With the Kraken still in the midst of their long All-Star/bye week hiatus, there has not been much action since the last edition of Monday Musings. So this week I am going to dig into a few topics I have been wanting to look at for a while but haven’t had the time, instead of re-reacting to the Seattle Kraken loss to the Sharks last Tuesday. If you’re here looking for that, you can listen to last week’s episode of the Sound Of Hockey Podcast. Spoiler: you will probably be underwhelmed by my non-emotionally charged response.
Shane Wright’s progress
I have talked to a few people about how Shane Wright has been performing in Coachella Valley. What I’ve heard is that those who have a critical eye for hockey talent seem to be impressed with how he is progressing. There will always be questions on how skill and production in the AHL translate to the NHL, but you want to see some stand-out qualities while young prospects are playing in the AHL. Shane is showing these stand-out qualities.
There are a couple areas I wanted to look at with regard to Shane’s game. First, how does his production compare to other forwards that played in the AHL at his age? Second, how is he trending? Is he getting better as the season progresses?
One area of note, getting advanced(ish) data from the AHL without buying an expensive stats package from a third-party provider is a challenge, so take all this analysis with a grain of salt.
From this basic analysis, it appears that Wright is scoring goals at the top end of his peer group, with .44 goals per game so far this season. Again, it is not a perfect analysis for projecting future results in the NHL, but we must be happy with the direction this is headed.
Shane Wright in-season trends
To take a stab at evaluating if Shane is getting better, I just created a moving average of shots, points, and goals. Ideally, we would have something like expected goals that would be generated by using shot location and events, but the AHL isn’t as lucky to have a rich analytics community that evaluates play-by-play data and runs it through a model to produce such metrics. Goals and points are obvious indicators of success on the ice, but I added shots to see if Wright has been generating more shots per game as the season progresses.
The chart is rather inconclusive. There was a sag in Wright’s points and goal production between games 20 and 28 with only a slight dip in shots during that same time span. Point production and goals seem to be rebounding lately, but both are roughly on par with where Wright was producing toward the beginning of the season.
One thing that is not available is time on ice and more specifically time on ice by game scenario (power play, penalty kill, etc.). Shane is on the power play and penalty kill, which is great to see, but we can’t break out the data to show that.
Here is a video from Saturday night. The clip does not do the play justice, but Wright was killing a penalty, stole the puck from the Tucson player, and charged down the ice to find a streaking Ryan Winterton as the penalty expired.
Overall, I think we should be excited with how Shane is developing into the two-way center he was billed as when the Kraken drafted him fourth overall in 2022.
Kraken scoring
It is obvious that one of the biggest challenges for the Seattle Kraken this year has been scoring goals. Part of this has been driven by injuries, and part of it has been a natural regression to a more normal shooting percentage after last year’s torrid pace.
There have been positive signs that the shooting percentage has been rebounding a bit. The Kraken’s shooting percentage has been 11.3 percent over the last 20 games. This topic warrants a deep dive on the scoring this season, so expect a Data Dump on that later this week.
Other Musings
We have seen two big trades over the last five days that both involved a first-round draft pick as part of the trade, in exchange for a center. You must figure other teams looking for a center are calling Ron Francis to see what it would take to get pending unrestricted free agent, Alexander Wennberg. In my opinion, Wennberg is on par with Sean Monahan, who just fetched a first-round pick in 2024 and a conditional third-round pick in 2027. With that market set, until the Kraken are squarely out of the playoff race, you don’t move Wennberg for anything less than a first.
If the Kraken trade Wennberg, the departure of his versatility will leave a huge hole in the lineup. He plays on the power play and penalty kill and leads Kraken forwards in total time on ice, averaging 18:42 per game.
It was exciting to hear the news about NHL players returning to the Olympics. Those tournaments have brought so much excitement for the game in the past. The Kraken have several players who have played in past Olympics, including Matty Beniers, Eeli Tolvanen, and Tomas Tatar. Will Borgen was also named to Team USA in 2018 but did not play a game.
