Last summer, Matt Beniers was preparing to play hockey for his freshman NCAA season with Harvard University. It was his first year of NHL Draft eligibility and one loaded with high expectations for the center. Then Covid-19 became an issue as hockey leagues around the world were making the tough call not to play. That included the Ivy League which meant no season for Harvard and left Beniers scrambling. Beniers would land on his feet to turn in a spectacular season and is poised to be selected at the top of July’s NHL Draft, perhaps even going second overall to the Seattle Kraken.
When the Ivy League announced it was not going to play, Beniers was able to transfer to the University of Michigan. He had been playing in nearby Plymouth, MI for the United States National Team Development Program (USNTDP) and was familiar with the coaching staff.
That made the decision easier.
“I just kind of had to make a hockey decision and make a decision for myself,” Beniers said during Michigan’s media day in the fall. “It just kind of fit all the things that I wanted in a school, obviously, great academics and a great program. A lot of guys I already knew were going there.”
Once he made the decision to become a Wolverine, the excitement grew.
Michigan already had two impressive incoming freshmen in defenseman Owen Power and forward Kent Johnson. All three players were projected by NHL’s Central scouting as potential first-round picks in the NHL Draft heading into the season.
“I didn’t really know how great it would be until I got here,” Beniers added. “Every day we’re pushing each other. And those two, like, they obviously also love hockey, and it’s what they want to do with the rest of their life. So, it’s kind of cool being around guys that just love the game and want to get better every day. It pushes me, I push them and so I think it will be a lot of benefit from playing together.”
Playing mostly against older college players, Beniers had a strong season, but Michigan’s run for a National Championship was cut down. Again, Covid-19 was the culprit as the Wolverines had to withdraw from the NCAA tournament due to a number of positive tests.
That disappointment hasn’t soured Beniers’ NHL Draft expectations which will come to a head on July 23 and just may land him in Seattle with the Kraken.
Matt Beniers by the numbers
Beniers, 18, started drawing attention after a strong 2019-2020 season with the USNTDP, splitting time between the U18 and USHL squads. In total, he appeared in 60 games and scored 25 goals to go with 32 assists for a total of 57 points.
He was also a key part of Team USA’s gold medal winning club at the World Junior Championship in January. Beniers was one of the youngest players on the team, a tournament dominated by 19-year-old NHL-drafted players, but by tournament’s end was one of the Americans’ top forwards.
Over the past couple of weeks, he won a bronze medal playing for Team USA at the IIHF World Championship. Playing against older professionals, he recorded a pair of points in six games but drew rave reviews.
He has the size, listed at 6-foot-1 and 174 pounds, and as a ‘late birthday’ he will turn 19 just after the start of the upcoming NHL season.
What do the scouts say about Beniers?
Beniers is consistently ranked high among scouting services. NHL Central Scouting ranked him as the sixth-best North American skater while other services either had him ranked first or second overall.
Chris Peters from Hockey Sense compares him to Chicago Blackhawks star Jonathan Toews in terms of a guy who didn’t pile up numbers in college but who displayed the necessary skill to be an elite two-way center and a guy that will make those around him better.
“I view a guy like Matty Beniers as a franchise building block,” Peters told the Sound Of Hockey Podcast. “I was talking to a scout and he called Matty Beniers a May-June player, meaning this is a guy that’s going to win the Stanley Cup, this is a guy that’s going to be there in the playoffs…He’s such an impact player, he impacts the game in all zones, and then he does have the skill to finish.”
Scouting reports on Beniers all hail him as the quintessential 200-foot center. He hounds pucks in the defensive zone but can quickly transition into offense and lead a rush the other way. His vision is superb, and teammates have to be ready for his pass.
It’s also how he would scout himself when asked what makes him a quality player.
“I would say either my hockey IQ or my ability to play in all situations,” Beniers said about himself. “Just my ability to play defense, produce offensively, but also and play penalty kill, power play, kind of whatever they need, I can fill that role or whatever role they want me to fill.”
Beniers’ skill on display
After winning the second overall pick in the NHL Draft Lottery on June 2, Seattle general manager Ron Francis was asked if there was a player who would be able to step directly into the NHL. Most players need a year or two of further development after being drafted with maybe three or four playing the same year they are selected.
