Last week, I mentioned that if the Kraken were to get four out of a possible six points from the three games between then and now, it would resemble a playoff team. They got four out of six points by beating Tampa Bay and Nashville and losing to Calgary. So why do I feel so icky and bummed about the Kraken right now? Recency bias.
Recency bias gives “greater importance to the most recent event” that often misleads us into overweighting the most recent events when determining the long-term outlook for future events. This happens in positive and negative scenarios. Right now, we have a bad taste in our mouths from the team’s performance against the Flames on Saturday.
Let’s acknowledge the good over the last week. The Kraken got a big win against a very good Tampa Bay Lightning team last Monday that marked the first win in franchise history against that club. They then beat Nashville on Thursday night at home. That was a bit of a redemption game after losing to the Predators back on Oct. 12, which – up until Saturday night – was the worst they played all season.
What’s up with Matty?
The short answer is that I don’t know. I hate the expression, since I feel it is something that hockey media makes up to create a narrative, but he could be “gripping the stick too tightly” right now. The last couple games, it feels like he is not playing with the same confidence we saw last year. There are times where seems to be passing instead of creating a shooting lane for himself, and other times where he is finding space to create a shooting option but misfires the shot.
I’ve seen him out on the power play, but I am not noticing him as a scoring threat or even a key part of the power play right now. He is third on the Kraken in total power-play time this season with 31:27 of ice time, but he only has three shots on goal. Conversely, Andre Burakovsky, who has been out since Oct. 21, has less than half that time as Matty with the same number of power-play shots. This could be by design in how the power play is structured, but Beniers has been largely unnoticeable.
It could also be that opposing teams know him a little better this season and know how to make his life difficult, or it could be some self-inflicted pressure he is putting on himself. No matter what it is, I know he will get through it and will be fine. Slumps happen, and they probably happen more often to young players in this league than we even know. I keep wishing for some kind of fluky, ugly goal to help him break out of this funk.
Other Kraken musings:
Jaden Schwartz has been playing excellent this season, but I think Oliver Bjorkstrand has been the best player over the last five games or so. Both Schwartz and Bjorkstrand have 10 points on the season and have shown up at critical times in games.
Bjorkstrand scored his fourth goal of the season on Saturday night. He did not score his fourth goal last season until Dec. 22.
Beniers has yet to score this season; last season he had five goals by Nov. 5.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but the Kraken rank eighth in the league in power play percentage at 25.7 percent, despite how ice cold (1 for 11) the power play was to start the season. The Kraken have at least one power-play goal in each of their last three games.
The Coachella Valley Firebirds are 5-2-0 on the season after winning four straight games. It has been a total team effort; they have 15 different goal scorers this season.
Shane Wright and Max McCormick lead the Firebirds with four goals apiece.
In just their second season, the Firebirds have the largest season ticket base in the AHL. It’s a remarkable achievement and testament to the leadership at Oak View Group. OVG has raised the bar in how to launch a franchise, both at the NHL level and now the AHL level. I often wonder if that is why we are starting to hear more expansion talk around the NHL.
Niklas Kokko, one of the Kraken’s second-round selections from 2022 NHL Entry Draft, is currently leading the Finnish Liiga in save percentage. He earned his first career shutout last week. Kokko is expected to be the primary goalie for Finland in the World Junior Championship at the end of December.
It was pretty cool to see “marathoner” Zdeno Chara run his second marathon of the year. On Sunday, he completed the New York Marathon in 3:19:19, which is an improvement on his Boston Marathon time of 3:38:23 in April. Congrats Big Z.
After injuring his shoulder in the World Championships last summer, free agent defenseman Ethan Bear is getting close to being fully rehabilitated and is destined for an NHL contract. He probably isn’t a fit for the Kraken, but I am excited to see this former Seattle Thunderbird back in the NHL.
Player performance
Jani Nyman (Ilves/SEA) – Playing for Ilves in the Finnish Liiga, Nyman had two goals in Ilves’ 6-4 victory over Sport on Saturday night. Nyman is currently donning the Red Bull helmet as the top U20 goal scorer in the league. He now has eight goals and five assists in 19 games for Ilves.