If you need a local hockey fix, you might want to tune into the AHL All-Star Game airing on NHL Network Monday. There are a lot of former Seattle Thunderbirds and Everett Silvertips playing in the game: Brad Lambert, Jake Christiansen, Gage Goncalves, Dustin Wolf, Olen Zellweger, and Dylan Guenther were all named to the game, plus the Seattle Kraken’s own Ryker Evans will be there.
Player performances
Oscar Fisker Mølgaard – One of the Kraken’s second-round selections in last summer’s NHL Entry Draft, Molgaard has nine points in his last 10 games playing for HV71 in the top-tier league in Sweden. Prior to those 10 games, he had seven points over his first 27 games of the season. We chatted with Oscar back in July.
Tyson Jugnauth – A fourth-round draft pick of the Kraken from 2022, Jugnauth has 24 points in 22 games for the Portland Winterhawks. He started the season with the Wisconsin Badgers but only had two assists in 13 games. He left school midseason to play for Portland, and I am pretty sure he has no regrets leaving Wisconsin (he explained his decision to leave in a Sound Of Hockey story here).
Niklas Kokko – The Finnish goaltender has two wins in his last three starts playing for Pelicans, his new team in Liiga. He has a .947 save percentage in that span.
Goal of the week
we can’t play it here but Lithium came on after Bjorkstrand’s goal & it was beautiful 🥹 pic.twitter.com/7lzo7AcMzh
The Kraken return to action on Saturday in Philadelphia. The Flyers dropped their last five games with a goal differential of 27-13 but have two games before they take on Seattle. Expect some rust for the Kraken coming out of the long break (last year they lost their first three games after the All-Star break).
Thanks to reader/listener ‘Yanni’s Suffocating Pestilence,’ who gave me a homework assignment after last week’s Musings. Expect some of those findings in the next edition.
If you have any thoughts or areas of exploration, feel free to leave a comment, and I will add it to the backlog.
Welcome to the halfway mark for the Seattle Kraken’s 2023-24 season. The Kraken have now played 41 games, so we thought it would be a good idea to give an overview of what has transpired so far, what the team is doing well, and what it can improve.
Season overview
Coming off last year’s emotional highs of notching 100 standings points and reaching Game 7 of the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, there were definitely elevated expectations coming into the 2023-24 season. But the Kraken quickly realized success was not going to be handed to them on a silver platter and lost their first four games in October.
Seattle clawed back, going 8-5-4 in their next 17 games to get to .500 and sneak into a the last wild card spot just in time for Thanksgiving.
Historically, most teams in a playoff position on Turkey Day have a higher percentage chance to make the playoffs at season’s end, so that brought the Seattle fanbase some good feelings. Most folks chose to forget that the Kraken had played more games than their opponents at the time, and instead just celebrated the temporary playoff spot.
The boys then apparently ate too many carbs and rattled off an eight-game losing streak. This was the low point of the season, but it was also representative of why I love hockey; things can change so quickly, and just when you think a team is dead in the water, it turns the tide and gets back in the race. The end of that eight-game skid was also the start of the Kraken’s current 12-game point streak (10-0-2), which has since evolved into an eight-game win streak.
Team statistics
Positives for the Kraken
Individual efforts
Vince Dunn
Dunn signed a four-year, $29.4 million extension and is delivering on it in his first season on the new contract. The defenseman leads the team in points with 34 (8-26—34) and is on pace for 68 points, which would be the best season of his career.
At the halfway mark last season, Dunn had 29 points, and the Kraken as a whole had 125 goals. This season, the team’s goal scoring is down at 115 goals, so Dunn has contributed to 30 percent of Seattle’s scoring. That is up seven percent from last year. Dunn scored on 9.4 percent of his shots on goal last year, and that has slightly improved to 10.5 percent this season. His shooting percentage has steadily improved as his ice time has increased.
Eeli Tolvanen
Tolvanen is on pace to break 50 points this year, which would be a career best. The winger leads the team in even-strength goals with 10 and even-strength points at 21. Tolvanen’s line with Yanni Gourde and Oliver Bjorkstrand has been the most consistent forward trio this season and has stayed together for almost the whole campaign. Per leftwinglock.comthey are the most frequently used line combination for the Kraken.