“You wait to get them into training camp and see how they play and how they perform and make sure that they’re ready,” Francis said. “Not only from a hockey game standpoint, but also physically and mentally. It’s not an easy league, and less and less players are stepping out of the draft and stepping into the NHL.”
Could Beniers be such a player?
With his late birthday, he’ll be nearly a year older than most of the players drafted which will certainly help. But his skills will perhaps be the biggest factor.
“He has the physical package, he’s strong, he’s competitive, and I’ve never seen him intimidated in any game.” Peters said. “He has the speed and the quickness; his brain operates at the level that you need at the NHL level. I do think Beniers has the most likely game to translate because the other thing that he can do is you don’t need to put them on your top two lines, you can put them on your third line and he’s still gonna find a way to make an impact.”
Watching Beniers, those skills become evident quickly.
In the clip below from the World Juniors you see the definition of a 200-foot player. Beniers retrieves a loose puck in his own end and quickly turns up ice the other way. He hits the neutral zone with speed and has his head up to spot an open winger at the blue line. Beniers connects a perfect pass for a shot on goal.
Beniers can play in all situations, especially on the penalty kill. In this clip he makes an absurd play on the kill while also showing off how strong he is on the puck. Good luck getting it from him.
Matt Beniers rags the puck for nearly 20 seconds while killing a penalty.
During the World Junior Championship gold medal game against Canada, he showed off his whole tool kit on one shift. Here he handles the puck through traffic in the neutral zone and finds an open shooter for a high-danger scoring opportunity. After the shot is stopped, Beniers hustles down the rebound to set up another teammate.
While he has all the skills and speed to be a two-way center, Beniers can finish. It’s an aspect of his game that can get overlooked. Here we see him put himself in a position to receive a pass for a scoring chance, one that he buries.
#NTDP Alumni Update. Some more fine work from the Wolverines on the 2nd goal of the game for Matt Beniers.
A nice keep in from Cam York ignites the play and such a good play from Kent Johnson as he finds Beniers in tight for the tap in. #GoBluepic.twitter.com/qkUmB4kZSk
Will the Seattle Kraken draft Matt Beniers second overall?
Seattle may not have a say, as the Buffalo Sabres may want to snatch Beniers first overall. This is a draft year where there are no sure things at the top of the list. Rather, there are five or six guys who all have the ability to turn into impact players.
Beniers is certainly in that group and if Buffalo goes in another direction with the first pick, it will be hard to imagine Francis passing up a chance to add a player like Beniers.
On Wednesday, during the NHL Draft Lottery, the Seattle Kraken learned that they will have the No. 2 overall pick in the NHL Entry Draft on July 23. The fledgling franchise was the only team to move up at least one spot compared to where it stood in the odds entering the lottery, as it had the third-best chances to win at 10.3 percent. The Anaheim Ducks, who entered the lottery at 12.1 percent, were the only team to move down, flipping with Seattle to come away with the third overall pick.
Selecting No. 2 overall is a huge deal. While this draft is expected to be different in that the top-three picks are not as cut and dried as in years past, there is close-to-NHL-ready talent that will be available.
The options
Owen Power, a 6-foot-5, puck-moving defenseman from the University of Michigan is widely expected to go No. 1 to Buffalo, but even he isn’t a shoo-in. The Sabres took Rasmus Dahlin No. 1 overall in the 2018 NHL Entry Draft, and he also just happens to be a left-shot defenseman.
Could this push that struggling organization to take two-way center Matty Beniers instead? If so, the Kraken would gladly take Power as a foundation for its blue line for the next decade and beyond.
Our guess at Sound Of Hockey is that Power still goes to Buffalo and Beniers is the pick by Seattle. But again, this isn’t a no-brainer like last year’s one-two punch of Alexis Lefreniere and Quinton Byfield or 2019’s Jack Hughes and Kaapo Kakko.
William Eklund, a smallish left winger out of Djurgarden in Sweden, is the top-ranked international skater according to NHL Central Scouting, while fellow Swede Simon Edvinsson is a big, mobile defenseman who is expected to develop into a cornerstone blueliner for a lucky franchise.
Beniers reportedly dodged a bullet Thursday morning at the IIHF World Championship, when he injured his leg and was unable to put weight on it. Fortunately, he is now listed by Team USA as day-to-day.
Choice of position for the No. 2 pick?