🙌😻 JAMPPA
Ilves siirtyi Vaasassa kahden maalin karkumatkalle tällä Jani Nymanin kauden seitsemännellä osumalla! 🚨
Ryan Winterton (CVF/SEA) – The third-round selection of the 2021 NHL Entry Draft for the Kraken has three goals and five points in his last four games. This is Winterton’s first season of professional hockey after playing in the OHL the last few seasons.
Justin Schultz (SEA) – Has four assists over the last three games including two power-play assists. He has been a significant contributor to the success of the Kraken power play as of late.
Chart of the week
The Kraken have uncharacteristically scored first in most of their games this season, which is usually closely aligned with winning. But the Kraken have won just 25 percent of the games in which they’ve scored first. The league average is 65 percent, so I expect that percentage to improve now that the team is scoring more. In the meantime, it has been an odd statistic through the first 12 games of the season.
Goal of the week
I had a hard time deciding between these two, so I’m picking two goals of the week:
BJORK-JAM! 🚨
Oliver goes BarrDown Studios for a power-play goal! What a shot.
The Kraken hit the road for a quick two-game set starting with the Arizona Coyotes on Tuesday, and then on to Denver to face the Colorado Avalanche on Thursday. The Coyotes are not the pushover we have seen the last few years, and Colorado really took it to the Kraken in a 4-1 win in Seattle’s home opener.
Seattle then returns home next Saturday with a game against a reeling Edmonton Oilers club. Getting four out of a possible six points will again be great, but three would be fine. It is another cliché, but I am looking for a full 60-minute effort in these games. I don’t think we’ve seen one yet, and a full 60 was the theme when the team went streaking last season.
One area where the Kraken must improve is the penalty kill. They have a 73 percent kill rate over the season after not allowing a power-play goal through the first four games. Over the last two weeks, they have a league-worst PK success rate at just 52.9 percent. That is brutally low, and they’ve got no chance at qualifying for the playoffs if they do not turn that around soon. This brief road trip would be a great place to rekindle that early-season magic.
As always, let me know your thoughts, questions, or areas you want me to investigate.
Finally, I want to give a big thank you to our Patreon members. We have a long way to go to be fully sustainable, but the support we have received to date confirms people appreciate our work and want to help it continue and grow.
I do my best to be objective and avoid being swayed too much by the emotional roller coaster that is the NHL season. When I evaluate the question of whether it is time to panic about the Seattle Kraken season to date, the logical part of me says it is not time to panic. Plenty of teams have stumbled out of the blocks, only to finish the season in a playoff spot.
But … My emotional side is freaking out right now.
We knew the first 10 games of the season represented a big challenge for Seattle, and if you would have told me coming in that the Kraken would be 1-4-1 through the first six games, I would have believed you based on the quality of opponents on the schedule. None of that really matters, though, because for as high as I was feeling after Thursday night’s game, it all came crashing down Saturday.
The Kraken looked out of sync against the Rangers, and it just felt like they could not get any sustained pressure or quality chances. Adding more fuel to the angst was the nature of how Andre Burakovsky left the ice after being boarded by Jacob Trouba. Sure enough, the Kraken announced Monday that Burakovsky had undergone a procedure to address the injury and would be out 6-8 weeks. That is a massive blow; the hockey gods seem to be kicking the team when it is already down.
Shooting percentages
Scoring and the Kraken’s low shooting percentage is the theme of the season so far. In 2022-23, they finished second in the NHL behind only the Edmonton Oilers by shooting 11.8 percent. This season they are currently sitting 30th in the league with a shooting percentage of 6.1 percent. I thought Thursday night’s explosion of seven goals against the Carolina Hurricanes might have been the catalyst for getting out of this scoring funk, but the Kraken scored just one goal on 19 shots to land at 5.3 percent Saturday, which is only slightly better than the sub-3 percent they were averaging in the first four games of the season.
Before I go any farther, let me call out that Saturday night might not be the best proxy for the season. The shot quality was extremely low in that game; according to NaturalStatTrick.com, the Kraken had only one high-danger shot on net the entire game. The previous low was five against Colorado.