Joey Daccord
Daccord has been lights out since taking over the starting job when Philipp Grubauer got hurt on Dec. 9. The 27-year-old netminder has started 12 of the last 13 games and gone 9-1-2 in that span. For the season, Daccord has two shutouts and a .923 save percentage. His ability to play the puck makes it harder for teams to dump and chase, and he helps the Kraken on the breakout by making the first pass. He has made timely, enormous saves to keep the Kraken in games, including a stunner against the Capitals in Thursday’s 4-1 win.
The Kraken are currently on a franchise-record 12-game point streak. They have also tied the record they set last season around this time with eight consecutive wins and will look to break that record Saturday in Columbus.
During the first half of this season, I did get some vibes of the inaugural season, when the team worked hard but couldn’t score enough and gave up bad goals at bad times. This season the Kraken have identified an issue with scoring and changed their style of play to a more defensive style, and their goalie has simultaneously caught fire. Now, Seattle’s offense is also clicking as key players like Andre Burakovsky and Jaden Schwartz have returned from injury, and the Tomas Tatar trade is showing positive early returns.
Line depth
Questions about replicating the fourth line’s production from last year were definitely prevalent early in the season. Due to injuries and a lack of chemistry, the fourth line has been a rotating group this year. With Tatar being acquired from Colorado on Dec. 16, and Schwartz and Burakovsky back, coach Dave Hakstol can now roll four lines.
With these changes, Jared McCann, Tye Kartye, and Burakovsky now make up the team’s “fourth” line, though the distribution of minutes has been pretty even across the forward groups so far. McCann, in response to a question from Sound Of Hockey‘s own Darren Brown, called it, “Probably the best fourth line in the National Hockey League.”
The Kraken’s success last season was partly attributed to being able to roll four consistent lines that could score, but even when it was at its best, the trio of Daniel Sprong, Morgan Geekie, and Ryan Donato played true fourth-line minutes. The Kraken forward depth is now the deepest it has been in its first three years.
Things to improve
Losing streaks
The eight-game losing streak was definitely the low point of the season. To add salt to the wound of losing eight in a row, three of those losses were against struggling NHL clubs; the Chicago Blackhawks, the Montreal Canadiens and the Ottawa Senators. The Kraken also started the season off with a four-game losing streak, and prior to the current win streak, they had not won more than two games in row.
With the current line depth, defensive-minded style of play, and elite goaltending, losing streaks should be reduced in the second half. There is still plenty of work ahead for the Kraken, though, as outlined in this article on the team’s playoff chances.
Individual performance
Philipp Grubauer
For one reason or another, it has been hard to get both Grubauer and the Kraken skaters to consistently play well with each other. This season has been no different. Grubuaer has a .884 save percentage, which is hard to overcome with Seattle’s scoring rate (2.80 goals per game). We never like to see a player injured, but Grubuaer’s injury has opened the door for Daccord, and he has flourished in the starting role.
While Daccord has dazzled, the team has played better at both ends of the ice in front of him. Curtis Isacke recently wrote, “I found that in virtually every gameplay situation, the Seattle Kraken generate better shot quality offensively and significantly suppress opponent shot quality defensively when Daccord is on the ice.”
Eventually Grubauer will return, so here’s hoping that when he does, the Kraken skaters keep playing this way, and he can build some confidence behind them.
Matty Beniers
Beniers is currently on pace for only 38 points, significantly off the pace of his 57-point Calder Trophy season. He had a 16.2 shooting percentage last year, and that has regressed to 8.3 percent in 2023-24.
The good news is he is shooting just as much as he did last season and is on pace for a similar number of shots, so we can expect his conversion rate to trend up. Returning to 16 percent is a lot to ask, but in the 10-13 percent range is realistic. Over the last 10 games, Beniers has six points, so there are positive signs there, and he and Jordan Eberle seem to be working well with Tatar.
More good news, Beniers is still young and could just be dealing with a sophomore slump. Continuing to play and get experience is the best thing for him, and we have no doubt he can turn it around.