Kraken general manager and head amateur scout Robert Kron seemed to have a penchant for selecting defensemen with their top picks while the two were teamed up in Carolina, but position is not expected to be a factor this time around.
“I think right now, the only guy we have in the organization is Luke Henman, so it’s not like we have a strength in one area or the other,” Ron Francis told media on Wednesday. “So, we’ll go through this draft and look at it and make sure we take the best player available with that No. 2 pick.”
Past No. 2 selections
To give you an idea of the level of talent that the Kraken might find with the No. 2 pick in the draft, here are the last 10 players selected in that slot and how they have performed statistically.
Other notable players to be selected in the No. 2 slot include Chris Pronger, Eric Staal, Tyler Seguin, Drew Doughty, Daniel Sedin, and countless others that turned into NHL stars.
Being drafted to an expansion team
Another angle to consider here is that getting drafted to an expansion franchise as its first-ever selection is a bit different than getting drafted to a team that’s more established in the league.
Past expansion teams— with Vegas being the obvious outlier thanks to more advantageous Expansion Draft rules— have certainly felt a level of pressure to get their prized top pick right onto the NHL roster.
At this stage, it’s hard to determine if any player in this draft is truly NHL ready, though, regardless of if that player is joining an expansion team. Can a player selected by the Kraken at No. 2 in the draft jump right into the lineup?
“I think you always have that possibility,” Francis said. “I think we’ll look at the big picture and see how the Expansion Draft goes and how the amateur draft goes. We can get them into training camp and see how they play and how they perform and make sure that they’re ready, not only from the hockey game standpoint, but also physically and mentally. It’s not an easy league, and less and less players are stepping out of the draft and stepping into the NHL.”
Variables caused by the pandemic
We’re expecting a lot of high-end players to slip through to later rounds than they probably deserve due to the limited live viewings that scouts were able to muster this season. There just isn’t the same level of familiarity at this stage between NHL teams and prospective players as there normally would be.
“It’s been a crazy year to say the least,” Francis said. “We had leagues that didn’t play, leagues that started late, leagues that tried to play all season long–started, shut down, started again. But our guys have done a great job of doing whatever it took to watch players play, whether that was on video, whether that was trying to get to see games live. You know, we’re looking at players all around the world, it’s not just North America.”
The Kraken have always been able to focus on the top few players on their list, though. Added Francis, “You kind of formulate your list, and quite honestly, we knew we’d be in the top five, so we’re zeroing in on the players that we thought would be in the top five. Now that we know we’re in [the top] two, we’ll even tighten that up a little more to make sure that we’ve got it right.”
What we know
The Seattle Kraken are going to get a good player at No. 2 overall in the NHL Entry Draft. With limited viewings from scouts due to the ongoing pandemic and a lack of a consensus top pick this season, it’s hard to say if that player will bring an immediate impact.
But where past expansion teams have had to force their top pick into NHL action, the Kraken will probably have enough talent to allow their No. 2 overall selection more time to develop if needed.
Darren Brown is the Chief Content Officer at Sound Of Hockey and the host, producer, and editor of the Sound Of Hockey Podcast. He is an inconsistent beer league goalie who believes that five players have to make a mistake before the puck gets to him. Follow him on Twitter @DarrenFunBrown or email darren@soundofhockey.com.
Are you starting an NHL franchise from scratch? If so, one of the top priorities you’ll need is a defenseman who can move the puck, man the power play, and create offense. The 2021 NHL Draft is littered with such defensemen which is good for the Seattle Kraken, who it turns out are starting an NHL team from scratch. Hailing from Sweden, Simon Edvinsson is such a defenseman who just may be on the Kraken radar during July’s draft.
Seattle will know exactly where it will be selecting in the draft after the lottery on June 2. No matter where their lotto balls fall, they do know that they’ll land somewhere between picks one and five.
There is no consensus top pick in this draft class, nor is there agreement on who the top five picks are going to be. The Kraken have some offensive options to choose from along with a strong class of defensemen.
Edvinsson may be the top blueliner available and is a player to watch.
Simon Edvinsson by the numbers
Edvinsson, 18, is listed at six-foot-five inches tall and 207 pounds which means he’s already NHL sized.
Last season he played for a number of teams, including a 10-game stint with Frolunda in the SHL, Sweden’s top professional league. He also was the top defenseman for Sweden at the U18 World Championships in Texas where Sweden won a bronze medal. In seven games there, he scored a goal while adding four assists.