There was a lot of chatter entering the season that the Seattle Kraken were due for a regression in scoring this season. That might be true, but this team has shooters, so we should not expect it to stay near the bottom of the league all season. Consider that Matty Beniers, Jordan Eberle, Eeli Tolvanen, and (before his injury) Burakovsky have not scored. All four of them have averaged over 10 percent in shooting their last five seasons. There is too much to go into on this, but I promise to do a deeper dive into the topic later this week.
It is still early. Let’s not panic… yet.
Early improvement in the face-off dot
We identified face-offs as an opportunity for improvement this offseason, and when Pierre-Edouard Bellemare was signed, we thought he should help the team improve in this area. While his own performance is bringing up the team’s statistics, Bellemare seems to be helping other players improve their face-off percentages as well.
Apart from Jordan Eberle, all players have improved their face-off percentages this season to date compared to all last season. Being that Eberle has only taken six draws, I would not worry too much about his 33 percent.
An area I was particularly concerned about coming into the season was the lack of right-shot centermen that could be deployed in the right face-off dot in the defensive zone. This dot is considered the strong side for a right-shot forward and the weak side for a left-shot forward. The Kraken’s four centers are all left shots, which would put the Kraken at a strategic disadvantage when taking face-offs in the right defensive-zone circle. (If you want to read more on this topic, check out this post from over the summer).
The data shows that the Kraken are weaker on the right defensive-zone circle, but even though they are missing the right-shot option (filled last season by Morgan Geekie) to take the right-side face-offs, they are still stronger on that right face-off dot.
It is early in the season, and some of the teams the Kraken have played this season were weaker face-off teams from last season. But even with the limited sample size, this is positive progress in this area.
Other Kraken thoughts
The Burakovsky injury is significant. I was counting on him to play a majority of the season to improve the Kraken offensively and replace the goals of Daniel Sprong.
The injury to Burakovsky, this will provide an opportunity Tye Kartye and Kailer YamamotoI I expect both of them to work up and down the lines and get more scoring opportunities with more skilled linemates. In my opinion, Yamamoto can create more offensive opportunities on the fourth line than Kartye, so I would bet Kartye starts most of the games up the lineup with Yamamoto getting occasional extra shifts outside of the fourth line.
It was fun to see Kartye score his first regular-season goal Thursday against the Hurricanes. It was equally fun was to see how excited he was after he scored.
I’ve often felt Alexander Wennberg is the most underappreciated Kraken player to ever wear the jersey, but I also put Jaden Schwartz in that same boat. Schwartz has two of the three power-play goals scored by the Kraken this season and is often moved around the lines to get other players going.
As a team, I believe the Kraken have played better than their record shows so far (although, maybe not so much against the Rangers). They’ve allowed 3.33 goals against per game, but three of the goals against were on an empty net.
Former 2022-23 Seattle Kraken fourth-liners Morgan Geekie, Daniel Sprong, and Ryan Donato have a total of four goals for their 2023-24 teams. The Kraken’s 2023-24 fourth line of Tye Kartye, Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, and Kailer Yamamoto have three goals through the first six games.
It’s way too early to start looking at the standings, but it is calming to see that the third-place Los Angeles Kings have just two more points than the Kraken.
Player performance /Stick taps
Jagger Firkus (Moose Jaw Warriors, WHL) – Firkus has five goals in his last two games, bringing his season goal total to 10 in 10 games. That’s not bad.
Jagger Firkus does his best work in the final minute of the period
Pierre-Edouard Bellemare (Kraken) – Bellemare has a face-off win percentage of 56.5 percent, and he scored his first goal as a Kraken, netting a short-handed goal against the Carolina Hurricanes on Thursday.
Vince Dunn (Kraken) – Dunn had a goal and three assists in the three Kraken games last week. I’ve mentioned several times this season that he has looked off, but I figured it was just a matter of time before he would be back to 2022-23 form. He looked back against Carolina.