Injury bug
The Kraken got struck by the injury bug during the first half of the season. The following players have missed time: Andre Burakovsky (29 games), Brandon Tanev (16), Jaden Schwartz (16), Philipp Grubauer (13), Pierre-Edouard Bellemare (7), Jordan Eberle (4).
That adds up to 85 games lost to injuries. This is essentially 2 key players lost for each game this season. Both Grubauer and Bellemare are still on injured reserve, but with Daccord holding down the fort in net and McCann/Burakovsky playing on the “fourth” line, the Kraken are set up to continue riding their recent wave of success. Remaining healthy will be key for the second half.
Overall
The Kraken dug themselves a hole in the first half of the season, and their current win streak has almost gotten them out of it. They are still on the playoff bubble, though, currently tied in points with the Nashville Predators for the last wild card spot. The Predators have two more regulation wins than the Kraken, which means they technically have the last playoff position right now.
It should be noted that the Kraken have played in 12 games that went to overtime. Only the New York Islanders have played more overtime games (14), and both the Columbus Blue Jackets and Toronto Maple Leafs are tied with the Kraken at 12.
Seattle has won only three of those OT games and lost nine. Out of a maximum possible 24 points, the Kraken earned 15 points in OT games (nine points for each OT/shootout loss and six points for the three wins). In the NHL standings that works out to a .625 (15/24) points percentage. So keep your head up when the Kraken lose in overtime or a shootout because the Kraken still get a valuable point in those scenarios, and 3-on-3 overtime and shootout results do not matter once you make the playoffs.
The second half looks bright for the Kraken, but one thing is true: they will have to perform better than they did in the first half.
The Utah Jazz surprised us all with their unexpected reveal of the Seattle Kraken’s Winter Classic Jersey on Nov. 17. This got me thinking about an NBA team inevitably returning to Seattle and what it might mean for the Kraken. More specifically, I’ve been pondering since that jersey reveal about how adding an NBA team to Climate Pledge Arena would impact the Kraken home schedule. Now that the hoopla of the Winter Classic has died down, I decided to do some investigating to see how other NHL teams’ schedules get impacted by sharing their buildings with NBA teams.
My expectation was that teams that share an arena with the NBA would have more mid-week games and fewer weekend games. In fact, the data does support that but does not have nearly the influence I would have guessed. The larger ramifications are on the specific day of the week the game is played and the number of day games.
Process
I analyzed 20 NHL team schedules—10 NHL teams that share an arena with the NBA and 10 that only house the NHL—from 2014-2024 and excluded the two seasons (2019-20, 2020-21) that were shortened due to the pandemic.
During the eight seasons researched, 328 regular-season home games were played per team with the exception of the Detroit Red Wings (205 games), who only started sharing with the Detroit Pistons in the 2017-18 season when Little Caesars Arena opened. For “NBA + NHL” cities, 3,157 regular-season home NHL games were analyzed. For “NHL Only” teams, 3,280 regular-season games were analyzed.
NBA + NHL
Currently there are 10 NHL teams that share an arena with an NBA team:
Los Angeles Kings
Dallas Stars
Colorado Avalanche
Washington Capitals
Detroit Red Wings
New York Rangers
Toronto Maple Leafs
Boston Bruins
Chicago Blackhawks
Philadelphia Flyers
One team of note is the Los Angeles Kings who share Crypto.com Arena with both the Clippers and Lakers. Interestingly, five of the “Original Six” NHL team arenas also play home to NBA teams. From a divisional standpoint, there are three teams each from the Atlantic, Metropolitan, and Central Divisions that house teams from both leagues and just one team in the Pacific Division.
NHL Only
I compared the “NBA + NHL” teams with 10 NHL teams that have their own barn, and the “NHL Only” teams used are:
San Jose Sharks
Vancouver Canucks
Montreal Canadiens
Buffalo Sabres
Carolina Hurricanes
Tampa Bay Lightning
New Jersey Devils
Pittsburgh Penguins
Nashville Predators
Minnesota Wild
Results
Data is sliced into a few views:
Sunday-Thursday versus Friday-Saturday
Days of the week
Day games versus night games
Comparison to the Seattle Kraken
Sunday-Thursday versus Friday-Saturday
As seen in the graphs, the difference between “NBA + NHL” and “NHL Only” for weekend games is only 2.6 percent. That works out to roughly one fewer weekend game each year for teams that share an arena.
