Even though Morgan Geekie and Daniel Sprong were not tendered qualifying offers, we still don’t expect any ground-breaking moves by the Seattle Kraken when free agency opens Saturday at 9 a.m. Pacific. Let’s examine the roster position by position to see where opportunities exist to add to the team.
Goalies
The Kraken are pretty set in net with Philipp Grubauer locked in and Chris Driedger and now Joey Daccord expected to battle it out for the backup goaltender spot. The Kraken have already added Czech goaltender Ales Stezka, who is likely earmarked to spend the season in Coachella Valley for the Firebirds. The Kraken also signed their 2022 NHL Entry Draft goaltender Niklas Kokko to his entry-level contract earlier this year, but there is a good possibility he plays at least one more year in Finland. The Kraken may add one more goalie for depth, but in all likelihood, anyone they add would be the type of goalie that bounces between the AHL and ECHL.
Defensemen
The only departure from the blue line this offseason appears to be defenseman Carson Soucy. If you blinked, you might have missed it, but the Kraken did trade for left defenseman Jaycob Megna back in February. He only drew into six regular-season games and did not register a point. On the right side, Cale Fleury was with the Kraken all season but only played 12 games.
Unfortunately for Fleury, the right side is relatively set with Adam Larsson, Will Borgen, and Justin Schultz still in the fold. There are certainly opportunities to improve on both sides of the defense corps, so signing someone in free agency might create a scenario where somebody else gets traded. This might be the reason we are hearing occasional Borgen trade rumors.
The biggest opportunity to improve is on the left side, but the challenge is that Seattle has Ryker Evans waiting in the wings. He probably needs one more year in the AHL before he is ready to make the jump to the NHL, though. Ideally the team signs a significant upgrade on the left side for just one year, but who is out there that would actually be an upgrade and would take that short of term?
The good news is that based on the expected large salary cap increase for the 2024-25 season, there might be a few skilled defensemen willing to sign a one-year contract with the expectations they can cash in next offseason as teams have more money to spend against the cap. Connor Clifton or Niko Mikkola could fit that profile, or the Kraken could hold out to see who needs a home later in the summer. The dream scenario is if Matt Dumba does not like what he sees long term and is willing to sign a one-year deal like John Klingberg did last free agent period.
One NHL player agent tells me today that the flat cap for 2023-24 plus the jump in space in 2024-25 (up to at least $88 million) equals a lot of one-year deals in the UFA market starting tomorrow. (1/2)
On the right side of the defense corps, the Kraken could swing a little harder with the intent that any right D they add probably means someone else is moving out. The challenge here is that the free agent pool is limited. It is not clear if you could get him on a reasonable deal, but Klingberg could fit this scenario. He could step into one of the power play units that struggled at times this season and should be available for significantly less than what he was looking for last year. Still, at 30 years old and even at a discount, is he worth the defensive risk?
Forwards
With Sprong, Geekie, and Ryan Donato hitting free agency, that opens the door for three forward spots on the squad. It is unlikely the Kraken will fill all those spots with free agents, though, considering who they have knocking on the door.
First there is Tye Kartye. Kartye took his opportunity by the horns in the Stanley Cup Playoffs and scored five points in 10 games, including a goal in his first game that had Kraken fans immediately buying jerseys with his number on them. He has proven he is ready for the NHL, but even if the Kraken do not make any moves, I don’t think he is a lock to make the club out of training camp.
If you recall, Kartye drew into the lineup because Jared McCann was injured on the Cale Makar hit. I expect McCann to take his appropriate spot back in the lineup when the season starts, so that would shuffle Kartye to the fourth line. Keep in mind the Kraken fourth line acts more like a third line, and Kartye could fit in nicely as a Sprong replacement.
With all respect to Kartye, there is another player that had a very good season in Coachella Valley that might be competing for a spot: Kole Lind. Lind had 30 goals and 32 assists, compared with Kartye’s 28 goals and 29 assists. The difference is Lind is a right winger and Kartye is a left winger, but Brandon Tanev can play either side. If either Kartye or Lind claims a spot on the fourth line, Tanev can flip to the other side.