I spent most of my Sunday doing data gymnastics to fix my location data from the Saturday game, since it was thrown off by the lighting issue that had the teams trading sides halfway through each period. You see, a defensive-zone face-off varies depending on the period (and arena) of the game. When the teams switch sides in the middle of a period, that logic gets screwed up. I realized this when my wife leaned over to me at the game and said, “This is going to screw up your data.”
As always, let me know if you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions on other areas to investigate by leaving a note in the comments section.
In the middle of last offseason, I went through a forecasting exercise to analyze the Seattle Kraken roster and evaluate the team’s playoff chances after its offseason acquisitions. Historical data says that NHL teams with positive adjusted goal differential on the season have at least a 50 percent chance of making the playoffs. Entering 2022-23, reaching the Stanley Cup Playoffs seemed like a huge stretch considering the Kraken were coming off a negative-59 goal differential that was good for 30th out of 32 teams in the league.
I was viciously mocked (not really) for even mentioning the word playoffs last offseason. At the end of the exercise, I forecasted the Kraken had a roster that could produce a negative-7.7 goal differential which would have given them a 33 percent chance of making the playoffs heading into the 2022-23 season.
Now that we’re ready to start the 2023-24 season, let’s look back at how the previous forecast did and also set expectations for this season.
Looking back at the 2022-23 forecast
Before we dig into the current Seattle Kraken roster, it is always useful to evaluate how the forecasting model performed last season to see if we can refine the process.
Here is a look at the player-by-player forecast and how it performed against what actually happened. As a reminder, we are using adjusted goals, which eliminates empty-net and shootout goals.
The forecasting model was under by 32 goals, largely driven by Jared McCann, Daniel Sprong, and Jamie Oleksiak’s variances. At the time I did last season’s forecast, Sprong was not on the roster. Even so, had he been on the roster, I would not have pegged him with 21 goals over 66 games.
Forecasting Shane Wright with 14.9 goals was an obvious miss on the forecast. He bounced between the NHL, AHL, back to the NHL, World Juniors, back to the OHL, and then eventually back to the AHL He scored one goal in the NHL.
Picking up Eeli Tolvanen on waivers is not something anyone could have foreseen in August, 2022. It was a huge steal for the Kraken and ended up being key to their success on the back half of the season.
Oleksiak was a pleasant surprise. After scoring one empty-net goal from his own goal line during the 2021-22 season, he posted a career-high nine goals during the 2022-23 season. I’m not sure how I could have foreseen that output, but his production offsets my expectation for Carson Soucy, which is how the forecast is supposed to work.
Overall, I felt the forecast model performed well with offsets on both sides of the equation.
Kraken departures and arrivals for 2023-24
The Kraken had quite a few goals leave the team this offseason. Sprong and Morgan Geekie did not receive qualifying offers, and Seattle did not re-sign unrestricted free agents Ryan Donato or Soucy. That is 47 goals that left the team.
In free agency, the Kraken added Kailer Yamamoto, Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, and Brian Dumoulin, totaling just 15 goals last season. In addition to the free agents, playoff legend Tye Kartye will be starting the season on the NHL roster.
On the surface, the net of the roster changes looks like a significant deficit to make up for in the 2023-24 season. Let’s dig into the forecast to predict how it will shake out.
Forecasting the forward goal production
My base assumption is players will produce goals at the same rate per game they did in the prior season. Additionally, my forecast for games played is a general average of the regulars in the season prior. For the bottom three forwards, I anticipate a bit of interchanging going on through the season, so assume they will not play as regularly as the top nine. Once I have the base assumptions around goals and games played, I’m making small adjustments based on additional information gathered last season.
Forward adjustments
With another year under his belt, I anticipate Matty Beniers to increase his goal production. To keep it conservative, I increased his goal rate per game by 10 percent.
Oliver Bjorkstrand seemed to start the 2022-23 season uncharacteristically snakebitten, but finished the second half of the season producing more in line with his normal levels. He would finish the season with his fewest goals per game over the last five years. I increased his goal rate by 5 percent to be comparable with his last three seasons.
I also adjusted McCann’s production down by 10 percent due to his uncharacteristically high shooting percentage during the 2022-23 season.
Kartye is a bit of a guess that is loosely based on his 2022-23 AHL season and a bit of his playoff games.
