What Vince Dunn being on long-term injured reserve (LTIR) means for the Kraken
Seattle Kraken defenseman Vince Dunn sustained an injury during the team’s 6-4 victory against the Philadelphia Flyers on Oct. 17. Dunn has since been placed on long-term injured reserve (LTIR). Per the Sound Of Hockey Twitter intern, “Vince Dunn just went down the tunnel. He took an awkward fall on his last shift and looked uncomfortable on the bench.” That happened with about five minutes remaining in the first period.
Vince Dunn just went down the tunnel. He took an awkward fall on his last shift and looked uncomfortable on the bench. #SeaKraken
— Sound Of Hockey (@sound_hockey) October 18, 2024
While Dunn played the second period, he did not play a shift in the third. Head coach Dan Bylsma described the injury as a mid-body issue and initially said his removal from the game was “precautionary.” But Dunn was later placed on LTIR, retroactive to Oct. 17, meaning the earliest he can return is the Nov. 12 game against the Columbus Blue Jackets. As the team’s top-pairing defenseman and power-play quarterback, his absence will be felt on the blue line.
Following the Kraken’s 2-1 overtime win against the Calgary Flames on Oct. 19, in which Dunn did not play, he was seen walking stiffly in the background of a Sportsnet After Hours interview with Kraken captain Jordan Eberle. The full interview with Eberle is worth watching, though it’s unrelated to Dunn’s injury.
While I’m not a medical professional, it’s clear from the video that Dunn is experiencing discomfort while walking.
LTIR primer
Long-term injured reserve (LTIR) is an NHL mechanism that allows teams to temporarily exceed the salary cap. To be eligible for LTIR, the injured player must be expected to miss at least 10 games and 24 days. When a player is placed on LTIR, the team receives cap relief equal to the injured player’s annual average value (AAV) minus the amount of available cap space the team has.
For example, if a team has a player with a $5 million AAV and $1 million in free cap space, the team can exceed the salary cap by up to $4 million while the player is on LTIR.
It’s important to note that LTIR relief does not accrue and cannot be saved for future use. The LTIR pool is only available while the player remains on LTIR. Once the player is healthy, the team must be cap compliant again, and LTIR relief is no longer accessible.
How this affects the Kraken
In the Kraken’s case, Dunn’s $7.35 million AAV and the team’s minimal cap space of just $4,286 (yes, that’s four thousand, not four million) resulted in an available LTIR pool of $7,345,714. This amount is calculated by subtracting the Kraken’s free cap space from Dunn’s AAV.
The LTIR pool is money the Kraken can spend, but it’s important to remember that this pool is temporary. The Kraken can use the LTIR pool to recall players from the Coachella Valley Firebirds, which they did when they brought back defenseman Cale Fleury on Oct. 21. This pool provides roster flexibility by allowing the Kraken to add players up to the 23-player limit as needed. However, it is not intended for the Kraken to sign a $7 million player to replace Dunn. Before Dunn’s injury, the Kraken were limited to a 21-player roster due to their tight cap situation, and that limitation will continue once he returns.
The #SeaKraken have recalled defenseman Cale Fleury from Coachella Valley.
— Seattle Kraken PR (@SeattleKrakenPR) October 22, 2024
Additionally, the team has placed defenseman Vince Dunn on long-term injured reserve (retroactive to 10/17). pic.twitter.com/JLVUBs4bSz
It is interesting that the Kraken have yet to recall a forward from Coachella Valley, even though they have the LTIR pool available to use. There are a couple potential reasons for this:
- The Kraken may be waiting until their upcoming road trip to Montreal on Oct. 29, as they are currently in the midst of a five-game homestand.
- The next player called up from Coachella Valley might be a younger player whom the Kraken want to continue getting playing time in the AHL rather than having be a healthy scratch.
On a recent Sound Of Hockey Patreon Mailbag podcast episode, there was a question about who would be the next forward called up to the Kraken. Here were the selections:
- Ryan Winterton (Darren)
- Jacob Melanson (John)
- Ben Meyers (Curtis)
Other possibilities include John Hayden, Logan Morrison, and Lleyton Roed. If you would like to support Sound Of Hockey and gain access to special Patreon-only content, sign up here.