As is most of this draft class, Edvinsson is all over the map as far as where he’s ranked. Among the various online draft-heads, he shows up as low as ninth and as high as second in the various lists. That puts him in the crosshairs for the Kraken to select Edvinsson.
The pros at NHL Central Scouting have Edvinsson ranked as the second-best international player in their final rankings.
Simon Edvinsson the player
When you look at Edvinsson’s traditional numbers, they don’t jump off the page at you. At no point in any of the leagues he competed in was he a big scorer.
So, why is he considered a top-of-the-draft prospect and a guy who can fill that need for an offensive defenseman?
“The thing about Edvinsson is that whoever is drafting him is drafting the potential,” prospect guru Chris Peters says on his Hockey Sense site. “He’s still pretty raw, hasn’t really figured out how to use his size yet and certainly hasn’t learned how to take charge. I think he’s going to get there with time and development.”
Scouts love his size and the way he skates.
Watching his tape, the potential is there and like a lot of draft-eligible players, the development is still to come.
Simon Edvinsson, #3, LHD playing for Frölunda. 17 year old, a top prospect for the 2021 NHL Draft. pic.twitter.com/HxVnb1659z
He has good vision and ability to set up his teammates. The clip below is at even strength, but watching it you get a sense of what he would look like manning the power play for the Kraken.
While he shows the ability to work the point on the power play, Edvinsson is an excellent skater, especially for a guy his size. He has speed and can be dangerous on the rush, as seen in this clip where he moves the puck from deep in his own end all the way to the attacking zone where he finds an open teammate.
Simon Edvinsson (2021) played his first Allsvenskan game yesterday and picked up this beautiful assist after carrying the puck all the way up the ice #NHLDraftpic.twitter.com/lDW6Tx2b8D
Finally, in this clip, he gets the puck, gets his head up, and makes a smart and accurate lob pass that sets up a dangerous scoring chance for a teammate.
#Allsvenskan: Pretty good start to Simon Edvinsson's (#9 Black) game today as Vasteras takes on Karlskoga. This is a gutsy lob but he times it perfectly. Wasn't used on either special teams and sat for a long stretch but he's been physical; passes have been crisp and on the tape pic.twitter.com/DKtxXiDwCY
— The Draft Analyst (@TheDraftAnalyst) March 5, 2021
Will the Kraken take Simon Edvinsson at the NHL Draft?
It’s impossible to say where Edvinsson sits on the Kraken internal draft board. They won’t be leaking that information, but it’s safe to say he’s on the radar for an early selection.
He is a player who will need more development, so don’t expect him to be a player that moves straight to the NHL in year one. More likely he’ll play back in Sweden this upcoming season to further work on his consistency and explosiveness.
There are other impressive defensive prospects in this draft, including Michigan’s Owen Power and Brandt Clarke from the OHL’s Barrie Colts. Edvinsson is in that grouping and it may come down to how Kraken head scout Robert Kron and general manager Ron Francis rate the potential to come.
Now that the trade deadline has come and gone, NHL rosters are relatively stable heading into the playoffs. This is as good a time as any to look at how NHL teams’ rosters are built, or more precisely, how NHL players are acquired on NHL teams’ rosters.
I pulled all the depth chart information on CapFriendly.com of all 31 NHL teams to see how squads are constructed.
Acquisition types
Before we get into the numbers, let us first take a high-level look at the different scenarios in which players can be acquired. There are some nuances and complexities to some of these scenarios, but I am going to keep it at a high level.
NHL Entry Draft – For those unfamiliar, the NHL Entry Draft is the amateur draft that is very similar to all other major sports in North America. NHL Entry Draft eligibility is generally for North American players between the ages of 18 and 20 and for non-North American players between the ages of 18 and 21.
Free Agency – There are three most common ways a player can become a free agent:
NHL player’s contract expires, and he does not sign an extension with his current team, therefore enters free agency and can sign with any team.
A player is not drafted during the years of draft eligibility and therefore becomes a free agent.
A player is drafted but does not sign an entry-level contract with the owner of his rights before those rights expire. The expiration of rights varies by where that player is drafted from (two years from draft year for junior players, four years for non-North American and NCAA players).
Trade – Pretty self-explanatory, but this is where a player is acquired in an exchange with another team.