There were no adjustments to Andre Burakovsky’s rate projections, but it is worth pointing out that a full season of Burakovsky should add at least another seven goals.
Forecasting the defense goal production
The forecast for defense will work very similarly to the forwards with a rate per game based on historical production. The top six defense lineup seems rather set, but we can almost guarantee those six will not all play 82 games, so I’m reducing their average to 75.
Defensemen adjustments
The only adjustment I made to the defense is cutting Oleksiak’s rate in half compared to his career high in the 2023-24 season.
I do expect Ryker Evens to play some NHL games this season, and he is a more offensive-minded defenseman that will score goals. But there are too many unknowns to build him into the forecast.
Goals against
Before we put the final goal differential together, we need to recognize the other piece of the formula, adjusted goals against that are expected to be scored against Seattle. Last season, the Kraken allowed 242 adjusted goals against. Modeling goals against is a challenge, but I do believe the additions of Pierre-Edouard Bellemare and Brian Dumoulin will be a net gain defensively for the Kraken this season compared to the offseason departures of Geekie and Soucy. We can conservatively estimate that those new guys can save the Kraken five goals against over the season. Based on this logic, the adjusted goals against estimate is going to be last season’s goal total of 242 minus the five goals we are estimating from the defensive contributions of Bellemare and Dumoulin.
Putting it all together
If you total the goal forecast and subtract the goals against forecast/estimate, you get a goal differential of plus 19.4 goals. That would put any team in the 92 percent range of qualifying for the playoffs.
This feels a bit high based on other NHL analysts’ projections, but a lot of those same analysts were horribly wrong last season, so why would we think they will nail it this season? Additionally, there are several opportunities for improvement for Seattle, such as the power play, goaltending, and face-offs that can directly or indirectly improve the Seattle Kraken’s goal differential.
Overall, I know this is a very simple forecasting process, but there is no sense in using a flamethrower to light a candle when all you need is a match. In keeping it basic, things look pretty good heading into the 2023-24 Kraken season.
It is no secret that an area where the Seattle Kraken have an opportunity to improve this season is their power play. That’s not to say it was horrible all last season – Seattle ranked 21st in the league – but isolating just playoff teams, they ranked 14th out of the 16 teams that qualified for the postseason. We recently posted a breakdown on how the team looks to improve the power play by starting off with a different look this season.
To get a better understanding of how the power play performed last season, I spent some time digging into the numbers and wanted to share my findings.
Pre-Burakovsky/Post-Burakovsky
There is a commonly cited theory that the Seattle Kraken power play took a huge hit when Andre Burakovsky went down with a season-ending groin injury in 2022-23. Let’s look at the numbers.
With a 0.9 percent drop in production after the injury, that theory might have merit. The fact of the matter, though, is that power play percentages drop later in the season.
At the time of the injury, Burakovsky led the team in power-play points with 14 and was second among forwards with 126:37 of power-play ice-time. Losing a weapon like Burakovsky was significant, but I do not think the team will improve drastically this season just because Burakovsky is back. The Kraken do need to make other tweaks, as Darren laid out in his article last week.
Power-play possession
There were times last season where it felt the power play was spending a disproportionate amount of time on the power play outside of the offensive zone. Some of this sentiment was driven by low face-off percentages with the manpower advantage. A common scenario was that the Kraken would start a power play with an offensive-zone face-off. They would lose the draw and possession, and the opposing team would clear the puck out of the zone, killing 10 to 15 seconds of the Kraken power play.
Although not a perfect proxy for possession, the Kraken were second to last in power-play face-off percentage last season.
The other area where the Kraken appeared to struggle without Burakovsky was offensive-zone entries. I am unaware of publicly available (a.k.a. “free”) data on zone entries, but one thing we can evaluate is the rate of shot attempts on a power play. Again, it’s not perfect for analyzing offensive-zone possession time, but it is a very good proxy, since the more often you have the puck in the offensive zone, the more likely you will have a shot attempt.
To show my work, I counted all the shot attempts (shots, blocked shots, missed shots) on a power play then divided by a team’s total power play to get shot attempts per power-play second. To make the number more relatable, I multiplied the shot attempts per power play second by 120 seconds. That gets us a shot attempt rate per two minutes, the usual length of a power play.