Days of the week
What jumped out here is “NHL Only” teams played 68.2 percent of their homes games on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays compared to “NBA + NHL” teams played only 59.9 percent. By far these three days of the week are the busiest in the NHL.
For “NBA + NHL” teams, the remaining days of the week were more level with approximately 10 percent of the games each day, with Friday being the lowest at 8.6 percent. For the “NHL Only” teams, Wednesday was the least active day at 5.7 percent with Monday, Friday and Sunday coming in around a nine-percent average.
Day games versus night games
Teams that share arenas have to deal with converting the venue from hockey to basketball and back, which is the reason I looked at the data for day games. The LA Times reported, “… a group of 60 Crypto.com Arena workers set in motion a two-hour transformation of the playing surfaces, from Clippers hardwood to Kings ice, and for only a handful of times, back to hardwood for a Lakers game the following day.” Here is a video of the process to convert between basketball and hockey.
For reference, a day game is any game starting before 3:00 p.m. and a night game is 3:00 p.m. or later. The main takeaway is that “NBA + NHL” teams had 3.5 percent more day games than “NHL Only”.
The number of day games per team varied by a large margin. For the “NBA + NHL” teams, the range varied from 0.9 percent to 18.9 percent. For “NHL Only” teams the range varied from 0.6 percent to 14 percent. That seems somewhat like team preference was a deciding factor on if teams played day games or not, but in general Seattle might expect a couple more day games during the year if they end up with an NBA team sharing CPA.
Comparison to the Seattle Kraken
Through the first three seasons of hockey in Seattle, the Kraken are right in the middle between “NHL Only” and “NBA + NHL” teams with 33.3 percent of their games scheduled on the weekend. The Kraken have evenly distributed their remaining games over the other days of the week (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday). Seattle has had six scheduled day games over the first three years which is 4.9 percent of their home games.
Overall
I agree that the NBA will come back to Seattle. “I think the NBA comes someday, and I think the NBA fans owe the Kraken fans a beer and a tip of the cap,” Kraken CEO Tod Leiweke told KOMO News on Jan. 4, 2023.
Kraken fans can rest easy, though, as the data supports that the NHL home schedule will not change drastically. There could be a few more day games and one fewer weekend game, but overall, we should continue to enjoy a similar schedule composition.
For the second time this season, the Seattle Kraken have lost four games in a row and are falling farther out of the playoff picture. Let’s hope this is the darkest of days for the 2023-24 Seattle Kraken. The week of games started out poorly when the Kraken lost in regulation to the lowly Chicago Blackhawks, and it somehow got worse with a shutout loss to Anton Forsberg and the Ottawa Senators on Saturday night. This was supposed to be the week where the Kraken make up points in the standings against some weaker opponents, but it was not to be.
Sandwiched between those two brutal losses was a decent effort against the Toronto Maple Leafs where the Kraken scored two goals in the third period to force overtime in a game they eventually lost in a shootout. The team showed resilience by battling back, and it felt like they could use that to carry momentum into Saturday against Ottawa. They did not.
All is not lost… yet
There is still plenty of time left in the season for the boys to claw back into a playoff position with a string of victories, but this team has shown no momentum whatsoever. The longest win streak by the Kraken this season is just two games. The 2022-23 Kraken had win streaks of five and seven games at this point in the season.
There are only so many times that you can blame a loss on facing a strong goalie or getting a couple unlucky bounces before you realize there might be some bigger problems at play. The penalty kill has been very inconsistent, the team’s shooting percentage is one of the worst in the league, and the goaltending has struggled throughout the season.
The “third line”
I always hate referring to the Yanni Gourde/Oliver Bjorkstrand/Eeli Tolvanen line as the third line for the Kraken. It’s partially driven by the special teams play of all of them, but it is not uncommon to see that line with the most collective minutes played. That third line is consistently playing well, but the Kraken need Gourde and Bjorkstrand to score some goals.