And then there is Shane Wright. Wright’s eligibility for the AHL next season is still in doubt, and there is still a decent possibility that he makes the Kraken out of camp. If he does make the team, that takes another spot. If Shane is ruled eligible for the AHL next season, that is good news for the Kraken, as they can move him up and down to the AHL without requiring waivers. The same goes for Kartye. If both Kartye and Wright spend most of the season in the AHL, that opens one spot for free agency.
That all adds up to complexity in the Kraken’s approach to forwards in free agency Saturday and beyond. It sure feels like they need to add a center, and of the available free agents, Evan Rodrigues might be the perfect upgrade the Kraken are looking for.
Additionally, I am sure they would love to add a bit more goal scoring, but so does everyone else, which could translate to an overpay. Maybe the Kraken end up adding a Vladimir Tarasenko, Jason Zucker, or Tomas Tatar in the hopes they can fill the gap for the departure of Sprong. For any of those three players, the Kraken might need to sign a longer-term contract than they are comfortable signing, but there are several forward contracts rolling off the books the next few years. So, perhaps that could make it more palatable?
Change is necessary to get better
If we expect the Kraken to improve next season, they must make changes to the roster. We have already seen two fan favorites likely leave after the team chose to not qualify Sprong and Geekie, and trades could still come to add skill to the club. These next few days will be very telling of how the Kraken will shape up next season.
On Dec. 15, Philipp Grubauer faced 39 shots against the Carolina Hurricanes and put the Kraken in a position to steal a game they had had no interest being in. It was an ugly game with the Kraken having just 33 percent of the shot attempts, and despite the Kraken being down 3-0 halfway though the game, they were very close to tying it in the third before eventually losing 3-2.
That was the moment I felt Grubauer turned the corner and started to be the goalie we expected he could be when the Kraken signed him in the summer of 2021, before the Kraken’s inaugural season. Ever since that game, I have felt that Grubauer should have earned more starts. Without further ado, I present my case for handing the net over to Philipp Grubauer.
Goal support
If you just look at the win-loss results for the two goaltenders this season, Martin Jones appears to be the better goalie, posting a record of 23-9-3 versus Grubauer’s 6-9-2. However, we know that wins and losses have a lot to do with how the team plays in front of the goaltender. For that, let us look at goal scoring by the Kraken for each starting goaltender.
In addition to the roughly 1.7 goals the Kraken average for Jones over Grubauer, 20 times or 59 percent of Jones’s starts, the Kraken score four goals or more. Sunday’s game against the Flyers was only the fourth time the Kraken have scored four or more goals for Grubauer. In fact, the Kraken have not scored more than four goals for any Grubauer start all season.
Save percentage
In a somewhat dated way of evaluating goalies, we can simply look at save percentage to evaluate the two goaltenders this year.
When we look at the chart, we can see that Grubauer has been steadily outperforming Jones in the save percentage category, but as I mentioned before, this is a slightly antiquated approach. Save percentage treats all shots as equal and does not consider the quality of the shots the goaltenders face when evaluating their performance.
Shot quality
I will not spend a lot of time talking about shot quality metrics, but the premise is that shots closer to the net and with a good angle are considered high-danger shots. Conversely, shots farther away and/or at a harsh angle to the net, are considered medium- or low-danger quality. For more information on shot quality, here is a nice breakdown from Alison Lukan.
Here is how save percentage breaks down at even strength by quality of shot. It is split into high-danger save percentage, medium-danger save percentage, and low-danger save percentage.
As the chart shows, Grubauer has a higher save percentage in all three categories over the season. The numbers are even more slanted in Grubi’s favor if you look at the numbers since Dec. 1.
Expected goals against versus actual goals against
The analytics community also has a statistic for evaluating a goalie’s performance called expected goals against. Keeping it simple, imagine expected goals against is what the most average goalie in the league would expect to give up if they were in net for the same exact shots that a goalie took in that game. You then take the difference of the expected goals against versus the actual goals against, and that will determine how well or poorly the goalie played compared to an average goalie in the same scenario.