Waivers – The waiver process is a little more complex. This is where a player has met a certain amount of playing experience, and his team wants to send that player to the minors (or taxi squad this season). In this scenario, another team can claim this player to acquire him. Acquiring players through the waivers process is relatively uncommon.
Expansion – Stating the obvious here but this is where the player was acquired in the NHL Expansion Draft. It’s important to call out that players that were acquired as part of the Expansion Draft via side-deal trades are designated as “acquired via trade” and not as Expansion Draft selections.
Shea Theodore is a good example, as he was traded from Anaheim to Vegas on the condition that Vegas would select Clayton Stoner in the Expansion Draft. In this scenario, Theodore would be acquired via trade while Stoner was acquired via the Expansion Draft.
Building through the draft
The media narrative is that teams are built through the NHL Entry Draft. If you look at the top 10 players in the league by points, nine out of 10 of them are on the teams that drafted them. Only New York Rangers forward, Artemi Panarin, was not drafted by his current team. Without digging much further, this tells me that the best way to acquire the best players in the league is through the NHL Entry Draft. But what about the rest of the team?
Of the 20 active players on each roster, I isolated all the players that were drafted by their current team to determine what percentage of the roster was acquired via the NHL Entry Draft.
The Vegas Golden Knights only have one active player on their roster that they drafted since they joined the league in 2017. It traditionally takes many years for drafted players to crack an NHL roster and with only four NHL Entry Drafts since Vegas joined the league, there has not been enough development time to expect more drafted players on the roster. Vegas also traded two of their players from the 2017 NHL Entry Draft, Nick Suzuki and Erik Brannstrom, for Max Pacioretty and Mark Stone, respectively. Both Suzuki and Brannstrom are regulars in the NHL and likely would have been playing for Vegas had they not been traded.
Trades
The second most common way to acquire players is via trade. Roughly 31% of the players on rosters league-wide were acquired via trade, versus 40% acquired via the Entry Draft.
The percentage of players acquired via trade is almost an inverse relationship of the percentage of players acquired via the NHL Entry Draft with Montreal and Vegas near the top.
Free agency
The last major way that teams acquire players is via free agency. Roughly 26% of currently rostered players were acquired via free agency.
Acquiring players via free agency gives a mixed bag of results. The number of elite players that reach free agency every year is relatively small, and situations where you can build your team around a free agent are very rare. Usually, free agent acquisitions are more complementary pieces to an already strong core of players. The top free agent acquisitions from the 2020 offseason were Taylor Hall (BUF), Alex Pietrangelo (VGK), and Torey Krug (STL). Those three players are higher-end talent, but are not be the best players on their new teams.
Waivers
There are only six active players on NHL rosters that were acquired via waivers. Waiver claims are rare because if a player is put on waivers, then this player is perceived as having a low value to their current team. That team is willing to essentially give this player away for nothing. However, in a salary cap crunch period like what the league is experiencing now, it could be that organizations need to create cap space for other players. There could be a slight increase in waiver claims over the next few years as teams try to juggle their salary cap situations.
Expansion
Finally, back in 2017, Vegas acquired 29 players via the Expansion Draft. They would flip some players via trade and let others go to free agency. Of the 29 players selected, only five players remain with the team: William Carrier, Marc-Andre Fleury, William Karlsson, Jonathan Marchessault, and Brayden McNabb.
Wrapping it all up
It will be very interesting to see how the Seattle Kraken roster is built in the first few years of the franchise. Certainly, there will be a large portion of the roster that comes directly from the Expansion Draft via their official selections or trades associated with that draft. Additionally, with the current salary cap situation facing the league, some quality free agents could be available for the Seattle Kraken since they should have much more cap space than other teams.
It has been well documented that the Golden Knights hit the jackpot in year one of the franchise and put themselves on a path to being a legitimate Stanley Cup contender every year since joining the league. This allowed them to trade away some of their developing first-round Entry Draft picks, which bolstered their position to make deep postseason runs now but may hurt them in coming years.
We should not expect Seattle to have the same immediate success as Vegas, as we at Sound Of Hockey believe the Kraken will more than likely hold onto their top prospects.