Both are playing great hockey but can’t seem to find the back of the net. Collectively, they’ve had 30 shots on goal over the last four games but no goals to show for it. Neither of them needs to change the way they are playing; I just think they are getting a bit of bad luck right now that will turn around in due course. How about a Bjorkstrand hat trick next week? I say he does it.
The Kraken fourth line
Due to the injuries to Jaden Schwartz, Brandon Tanev, and Andre Burakovsky this season, coach Dave Hakstol is minimizing the usage of the fourth line. Last season it was common for the fourth line to get 12-14 minutes a night, but as of late, the fourth-line wingers are getting between six and nine minutes of ice time. Pierre-Edouard Bellemare is averaging right around 10 minutes a night, largely because of his time on the penalty kill.
Part of this is situational. The Kraken are behind more frequently this season and need to get some of their goal scorers more ice time by taking it away from the fourth line.
Last year’s strength was Seattle’s depth with Ryan Donato, Daniel Sprong, and Morgan Geekie often contributing with goals from the fourth line. It is not a perfect analysis, but the three of them averaged .65 goals per game. Tanev, Kailer Yamamoto, and Bellemare together are averaging .43 goals per game, but that’s not an accurate picture. Tanev has been hurt a good chunk of the season, and injuries farther up the lineup have Yamamoto slotting in on other lines. That has left the fourth line to be made up by a hodgepodge of fill-ins like Devin Shore, Andrew Poturalski, Marián Studenič, and now Max McCormick.
Other musings:
Several of the World Junior Championship teams should start announcing their pre-tournament camp rosters this week. I expect Seattle Kraken prospects Jagger Firkus and Carson Rehkopf to be on the initial camp roster for Team Canada. Defenseman Ty Nelson could be another candidate, but he might be a bit of a long shot to make the final squad. Though Shane Wright is still eligible, he is not expected to play in the WJC this year.
It is unlikely that the Chicago Blackhawks would loan former Seattle Thunderbird Kevin Korchinski to Team Canada. The last time the Blackhawks let one of their prospects play in the World Junior Championship, Kirby Dach broke his wrist and missed a majority of his 2020-21 season.
Chris Driedger had a shutout for the Firebirds on Friday night against the Ontario Reign. In 13 games, he has a .916 save percentage in the AHL.
Wright has at least one point in 11 of his 15 AHL games this season for the Coachella Valley Firebirds. My prediction at the beginning of the season was that Shane would get 20 to 30 games in the AHL and would eventually be called up by the Kraken to spend of the rest of the season in the NHL.
Alex Wennberg’s assist on the game-tying goal Thursday night against the Toronto Maple Leafs is a perfect encapsulation of why he is such a good player and flies under the radar. He literally entered the offensive zone with the puck while the rest of the Kraken players were changing behind the play. There were four Maple Leafs in the zone with Wennberg but he managed to keep the puck and eventually find Jared McCann for this beauty of a goal. No highlights will show him entering the zone for a 1-on-4.
Wennberg is on his last year of his current contract and could be a trade candidate for the Kraken if they are out of the playoff picture. He doesn’t get nearly enough credit for the attributes he brings to the game because a lot of people just look at his scoring.
Player performance
Eduard Sale (BAR/SEA) – The Seattle Kraken first-round pick from the most recent NHL Entry Draft has practically flown off the radar this season but still has 21 points in 23 games for the Barrie Colts in the OHL. Expect him to represent Czechia in the World Juniors tournament.
Conor Geekie (WEN/ARI) – The Arizona Coyotes prospect playing for the Wenatchee Wild has put up 12 points in three games, including four unanswered goals against Portland on Saturday. He has points in eight straight games.
Mathew Barzal (NYI) – The former Seattle Thunderbird had seven points in two games last week, including this overtime winner against the Hurricanes.
In one of the pre-game media availabilities last week, Coach Hakstol got a question about defensive scoring that implied that is why the team has struggled to score this season. So, I looked it up.
So, yes, the defense has not contributed as much as it did at this point last season, but neither has the forward group. (Andre Burakovsky had nine goals at this point last season.)
Goal of the week
Seattle Kraken sixth-round selection in the 2023 NHL Entry Draft, Zeb Forsfjall, scored the overtime game winner for Skellefteå on Saturday.