For example, based on the location and scenarios around all the shots against in a game, if the expected goals against was 3.54 and the actual goals against was 3.00, then the difference would be -.54. Meaning, the goaltender saved .54 goals more than we would have expected from the average goaltender. For more on the expected goals statistic, checkout another great article by Alison.
This visual is a little more challenging to interpret, but you are looking for more dots below the zero line.
I added a reference line to show the direction each goaltender has trended lately, and it clearly shows Grubauer headed the right way and Jones heading the opposite way. One other insight I see on the chart is that Grubi’s last five starts have been better than average, and he has had only four starts that were below average this entire season.
It’s Grubauer’s time
I know that there are several flaws with strictly evaluating data to determine who should start in net for the Kraken, but all signs are pointing to Grubauer playing the best he has played in a Kraken uniform. He deserves a shot at getting a more regular cadence of games.
We made it through the long and dull summer in Seattle, a period otherwise known as the NHL offseason. The kick-off of rookie camp is a special time for us hockey sickos, and we are here for it. On Sunday, the Seattle Kraken announced their training camp rosters with Monday and Tuesday dedicated to the rookies on the squad and the main camp starting Thursday. We are seven days away from the first preseason game against Edmonton at Climate Pledge Arena, so we thought now would be a good time to look at some storylines to monitor for Training Camp. Here’s what to keep an eye on in week one.
Centers
With the selection of centerman Shane Wright in the 2022 NHL Entry Draft, the Kraken have a positional challenge to consider. Add Wright to the quiver of Matty Beniers, Alex Wennberg, Yanni Gourde, and Morgan Geekie, and now the club has five centers for only four spots. One of them will center the fourth line and another will need to move to wing. Lines can and will change a lot during the season, but it will be interesting to see who is getting the reps at center in the first few days of camp.
Who advances from rookie camp?
It is safe to say that Matty Beniers and Shane Wright are locks to move on from rookie camp to the main camp, but the bigger question is who else will stick around for a bit longer? Safe money is on Ryker Evans, the Kraken’s second-round pick from the 2021 NHL Entry Draft, who had an excellent season with Regina in the WHL. After Evans, it is a bit of a toss-up. Undrafted forward Ty Kartye signed an entry-level deal with the Kraken in March and could be one of the players to move on to the big camp at the end of the week. Another candidate could be 2021 fifth-round draft pick Jacob Melanson. He tends to fly under radar but put up 35 goals in 54 games in the QMJHL last season. Advancing from rookie camp to the main training camp does not mean the player is destined for the big club any time soon, but it might signal the potential these prospects have for reaching the NHL.
Eyes on Wright
Seattle’s coveted first-round pick from the 2022 NHL Entry Draft, Shane Wright will undoubtedly get a lot of attention. We think he will be given every opportunity to make this team, but it is far from guaranteed. Wright will need to prove he belongs in order to stay with the team all season. The coaching staff expects all the players to buy into their two-way game, and there is no doubt that Wright plays that style. But can he play that style in the NHL at 18 years old? Interesting to note, Cole Sillinger of Columbus was the only player taken in the 2021 draft to play the full 2021-22 season in the NHL.
The Killer B’s
If you are lucky enough to attend training camp in person, you will get to see reps and reps of the same drill. This enables you to focus in on individual players and compare them to each other doing the same drill. Keying in on Beniers for individual drills will be something special to watch, as his creativity and skill should be on full display. This will also be the first time we get to see offseason acquisitions Oliver Bjorkstrand and Andre Burakovsky up close and personal in Kraken jerseys. Bjorkstrand and Burakovsky have amazing shooting capabilities, and seeing them fire pucks in volume at practice should be a treat. A Bjorkstrand, Burakovsky, and Beniers line does sound cool, but it is premature to think it will happen or stick for the long term.
