturday.
Furthering the discussion about the Kraken draft picks, here is a look at the number of draft picks playing for the teams that drafted them. I leveraged the CapFriendly.com depth charts so there could be players not reflected in the data if they are currently out of the lineup.
What to watch for
Shane Wright. There are not a lot of obvious roster changes next season, but you can probably lock Shane into a spot right now. I don’t think we will be able to extrapolate much from this stint with the Kraken, but my hope is we see the strides he has made by developing in the AHL this season. It would be great to see a goal or two, but I am eager to see how he moves the puck and how he plays defensively. Hopefully, he gets some special teams opportunities.
We are getting close to offseason mode where we will be digging into the draft, prospects, what went wrong, and a host of other content ideas we have brewing. If there are areas you want us to dig into, please let us know.
The Kraken did more of the same on Sunday and dropped their eighth straight game, this one a 5-1 embarrassment on home ice against a Montreal Canadiens club that is last in the Atlantic Division and carries an even worse record than Seattle.
This was the second home game of the season that I personally have not attended and couldn’t watch live. My plan was to get home late, watch the replay of the game, and write Three Takeaways off of that. But when I saw the score and the reactions of our great followers on social media, it occurred to me that I really didn’t need to watch this game. I’ve seen it before. I saw it against Washington, Nashville, and Buffalo last week, and I also saw it in Arizona on Friday. (To be fair, the Kraken played a little better in that game before blowing another late lead. And I did watch the “highlights” from Sunday’s game, because I’m a sicko like that.)
So why waste my time? Similarly, why should fans waste their time and money to attend these games, when the home team isn’t even going to put forth an honest effort?
Well, I apparently wasn’t alone in these sentiments, because even head coach Dave Hakstol had seen enough and didn’t pull punches in his post-game presser.
"You play this game with passion. You play it with heart. You play it for the guy next to you. We're not doing that right now and that's more than disappointing."
In three years covering this team, I’ve seen Hakstol keep a level head in every media scrum he’s done. Other than Sunday night, if you didn’t watch the game and just listened to his media availability on any given night, you usually wouldn’t know from Hakstol’s demeanor whether the Kraken had just won 5-0 or lost by 10. That’s how steady he is when he talks to us.
“Every time you put this jersey on, it means a lot, and right now, we are not portraying that out on the ice.” Those are strong words from any coach, let alone Hakstol who has always (and I mean always) found a way to put a positive spin on every game, no matter how big of a steaming pile of hockey it was.
The truth is that since the Kraken blew a two-goal lead and lost in overtime to Vegas on March 12, they have been a broken group that has looked ready to hit the golf course. They have not been trying, and it was oddly refreshing to hear Hakstol call it as such on Sunday. For a group that “has a lot of pride,” as we’ve heard constantly, they have not shown it and should be ashamed of the shows they’ve been putting on for the fans that have shelled out thousands of dollars to watch them mail it in at Climate Pledge Arena.
Changes made
While we’ve watched these players glide through this losing streak, which now matches the length of the eight-game skid in November and December that helped put them in this position in the first place, we’ve been especially irked by the lack of accountability. They have seemed to have no regard for their jobs, because for most of the veterans, their positions have been etched in stone since Day 1.
With the exception of Kailer Yamamoto or Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, nobody was getting healthy scratched because there wasn’t anybody else to insert into the lineup. So, players were allowed to give half efforts and go through the motions to make it look like they (sort of) care, even though a trained eye like that of Hakstol or general manager Ron Francis can plainly see that the “pride” has disappeared.
Hakstol put his foot down publicly after the game Sunday (perhaps five games too late), and Francis followed suit, immediately calling up Ryan Winterton and Logan Morrison from AHL Coachella Valley.
We’ve said it before, but at this point in the season, we’re fine with losing. The more Seattle loses, the higher it rises in the draft lottery, so in the long run, it may be a good thing to drop some additional games down the stretch.
Besides, the Kraken are who they are, and this roster was never talented enough to make a real run at the postseason if it didn’t stay almost totally healthy, which it did not. Add to that a soft sell at the trade deadline, and any optimism we maintained at that time was misguided, but we never thought we’d see these players quit playing, and that’s a tough pill to swallow.
If you’re going to lose because you aren’t good enough, we’re fine with that. But if you’re going to lose because you aren’t trying, then changes need to be made, and Francis sent his first real message to the club with these call-ups.
If Winterton and/or Morrison draw in on Tuesday against Anaheim, who they replace in the lineup will speak volumes.
What next?
Now that Hakstol has pulled the lever of the public shaming of his team, and Francis has yanked the “call up some kids” ripcord, we’re curious to see what other mechanisms get deployed in these last few weeks of the season.
Seattle’s front office plays things close to the vest, so we can’t tell you what Francis and his staff are thinking. But it’s been clear for a while that any messages being sent to the players have not been received. So is Hakstol coaching for his job right now, or does Francis view the team’s many shortcomings as player personnel issues that can be addressed in the summer?
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.
If you follow along closely with the written content we create here at Sound Of Hockey, you know that I typically write a “Three Takeaways” after every game. If you also listen to the Sound Of Hockey Podcast, you know that—despite the devastating 5-4 Seattle Kraken overtime loss to the Vegas Golden Knights on Tuesday—I remained in a chipper mood on this past week’s episode.