Halfway through the first period of the Everett Silvertips’ game against the Tri-City Americans on Wednesday, Olen Zellweger walked the offensive blue line, dragging the puck with him. With power play traffic gathered in front of Tri’s goal crease, he snapped a low shot that found its way through the mass of humanity and made netminder Talyn Boyko reach to his right. Boyko was out of position after the first save and never stood a chance on the rebound, as Jacob Wright tapped it home for the first goal of the game and the eventual game winner.
Walking the line and getting the puck through traffic is an artform, and one at which Zellweger excels. If you watch him closely, you will get a sense that almost every time he puts the puck toward the net, some level of chaos ensues shortly after.
Zellweger, a shifty 17-year-old draft-eligible defenseman who hails from Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, is off to a great start offensively with a goal and four assists in five games on Everett’s blue line this season. He has picked up nicely after a solid 16-year-old campaign, in which he registered two goals and 10 assists in 58 games.
Zellweger has been playing with Gianni Fairbrother, a veteran in the WHL and a 2019 draft pick of the Montreal Canadiens. Zellweger credits his defensive partner with “making it easy” on him by really talking on the ice. The two are building chemistry as the season goes along, and Zellweger fits naturally alongside the older, more developed Fairbrother.
Playing on the top pairing, on the power play, and even occasionally on the penalty kill as a 17-year-old shows the level of trust that the Silvertips coaching staff has in Zellweger. He’s even playing the right side, despite being a left-shot defenseman. Zellweger doesn’t think it’s a big deal to play the offside, noting, “There’s pros and cons, but there’s pros and cons to playing on your strongside too.”
Silvertips head coach Dennis Williams put a little more thought into playing Zellweger on the right, though. “This is what we think of Olen as a player is we move him to his offside, which is not easy for a defenseman to do, especially in the Western League at that age.” The Silvertips have a glut of left-shot defensemen in Fairbrother, Zellweger, Ronan Seeley, and Aidan Sutter. “On the right side we needed to move one of those guys over, and we thought Olen, with his feet and his hockey sense and his ability to retrieve pucks and escape pressure because of his skating that he would be the best, so we were able to put him with a guy like Gianni Fairbrother and use them as shutdown D as well.”
Olen Zellweger makes a pass against the Tri-City Americans. (Chris Mast, Everett Silvertips)
For a young player like Zellweger to accept such a huge role—particularly playing the right side—and to shine is a credit to his abilities and his drive as a player. “It’s been working so far, I think he’s done a really good job with [Fairbrother], but again, it’s not easy,” Williams says. “Our forwards sometimes will fling a puck up the wall and forget he’s on his offhand. That’s tough to collect on your backhand as a guy’s coming out at you on the point, you know, to not bobble it, try to get it back deep. But, he’s done a really good job of trying to get his feet around it, have composure, absorb a hit, and get it back behind the goaltender.”
While his ability to create offense from the blue line is apparent, Zellweger’s skating is undoubtedly his greatest strength. He’s slick and deceptive and appears to move effortlessly on the ice. Despite being on the small side at 5-foot-10, 175 pounds, Zellweger never seems to get squared up for big hits. Instead, he lets his feet deliver him out of trouble in his own end, often spinning away from attacking forwards and even jumping up to lead the rush offensively.
He’s the true modern-day defenseman, who Williams calls a “relentless worker” who “lives and breathes the game of hockey.”
“There’s nobody on our team that works harder than Zell,” Williams adds. “And if you were to ask all 25 guys, they’d all give you the same answer. He wants to do everything in his power to be a hockey player and he gives himself the best opportunity, whether it’s eating properly, resting properly, his preparation for practice and games. He’s just a pleasure to coach, and to see him from last year to this year, you know, the strides… He’s definitely going to have an opportunity, I believe, to be a pro hockey player and an opportunity to be drafted in the upcoming draft.”
Williams is not the only one who believes that Zellweger will hear his name called by an NHL franchise in July. In fact, Zellweger landed on NHL Central Scouting’s “Players to Watch” list with a ‘C’ rating, making him likely to be selected in the fourth through sixth rounds. “It was pretty cool to be named to that list,” Zellweger says. “Obviously, I want to move up to whatever I can, so I think I just gotta go up from here.”
Zellweger isn’t embarking on this journey alone, though. “We have quite a few signed players on our team so they kind of know what it takes and they know what you gotta do. You gotta be focused and be prepared every day to play because somebody’s always watching.”