Tanev and Schwartz
Brandon Tanev and Jaden Schwartz were having productive seasons in 2021-22 before being sidelined by injuries. In Tanev’s case, he had season-ending knee surgery after a freak play against the Edmonton Oilers in mid-December. Schwartz’s diagnosis was never disclosed, but he was in and out of the lineup throughout the second half of the season. In both cases, the fanbase should be hopeful they return to pre-injury form. Both have been skating at Kraken Community Iceplex, and early reports are that they look good. Training camp should be a little more telling of where both those players stand in the recovery process.
Those are just a few of the storylines to watch throughout training camp this week. Keep any eye on SoundOfHockey.com and our twitter account all week for various reports from training camp as we ramp up to the start of the season.
In the third installment of this “becoming a playoff contender” series, we evaluate the Seattle Kraken offseason moves and determine what are the chances they make the playoffs. If you need a refresher, in Part 1, we determined that an NHL team will need a non-empty-net goal differential of minus five to have a 50 percent chance of making the playoffs. In Part 2 of the series, we dug into the goal forecast of the current players on the roster to determine the Kraken would need to add 45.6 more goals this offseason.
Roster changes prior to free agency
The forecast from Part 2 was based on all rostered and restricted free agent players on the team at the time. A lot has changed since then so let’s evaluate the changes.
The first order of business was the NHL Entry Draft. As most of you know by now, Shane Wright fell to the Seattle Kraken in the fourth overall spot in the draft. Wright was one of the few players taken in the draft expected to play in the NHL this season. There is a chance Wright does not make the Kraken roster immediately, but we feel that is unlikely and therefore will be punching him into the scoring forecast.
The prior goal forecast was also done before the qualifying offer deadline for all pending restricted free agents. The Kraken ended up not qualifying Ryan Donato*, Daniel Sprong, Haydn Fleury, and Dennis Cholowski. We will come back to Donato in a second, but this impacted the forecasted numbers since Donato and Sprong were forecasting over 15 goals for next season.
The expected goals for Fleury and Cholowski also impacted the forecast, but we only projected three goals combined for both of them, so they did not have a material impact on the overall forecasted number. When we removed Donato, Sprong, Fleury, and Cholowski, the gap in goals to become a playoff contender became much bigger.
Uh oh. They were heading in the wrong direction.
Roster additions
In addition to Shane Wright, the Kraken would go on to add forwards André Burakovsky, Andrew Poturalski, and John Hayden plus defenseman Justin Schultz during the first week of free agency. For a while, it looked as if the Kraken were done with only a few goal-scoring players left available. Nine days after the free agency period opened, the Kraken landed Oliver Bjorkstrand in a steal of a trade for the Kraken. With Bjorkstrand and Burakovsky on the roster, things began to look better for the scoring capabilities of the Kraken for the 2022-23 season.
The team also eventually re-signed Donato two weeks after free agency opened and added another depth defenseman in Michal Kempny.
New forecast projections
With these roster additions, now is time to punch them into the forecast. First up, how do we forecast Shane Wright’s numbers this upcoming season? For an estimate on Wright, we isolated the forwards selected in the top five picks since 2015 that would go on to play more than 15 games in the NHL in the season immediately after their draft season.
The average goals scored for that cohort of players was 16.8 in their first season. To be slightly more conservative, we are going to lower Wright’s forecasted goal totals to 14.8 for 2022-23. We recognize this is a very simple methodology but feel it is a reasonable number of goals to expect of Wright.
Plugging in the other player additions is relatively easy since it is based on their 2021-22 adjusted goals per game times the number of games we forecast those players to play in the 2022-23 season.
We also recognize there are some tweaks we could make to individual players’ expected performances next season. We are intentionally not making any individual adjustments because we think some players will exceed the forecast while others will be below the forecast. At the end of the season, they will even themselves out. When we put it all together, here is the current forecast for adjusted goal differential.
Playoff chances?