It seems like I am saying this every week, but the Kraken face another critical week, and the opponents don’t look that intimidating, though all of them have a better record than the Kraken. Seattle starts the week with a game Monday against the Montreal Canadiens to try to salvage this road trip before returning home for six games in 10 days. The Kraken have got to figure out a way to link more than two wins together if they want any hope of making the playoffs.
It would be great if the Kraken can get Burakovsky back for this stretch of games. He was back in a regular blue jersey at morning skate Monday, per our best friend, Alison Lukan, but is not expected to play against the Habs. The success of the season may depend on how Burakovsky plays when he comes back.
A question for the readers
What happens first, a shutout by a Seattle Kraken goalie, a hat trick by a Kraken player, or Shane Wright gets called up from Coachella?
There has been chatter about potential NHL attendance issues across the league early this season. Softness in Winnipeg, Buffalo, and Ottawa has been bantered about across Canadian hockey media outlets, but is it accurate? Is attendance actually a problem in those cities?
It is a little early to start sounding the alarms of potential attendance issues, and depending on how you look at the numbers, they can also be misleading. That said, we will dig into the attendance numbers through all October games to see if there are themes we might want to keep an eye on as the season progresses.
Overall attendance
Average attendance during the month of October across the league is up 2.3 percent from last season. That is good, but it is not back to the same level for the October games played in the 2019-20 season.
There are a few things to note here:
1) Arizona now plays its games at Mullett Arena with a capacity of 4,600 per game. Back in 2019-20, they played at Desert Diamond Arena (formerly Gila River Arena), and although they were not selling out, they still averaged 12,224 per game. So naturally, the shift to the smaller arena will bring the overall league average down.
2) The NHL is a high-sellout league where several teams sell all their tickets for all their games, so seeing growth from those teams is constrained by their capacity.
3) Since 2019-20, a few arenas have downsized their capacities slightly to clear room for more luxury seating and experiences.
4) The game count per arena can vary and therefore throw off the weight of a certain team’s attendance. i.e., The Chicago Blackhawks played eight home games in October of the 2019-20 season but have only played two October home games during the 2023-24 season. This is important because the Blackhawks play in one of the biggest arenas in the league, and the volume of games is thus not weighted as heavily in 2023-24 as it was in 2019-20.
Sellouts
To avoid some of the limitations and nuances of looking at average attendance, another way to evaluate these figures is to look at the percentage of games that sell out across the league. I consider a game a sellout if attendance is 99 percent of capacity.
Like the average attendance figure, this can be misleading due to the weighting of teams but still a good indicator of league-wide attendance.
Team-by-team detail
Looking at the change season over season you start to get a better read on some teams that might be struggling.
Here are a couple notes about the attendance changes season over season by team.
New Jersey is getting a pop in attendance after the team took major steps forward last season, including a first-round win in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
Chicago’s attendance increase can be attributed to Connor Bedard joining the team after he was selected first overall in the 2023 NHL Entry Draft.
Buffalo has been called out as a team with softness in attendance this season, but they have increased quite a bit off last season’s October attendance numbers.
Winnipeg’s 19 percent drop is significant considering they did make the playoffs last season. Teams tend to not see a drop in their attendance after making the playoffs in the prior season.
Arizona, Boston, Dallas, New York Rangers, Seattle, and Tampa Bay have sold out all their games in October over the last two seasons.
It’s not the easiest to read, but here is a game-by-game breakdown of all the teams’ games through October. I will be updating this throughout the season.
Seasonality and day of the week
When media people state variances in attendance, they often compare an impartial season to prior completed seasons. They are not wrong, and I am not implying they are being deceptive. I’m just saying it would be more accurate to look at the seasonality in attendance.
The disrupted three seasons of hockey between 2019-20 and 2021-22 made those unfair comps. There are no major takeaways from this graph other than attendance tends to climb a bit in December, January, and February, with a little pop in the low-volume month of April.
This might not come as a surprise to many of you, but the day of the week a game is played can also impact attendance.
The variances do not seem that significant when looking at the league as a whole, but when you look at a team with some more variability in its attendance, it can be significant.