The Everett Silvertips are in the early stages of a shortened 24-game WHL season. There has been plenty of concern expressed around the hockey world for how young players could continue their development, especially when play was halted due to the pandemic. Zellweger took everything in stride, though, and saw it as a chance to augment his already impressive skillset. “It’s unfortunate that we don’t get the full season, but this will be a good opportunity for us, and I look at the shortened season and extra training time as a really good opportunity to improve upon weaknesses and stuff like that. So for me, it was good time and used well, so I think it was good for me.”
That extra training time shows, as Zellweger looks like the real deal. If he keeps scoring, he could hear his name called at the NHL Draft a lot earlier than his ‘C’ rating suggests.
Olen Zellweger and the Everett Silvertips are a perfect 5-0-0 this season and lead the U.S. Division with 10 points.
Featured image taken by Chris Mast, courtesy of the Everett Silvertips.
Darren Brown is the Chief Content Officer at Sound Of Hockey and the host, producer, and editor of the Sound Of Hockey Podcast. He is an inconsistent beer league goalie who believes that five players have to make a mistake before the puck gets to him. Follow him on Twitter @DarrenFunBrown or email darren@soundofhockey.com.
Here are some milestones Seattle fans should have on their radar as we turn the page on 2020, and the Kraken look to make their official debut in the fall of 2021.
Head Coach
There has been a lot of anticipation on the hiring of the Seattle Kraken’s first head coach. General manager Ron Francis has signaled that he is willing to be patient in filling this role. Unless there is a coach out there that he really wants, then there is no rush. However, the head coach should contribute to discussions around the Expansion Draft selections, so we would anticipate a coach will be hired in the April/May timeframe. This is conjecture, and the team hasn’t said anything specific about when it plans to hire somebody, but that would make sense.
Expansion Draft
The Seattle Expansion Draft is set for July 21st. I have this date etched in my brain. This is the date the Seattle Kraken becomes a team. This is how the core of the team will be built and is probably the single most important date on the calendar.
NHL Entry Draft
40% of the players in the 2020 Stanley Cup Playoffs were playing for the teams that selected them in their respective drafts. Eventually, the Seattle Kraken will be mostly homegrown draft picks from the NHL Entry Draft. We might not see some of these “kids” play for the Kraken for several years, but while the Expansion Draft is the present, the Entry Draft is the future. The 2021 NHL Entry Draft will be July 23rd and 24th. Depending on how the Draft Lottery goes, Seattle will pick somewhere in the top six.
Jersey Reveal
Fans wanted their authentic Kraken jerseys yesterday, but teams usually unveil their jerseys the summer leading up to the season. There might be an exception to the Kraken being that they are not playing this season, so there is a chance the official jersey and uniform will come early. The earliest I could foresee the official jersey reveal happening is May 10th and the latest might be August.
NHL Schedule
I might be anticipating this more than most, but I can’t wait to see the NHL Schedule with the Seattle Kraken listed all over it. When is Opening Night? When are my San Jose Sharks coming to town? When do we get to see Connor McDavid play at Climate Pledge Arena? Schedule reveals tend to be around the NHL Entry Draft, so I would expect this in late July or early August sometime.
TV Partner/Solution
A lot of the current TV deals that sports franchises have are designed for business models and revenue streams built in 1990s. Has anything in the digital video distribution business changed since then? Of course it has.
Hello, Amazon Prime TV and Hulu Live Sports.
Figuring out what kind of “TV” distribution solution the team agrees upon should be interesting. There is the traditional pay TV route (Cable, Satellite, and Internet TV) or the aforementioned streaming services. Both have their pros and cons in terms of demographics, accessibility, user base, revenue, etc. I could write a whole separate article about this, but for now we’ll leave it at this. Expect information about the Kraken’s distribution partners and solutions in the summer.
Youth Hockey Engagement & Programs
The Seattle Kraken have been quiet in pushing youth hockey and Learn to Play programs since being awarded a franchise two years ago. You do not have to play the game to be a fan, but youth hockey has always been the lifeblood of building new supporters for life.
It’s coming. 2021 will mark the inaugural season for the Seattle Kraken, which – assuming everything does get back on track now, as the NHL has planned – will commence in October.
Those are just some of the big milestones Kraken fans can look forward to in 2021. We’re just about 9 months away from dropping that puck. I hope you’re as excited as I am.