Using the shot attempts rate by power play time, we can see that the Kraken did have an issue with possession on the power play last season. The Kraken ranked 25th and last amongst playoff teams in generating shots per two minutes of power play time. We do not know the root cause of this issue, but it is probably a combination of face-off percentage on the power play, zone entries, and maintaining possession in the offensive zone. This shot attempt rate is something we will keep an eye on in the coming season.
Dry spells
During training camp last week, coach Dave Hakstol called out droughts and a lack of consistency that hurt the power play last season.
I certainly remember the Kraken going through dry spells, but I have always thought that is part of the cyclical nature of a hockey season. This is another area to focus on this season. Are the dry spells shorter and less frequent? Let’s hope so.
Who is getting the PP time?
Finally, I wanted to look at who was getting the power-play ice time and identify any potential changes for the upcoming season. To do that, I wanted to look at how the power-play time changed over the season, particularly before and after the Burakovsky injury.
The table shows that Eeli Tolvanen and Yanni Gourde picked up the extra time when Burakovsky went down in early February. With Burakovsky starting this season healthy, you can anticipate his power-play time to come back, but Tolvanen should remain on the power play with the departure of Daniel Sprong in the offseason. Sprong was on the ice for 40 percent of the Kraken’s power play when he was in the lineup.
Power play outlook
Without any substantial personnel changes to the Seattle Kraken roster this offseason, the changes will need to come from within. Getting Burakovsky back to start the season will certainly help, but the team will need to create different looks and options if it expects improvement in production. The Kraken’s new approach has showed promise in preseason. Will it carry over to the regular season?
The Seattle Kraken kick off official hockey activities with a two-day rookie camp on Monday and Tuesday, before the full training camp starts Thursday. A lot of the players that will attend the rookie portion are players we saw in the development camp the Kraken hosted in July, but expect higher intensity these next couple days.
A lot of these Seattle Kraken prospects could be years away from making their regular-season NHL debuts, and many will never play for the Kraken. But I always enjoy getting an up-close viewing of Kraken prospects at this point in their careers. Here are four players I am particularly excited about watching.
Carson Rehkopf
Calling out Carson Rehkopf is not exactly going out on a limb. He was the Kraken’s second pick (50th overall) of the most recent NHL Entry Draft, but I feel he could be one of those players we talk about years from now that other teams missed when they had the opportunity to draft him.
I tend to overvalue a prospect’s shooting abilities when compared to his peers, and Rehkopf’s shot really stood out in the group of players at development camp. Another aspect of his game that raised some eyebrows was his poise with the puck. He seemed very patient and often avoided making the obvious pass to instead create an even better scoring opportunity for his team. The sample size was small, and the scenarios were a little different in dev camp, so I hope his performance this week will be consistent with what we saw in July.
2023 fourth-round selection, Andrei Loshko, will not stand out like some prospects in terms of dangles or wicked shots. He is better known for his strong two-way game that could translate to the NHL one day. Originally from Belarus, Loshko has played the last two seasons with the Chicoutimi Sagueneens of the QMJHL, where he put up 70 points over 67 regular-season games in 2022-23. He is considered a bit of a sleeper, so it will be fun to set a baseline at this rookie camp to start tracking his progress over the next few years.
Lukas Dragicevic
I figure that any hardcore Seattle Kraken fan will have plenty of opportunity to see Lukas Dragicevic this season by watching the Tri-City Americans any time they are playing your local US Division WHL team. But it will also be exciting to see how he stacks up against the Kraken prospects. What really fascinates me about Dragicevic is that he switched to defense four seasons ago, explaining his high-end offensive skill. The word around the campfire is that Dragicevic will need to develop his defensive skill, but in the meantime, I will enjoy seeing his offensive prowess on display.
Tucker Robertson
It was not until the OHL playoffs that I watched a lot of Tucker Robertson, and he was a big reason the Peterborough Petes won that league’s championship. The OHL Final was particularly impressive. Robertson had nine points in the series against the London Knights, including one goal and one assist on the Petes’ 2-1 series-clinching victory in Game 6. Robertson might be that elusive right-handed center the Kraken could be looking for. He is expected to be in Coachella Valley this coming season.