After all the changes and modifications to the goal scoring forecast, we are estimating the Kraken will have a -7.7 adjusted goal differential. If that forecast is realized, the Kraken should stick around the playoff hunt and would have a decent shot at making it to the postseason.
Based on the chart above, should the Kraken have a goal differential of minus seven, this gives them a 33 percent chance of making the playoffs.
What could go right and what could go wrong?
Again, we recognize this is an over-simplified forecast model, but there were significantly more complicated models that were way off last season.
Here are a few things that could go wrong for the Kraken:
The goalie tandem of Philipp Grubauer and Martin Jones does not improve and ends up last in team goaltending again.
Injuries. Brandon Tanev and Jaden Schwartz had significant reductions in games played last season due to injuries. The injury bug will come back in 2022-23, but who will it hit and how hard? Let’s just hope it doesn’t come for one of the goal scorers.
Burakovsky’s goal scoring rate decreases when playing for the less-talented Seattle Kraken compared to last year’s Stanley Cup champion Colorado Avalanche.
There are also things that could go right for the Kraken in 2022-23.
Goaltending is at or above league average. This could swing an additional 30 goals in the goal differential category.
Joonas Donskoi returns to form. 2021-22 was a brutal season for Donskoi, where his shooting percentage was a dismal 2.2 percent. If he gets back to his career average over 10 percent, he could be looking at a 15-to-20 goal season.
Shane Wright exceeds expectations with a 25-plus-goal season. Right now, we are conservatively estimating just under 15 goals for Wright. It is a possibility that he exceeds that number in his rookie campaign.
Lowering playoff expectations
It is rare for a team to bounce back from a 60-point season and vault themselves into a playoff spot. Since the 2000-01 season, only five teams qualified for the Stanley Cup Playoffs the season after posting 70 points or fewer. So maybe we should temper the expectations a bit as this team has several young pieces with new players that might not be totally comfortable playing with each other yet. With that said, playing meaningful games in March, even with an outside chance of making the playoffs, should be considered a success for 2022-23.
The final four teams are set to begin the third round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs this week, so we thought it would be fun to look at the remaining rosters for the Conference Finals to evaluate how they were built.
Player acquisition type
NHL Entry Draft, free agency, trades, and waiver wire acquisitions are all the various ways a team can build a roster. To build a contender, you need to use every tool at your disposal. Let’s look at how these teams built their rosters.
The two-time Stanley Cup Champion Tampa Bay Lightning have the highest percentage of players that were acquired via the NHL Entry Draft. It’s fascinating that Colorado’s percentage of drafted players is so small, especially considering that their cornerstone players – Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar, Mikko Rantanen, and Gabriel Landeskog – were all acquired through the draft. The variance among the teams that have a high draft percentage is a little surprising as well, being that the conventional wisdom is that successful teams are built through the draft.
To add some context around the roster composition, we should look at which players are scoring each team’s goals by acquisition type.
The second chart shows that players who are still playing for the teams that drafted them contribute a higher percentage of goals scored in the playoffs compared to the quantity of drafted players still on the roster (shown in the first chart).
This is easily explained as the higher-skilled players tend to score more, and teams are more willing to hold on to their drafted, high-scoring, skilled players (i.e., pay more money to assure they don’t reach free agency).
Note that goal scoring is a rather simple and narrow way of evaluating contributions to a team’s success, but directionally, we think this is a fair indictor on how to evaluate contributions by acquisition type.
Draft rounds
Regardless of the acquisition type, it is also fun to look at how many players each team has from each draft round.
As one would expect, players that were selected in the first round account for the highest percentage of players on the rosters. The surprising piece here was that 25 percent of the Rangers roster consists of undrafted players (Alexandar Georgiev, Barclay Goodrow, Dryden Hunt, Artemi Panarin, Kevin Rooney, and Frank Vatrano).
Roster ages
The average age of a team is also an appealing data point to evaluate.
Tampa is the oldest team in the Conference Finals, which makes sense as they have continued to trade away young prospects and draft picks at the trade deadline over the last three seasons. These moves have left their prospect cupboard rather light.