Cale carousel
Cale Fleury was with the Kraken for two days before being reassigned back to Coachella Valley on Oct. 23. He was recalled again on Thursday morning. We believe the purpose of sending Fleury down is to pause the clock on his NHL waiver eligibility. Players who have previously cleared waivers can play in up to 10 NHL games or remain on an NHL roster for 30 days before needing to clear waivers again. By sending Fleury down, the Kraken can extend this 30-day window. This move could indicate that Dunn’s recovery is expected to take longer than 30 days, or it could just be that the team is trying to get as much time with Fleury at the NHL level as possible before they have to put him on waivers again.
Defense without Dunn
During the 2023-24 season, Dunn missed 23 games due to injury. Seattle’s record during that span was a dismal 6-15-2. While this year’s team is better equipped to absorb his absence, Dunn’s absence remains significant.
Brandon Montour, a puck-moving defenseman, will run the top power-play unit and bring his offensive punch to the Kraken attack. Ryker Evans, who has made significant strides this season with five points (two goals, three assists) in the first seven games, will quarterback the second unit. Additionally, Josh Mahura has slotted to fill the hole on defense and provides stability and experience.
While Dunn’s injury is not ideal, the Kraken’s defense is in good hands with the additions of Montour, Evans, and Mahura. This combination of the three players can contribute offensively while maintaining a strong defensive presence.
Trade implications
While Dunn’s injury has created temporary salary cap flexibility due to the LTIR pool, it has also reduced the perceived urgency for the Kraken to make a trade to be able to roster more than 21 players. However, general manager Ron Francis has remained calm and not rushed a deal that would negatively impact the team.
Through the team’s early success and the temporary LTIR pool, Francis now has an extended window to assess possible trade options while maintaining the ability to call up players as needed. Any trade leverage other NHL GM’s perceived to have over the Kraken has been significantly reduced.
While the LTIR pool provides some breathing room, it’s important to note that it’s still a temporary solution. Once Dunn returns from injury, the Kraken will need to be cap compliant. Therefore, any trades made will need to ensure Dunn can be activated when fully recovered.
Sound Of Hockey’s own John Barr recently wrote about the cap, injuries, and potential trade candidates like Brandon Tanev and Yanni Gourde. Defenseman Will Borgen is another possible candidate for trade. These three players get pulled into trade rumors only because they are all in the last year of their contracts. Freeing up any of their AAV’s would give the Kraken the cap space needed to go up to the 23-player roster limit when Dunn returns.
Gourde and Tanev have been playing exceptionally well so far this season, which could increase their trade value. However, at the same time, they are part of the reason for the early success of the Kraken, so perhaps Seattle simply continues to operate with minimal flexibility even when Dunn comes back.
Dunn’s injury creates a challenge
While injuries are never a positive occurrence, Vince Dunn’s injury has presented the Kraken with a challenge, and they are making the best of it. The LTIR pool has provided temporary salary cap flexibility, allowing the team to maintain a competitive roster and explore potential trade opportunities with less urgency. This gives the Kraken the advantage of being more selective and patient in their decision-making.
If you have any questions, thoughts, or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments below, or reach out to me on the X @blaizg.
Kraken Notebook – A line shakeup and a spooky gathering
The Seattle Kraken went right back to work Wednesday at Kraken Community Iceplex, roughly 14 hours after their 3-2 loss to the Colorado Avalanche on Tuesday. But things looked quite different for Seattle at the skate, where coach Dan Bylsma had shuffled his forward lines and defense pairings. With this lineup jumble, Bylsma was seeking a bigger offensive punch for when the Kraken return to game action Thursday against the Winnipeg Jets, the NHL’s last remaining undefeated team.
“I think it’s still a search,” Bylsma said. “We don’t want to take away from how we played in the first period [Tuesday], but I think there are still things we can do better from both a team and individual standpoint.”
Here’s how the Kraken lines looked Wednesday:
Jared McCann // Matty Beniers // Jordan Eberle
Jaden Schwartz // Chandler Stephenson // Brandon Tanev
Eeli Tolvanen // Yanni Gourde // Oliver Bjorkstrand
Andre Burakovsky // Shane Wright // Tye Kartye
Meanwhile, the defense pairs were also tweaked, with Ryker Evans moving back up to play with Adam Larsson and Josh Mahura back down to skate with Will Borgen.