If you are not able to attend either of the rookie camp on-ice sessions, a lot of the young players should stick around for at least several days of the main training camp that starts Thursday. The entire schedule can be found here.
Last offseason I did a series of articles that analyzed – at a high level – just how much the Kraken would need to improve to be contending for a playoff spot in their second season. At the time, the analysis was met with a bit of cynicism after such an abysmal inaugural season in 2021-22.
At the heart of that analysis was one simple metric, adjusted goal differential. Adjusted goal differential was essentially ‘goals for’ minus ‘goals against,’ excluding empty-net goals on both sides of the equation. The target I landed on for the Kraken to make the playoffs in 2022-23 was an adjusted goal differential of minus four or better because historically, teams that had a minus-four adjusted goal differential have had a roughly 40 percent chance of qualifying for the playoffs.
Based on Seattle’s results in its first season, I would have taken those odds any day of the week.
The Kraken had a brutal minus-59 adjusted goal differential in their inaugural season, good for sixth worst in the league. To get to that minus-four adjusted goal target, they needed to do some combination of scoring or allowing a 55-goal improvement in 2022-23. Fast forwarding, the Kraken blew that minus-four target out of the water by scoring 75 more goals in 2022-23 and allowing 16 fewer goals. Lo and behold, they clinched their first playoff berth with two weeks remaining in the season.
Offseason changes
It would be easy to just rinse and repeat for the upcoming season, but even though Seattle’s top three forward lines and top two defensive pairs remained intact, the Kraken saw a significant number of goals leave their roster this offseason. Restricted free agents Daniel Sprong and Morgan Geekie were not tendered qualifying offers and signed with Detroit and Boston respectively. Unrestricted free agents Ryan Donato and Carson Soucy signed with Chicago and Vancouver. That means 47 adjusted goals for walked out the door via free agency.
For you scoring at home, the Kraken had an adjusted goal differential of plus 32 last season. With 47 goals departing from the roster, that would put them at minus-15 for 2023-24, assuming no change at the defensive end of the ice. But they did make a few additions in the offseason that will partially offset their offensive losses. Enter Kailer Yamamoto, Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, and Brian Dumoulin. Here is a look at their numbers from last season:
It’s not exactly an even swap if we are only looking at goal scoring. If all other metrics stay the same (which they won’t), the players subtracted and added to the roster put the Kraken at exactly zero in adjusted goal differential. According to the chart at the top of the post, that would put them at about a 50-percent chance of making the playoffs.
Other variables
Astute Kraken fans will quickly point out some of the missing names from this exercise. Shane Wright and Tye Kartye are highly likely to contribute in some capacity this coming season and are not accounted for in the tables. Other fans will point out that a full year of Andrei Burakovsky will certainly add to the goal totals for next season. Those are reasonable points to make, but goal projections will be part of a future post where I go a little deeper and project player-by-player game totals.
A quick note about adjusted goals against
To this point we have only really walked through adjusted goals for, but obviously there is another side of the equation: adjusted goals against. This is much harder of a number to forecast. The additions of Dumoulin and Bellemare could be seen as defensive improvements, but it is a challenge to determine how that would translate to goals against numbers.
Goaltending will also come into play when determining adjusted goals against. Goals against average (GAA) would seemingly be a perfect stat to analyze a team’s adjusted goals against forecast, but as it turns out, it is a horrible stat. The challenge is there are so many variables for goalies, such as quantity and quality of shots, not to mention the team’s overall defensive ability, which would also impact quantity and quality. We will save some goalie analysis for a future post.
Just a starting point
This might not give Kraken fans a lot of optimism headed into season three. Think of this more as round one of analysis when sizing up this upcoming season. We have noted the offseason changes and identified areas to explore in future analysis. Over the coming weeks we will dig into these areas to get you properly prepared for season three. If you have any thoughts or questions about the Seattle Kraken’s playoff chances heading into this season, leave a note in the comments below.