But after the past two games, I’ve found it hard to pull out compelling “Takeaways,” and my hockey-related mood can no longer be categorized as “chipper.”
Part of the positivity on the last podcast episode was simply endorphins from lots of exercise the day we recorded, blended with a string of sunny weather in Seattle. But part of it was that I still genuinely believed this team could lump together a bunch of wins down the stretch against bad teams and backdoor its way into the playoffs. Heck, I even wrote a Notebook article on Thursday afternoon about how several players on the team thought they could still do the thing, and how I believed what they were telling me.
But after a 2-1 Kraken loss to the Capitals on Thursday night, and Saturday’s 4-1 loss to the Predators, it has become painfully obvious that this team is done. They are not yet mathematically eliminated, but they are eliminated from contention in every other way, and the tone within the dressing room has shifted.
“You have to hit it head on,” coach Dave Hakstol said Sunday. “We have to understand the reality of our situation, and then our goal and our opportunity is to change that picture. We can’t look too far down the road, so we have to have a great mindset, and we’ll have a mindset of that going into [Monday’s game against Buffalo] to work to change that picture.”
With the team sitting nine points behind Vegas for the last wild card spot with 16 games left, and MoneyPucknow giving Seattle just a two-percent chance to reach the playoffs, the players seem to know their season is dead in the water, even if they won’t overtly admit it.
“It’s obviously very frustrating,” Jared McCann said. “We haven’t been able to score many goals, so it’s been kind of a grind lately. I don’t feel like we’re out of this at all. We’re just going to keep pushing, and you never know what’s going to happen. We’ve got to stay positive.
“It’s easy to be negative, and it’s easy to spread negativity, too, but we’re lucky to be in the National Hockey League. We have some of the best jobs in the world, and you’ve got to come in every single day and just look at the positives. I know, obviously, things aren’t going well for us right now, but just look at the positives and keep moving forward.”
Sure, injuries have been a factor, but…
When general manager Ron Francis traded second-line center Alex Wennberg to the New York Rangers in advance of the March 8 trade deadline, he made Seattle’s odds of reaching the playoffs even longer than they already were. We still maintain that this was the right thing to do, given where the team sat in the standings at the time, and with the writing very much on the wall that the Swedish center would not return to Seattle beyond this season.
But remember, with Wennberg held out of the lineup for two games to avoid a pre-trade injury, the Kraken ripped off two (at the time) huge back-to-back road victories in Calgary and Winnipeg. They showed they could be competitive without Wennberg, so even after the trade, we still held onto hope that the “resilient group” could battle its way through the rest of the season.
We’ve since learned, however, that with Wennberg jettisoned, Seattle could no longer survive with any injuries to key players. Vince Dunn has been out since that Calgary game, when Martin Pospisil hit him with a cheap shot from behind that earned the Flames forward a three-game suspension. Jaden Schwartz has been out since the first game of this (so far) winless homestand, a 3-0 loss to the Jets.
“Obviously, teams deal with different things and adversity throughout the season,” said defenseman Brian Dumoulin, who has been filling in on the top pair with Dunn sidelined. “We’re no different here, but I mean, I know we’ve got enough in this room to compete and win hockey games, and we’ve got to get back to that.”
Without Dunn, Schwartz, and Wennberg, Seattle’s lineup looks thin. Hakstol shook things up Saturday, moving McCann back to the top line with Matty Beniers and Jordan Eberle, and bumping Tomas Tatar down to the fourth line (which we don’t think is a good fit for the veteran winger). Halfway through the game Saturday against Nashville, the new forward lines had generated just eight shots on Juuse Saros, and they were shut out on the night at 5-on-5.
Unsurprisingly, the lines went right back in the blender at practice on Sunday.
No matter what Hakstol has tried the last couple games, Seattle is simply not generating. The absence of Wennberg, Schwartz, and Dunn is partially to blame, but so too an apparent recognition that their season is over.
The group has only had a handful of games with its full lineup healthy this season, yet the fact of the matter is that every team in the league deals with injuries. This is why you need depth, and after the whole (very productive) fourth line walked last summer, everything needed to go exactly right on that front for the Kraken to have another successful campaign.
They can only blame themselves
Injuries are not enough to let this team off the hook for the many stretches of poor play that have led to its demise. There’s no excuse for dropping eight consecutive games in the heart of your season. There’s no excuse for losing the last game before the All-Star break, 2-0, to the lowly San Jose Sharks. And there’s certainly no excuse for blowing two-goal leads at home and losing in overtime in critical games against St. Louis on Jan. 26 and Vegas this past week.
In an 82-game season, you can get away with having dips in performance, but when the valleys are more abundant than the peaks, you will fall from contention in March.
That overtime loss to the Golden Knights was the nail in the coffin. Had Seattle held onto its two-goal lead and won in regulation, then ridden that momentum into the game against Washington and won, the team would have come into the game against Nashville just four points out of the playoffs. Instead, in the blink of an eye, Seattle experienced a three-point swing in the standings and allowed the negativity from that damning loss to sap their effort in the next two games.
Now, it’s (all but) over. We know it, the Kraken know it, and at this point, I’m not even sure if there are exciting storylines to look forward to for the next month of Kraken hockey.
I think I need to go get some more exercise.
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.