Here are a few examples.
Attendance vs butts in seats
I specifically use the term attendance because that is what is used in NHL game reports. I am aware these numbers do not reflect actual attendance figures, but until teams and the league start sharing the actual butts in seats attendance numbers, this will have to suffice.
Teams’ on-ice success can be very cyclical, and as a fan, you should expect some low-attendance seasons; there was a time that the Coyotes had higher attendance than Boston, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. This is all natural.
I hope you find this info informative, and if you have any specific questions feel free to ask me in the comments section below on twitter.
With the offseason lull seemingly in full swing, we thought it would be a good time to break down the 2023-24 Seattle Kraken schedule to get a flavor for what lies ahead. Here we will dig into travel, back-to-back games, and give some interesting factoids to understand what is on the docket for the Kraken this coming season.
Travel distance
One bit of housekeeping before we get into the breakdown. For simplicity, I did not incorporate the travel involved for the NHL Global Series for teams traveling to Sweden in mid-November. This means that Detroit, Minnesota, Ottawa, and Toronto will have understated miles on any charts and references to their travel distance.
Based on the location of Seattle in North America, the Kraken will always have one of the heavier travel schedules across the league. This year is no different in that regard.
The Kraken have the ninth-most travel miles over the regular season with 45,434 miles expected. That is up 600 miles from last season. As you might be able to tell by looking at the teams in the top 10, the Pacific Division teams generally have more travel than other NHL teams.
Here is how it breaks down by division:
The Pacific Division teams are clustered with similar amounts of travel, and Seattle falls just below the average for its divisional rivals.
Number of road trips
One side benefit of the increased travel is that the Kraken have fewer road trips than most other teams. This is because when they hit the road, they tend to also visit more cities and games on a single trip to limit the number of longer-haul flights. Seattle is tied for the fewest road trips in the league.
Here is a look at how homestands and road trips break down by month for this coming season:
November looks a bit crazy, but there are two one-game road trips in there to Edmonton and Vancouver, so that skews things a bit.
Back-to-back games
Statistically speaking, teams playing the second game of a back-to-back scenario have a disadvantage, winning just 181 out of 410 games in 2022-23. The good news for the Kraken is they have the fewest back-to-backs in the league in 2023-24 with just seven of these occasions on their schedule.
The bad news is that the Kraken were 5-3-0 in the second game of back-to-back scenarios last season, so maybe they would have liked to play more of them? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I am declaring Nov. 13-20 as hockey week in the Puget Sound. There are three Kraken home games and two home games each for the Silvertips and Thunderbirds, including a home-and-home against each other. That’s seven games across those eight days. How many games can you (and we) attend?
If a full week of hockey is just too many days for you, there is also a packed hockey weekend in December. There are five games from Dec. 8-10 across the Kraken and local junior teams. If you wanted to, you could see the Tri-City Americans versus the Seattle Thunderbirds Friday night, the Tampa Bay Lightning against the Kraken on Saturday night, and the Portland Winterhawks against the Everett Silvertips on Sunday. That sounds like a heck of a weekend.
There are also seven days where the Everett Silvertips, Seattle Thunderbirds, and Seattle Kraken all play on the same day.
If you are looking to catch glimpses of any Seattle Kraken prospects as they roll through town, you should get ample opportunity to see Lukas Dragicevic (TC), Caden Price (KEL), and Kaden Hammell (EVT), but the two games I am circling on my calendar are when Jagger Firkus and the Moose Jaw Warriors come to town. The Firkus Circus visits the Silvertips on March 1 and the Thunderbirds on March 2.
Epic Seattle Kraken hockey fan road trip
When I saw the Kraken schedule get released, I already blocked off my calendar for March 21 and 22 to see the Kraken take on Vegas and Arizona respectively on the road. But then the AHL schedule came out…
I do not know if I will make all four games of that sequence, but I know I have to get down to Coachella Valley this season for a Firebirds game. That atmosphere looked awesome all year, and it looked extra rowdy in the playoffs.
If you have any questions or games that you are looking forward to, let us know in the comments below. Only 85 days until opening night.