Edmonton is the second oldest team remaining, though this is being inflated by Mike Smith (40) and Duncan Keith (39).
Looking at average age of the rosters is interesting but can be a little misleading because it lacks things like ice time. Plus, having a few players on the extremes of the age range can influence a team’s average age.
Height and weight of NHL playoff rosters
Finally, we are going to take a quick peek at the height and weight of the four teams in the conference finals.
The heights are very similar with all teams having an average height within less than an inch of each other, but the weight of the players is quite different between the Western Conference teams (COL and EDM) and the Tampa Bay Lightning.
Here is a look at the player detail behind the weight of the players:
In Tampa, Victor Hedman and Patrick Maroon are right around 240 pounds and are undoubtedly influencing the average weight of the team. On the other side of the spectrum, Kailer Yamamoto is listed at 153 pounds and is the lightest player across the four remaining teams.
This was a very simple view at evaluating the Conference Finals rosters, but we hope it gives you a different perspective when watching over the next two weeks. If you found this interesting, you might enjoy looking at this story, breaking down all NHL rosters from last year. If you have questions about the data or some additional angles you would like me to consider, let me know in the comments section.
The weekend capped off an epic first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs with five series going to seven games. Storylines and narratives through Round 1 were plentiful, with early complaints being thrown around about there being too many penalties and blowouts. Let’s dig into the numbers to see if those complaints were valid and to gain some insights and appreciation of what we just witnessed.
Goal scoring
We already knew the regular season saw an increase in scoring, but we were not sure if that would expand to the playoffs. Spoiler, it did!
The first-round matchups saw the highest scoring in recent playoff history with an average of 6.4 goals per game this year compared to 5.7 last year. One possible theory for explaining this uptick is the increase in empty-net goals.
On average, empty-net goals are up, but this only accounts for .13 of the .7 goals-per-game increase we are seeing this year.
Margin of victory
Early in this playoff season it seemed like there were quite a few blowouts with opening night bringing three games decided by four goals or more. Did this trend continue throughout the first round? Were games across the league less competitive than in previous postseasons?
That is quite the spike in goal differential this year compared to the last two years. Again, empty-net goals were a contributor, but that again does not explain the entire increase.
As uninteresting as some of the games were in the beginning of the round, the series remained close, and toward the end of the first round the games got much tighter. Here is a look at the goal differential by game number of the first round.
Yep, that graph checks out. The games felt like they got better as the round progressed, and the numbers confirm that sentiment.
Penalties per game in the Stanley Cup Playoffs
Now on to the other hot topic, penalties. There was certainly a lot of chatter about the rate of penalties called in the early part of the first round, and this chart proves it out.
Certainly, the number of penalties called per game is up from the regular season, but more importantly, it is up from the last few postseasons. One thing to note on the comparison of regular season to playoffs is the fact that there are more offsetting scenarios in the playoffs compared to the regular season.
Similar to the margin of victory trends, let’s look to see if the number of penalties called changed over the first round.
This chart shows a steady decline in penalties the deeper we got into Round 1. Most people will claim the referees stopped calling “soft penalties” as the round progressed, but it is entirely possible that the players adjusted to how the games were called early in the round. The root cause is probably a combination of both.
For comparison, here is how last year’s chart looked for the opening round.
Last year showed a decline from the beginning of the round to the end as well, but the number of penalties called was more consistent.
Game 7’s and overtime
This last weekend the hockey gods gave us one of the best weekends we could hope for with five Game 7’s, two of which ended in overtime and four of which were one-goal games. Assuming no rooting interest, we could not have asked for much more. Let’s add some context.
Five Game 7’s is rare and was the most in an opening round since 1994. The hockey world seems to agree that the number of Game 7’s was great, but did we have as many overtime games this round?
Eight overtime games compared to 16 last year was quite the drop, but that was in line with the average from 2018 to 2020.
Do you have any thoughts on the playoffs so far? Anything from a data side you want us to look at? Drop a line in the comments or on twitter and we will see what we can do.