What I found interesting about the new Kraken forward lines is that they don’t clearly signal second, third, and fourth lines. McCann, Beniers, and Eberle are somewhat obviously the team’s top line, but you could argue that any of the other lines could be Seattle’s second or third.
Do Burakovsky and Wright belong on the fourth line? No, but that’s the makeup of this Kraken roster. Somebody has to play there, and Gourde, Tanev, and Kartye proved during the first seven games that even the fourth line can impact games and still play relatively big minutes.
“I don’t really decipher one through four,” Bylsma said. (Interestingly, this was something we heard Dave Hakstol say last year as well.) “If you’ve paid attention to that, you might question why I’m starting Gourde and Tanev and Karts for the start of the game. But they’ve been the line that—in the beginning of the game—was getting us good shifts, good offensive-zone shifts, playing with a lot of speed and pace. So I don’t really look at them as a fourth line.”
Although Gourde was technically still the fourth-line center on Tuesday, he played more than 17 minutes, while Tanev and Kartye had more typical fourth-line ice time at 12:51 and 9:59, respectively.
By the way, Bylsma has mentioned before that his line construction is based more on pairs of players rather than trios. He looks for two players that have good chemistry together, then rotates the third player. Based on the previous lineup and what Seattle appears to be deploying now, it’s safe to say that the “pairs” are McCann and Eberle, Schwartz and Stephenson, and Tolvanen and Bjorkstrand. None of the new “fourth” line of Burakovsky, Wright, and Kartye played together in the previous iteration of Kraken lines.
Line shuffling is nothing new
Line shuffling is a normal part of hockey. If a head coach doesn’t like an aspect of the team’s game, a new lineup at the next practice is never a surprise. Players are used to it as well.
“It’s typical throughout the season that you’re not going to stay with the same line every game,” Jaden Schwartz said. “We’ve had a couple tweaks so far already, and maybe we get a little bit more offense or different looks. Every situation is different, whether it’s matchups or trying to get a couple guys more looks on net or shake things up.”
The goal of this particular lineup change seems to be creating more offense and improving play across all Kraken lines. A set of tweaks like this can sometimes create an offensive spark, but as Schwartz notes, it doesn’t always go according to plan.
“It doesn’t always work out that way,” Schwartz said. “I mean, that’s your goal, right? But we have guys who can play in different spots—left wing, right wing, different situations. And some guys have played with each other more through the last few years, so they might have more chemistry.”
Getting the band(s) back together
Two of these Kraken lines look especially familiar, with Beniers rejoining McCann and Eberle, and Gourde reuniting with Tolvanen and Bjorkstrand. The Gourde line has seen periods of tremendous success together over the past couple of seasons.
“I think, two seasons ago, they were one of the best third lines in the game, if you want to label them one, two, three, four,” Bylsma said with a smirk, acknowledging he had labeled them as the third line moments after saying he didn’t think of lines that way. “I thought about playing the song for them today.”
To be clear, Bylsma was referencing the 1978 hit “Reunited” by Peaches and Herb.
Kraken players had a spooky gathering
Over the past couple of days, we’ve had some good laughs with the players discussing the team’s Halloween party, which Schwartz hosted at his house on Sunday night. Although there haven’t been too many publicly shared photos of the players’ costumes, we’ve heard that several had solid outfits, from Schwartz as Harry Potter and Tanev as Professor Snape to Josh Mahura as Alfalfa and the “young bucks” going as the Flint Tropics from Semi-Pro.
Jared McCann and his wife Val went as Jack Skellington and Sally at the #SeaKraken Halloween party. Jared said she did his makeup. Pretty good! 🎃 pic.twitter.com/Uv45BjcLOl
— Sound Of Hockey (@sound_hockey) October 21, 2024
“It was good to get everyone together,” Schwartz said. “We did it a little early because it was our only time to really do it, but it was fun to see everyone dressed up and having fun together. You don’t get too many chances throughout the year to have a big team gathering, so it’s always fun when we can get one.”
Of course, the highlight of the week was when Burakovsky addressed the media on Monday with some lingering face and neck tattoos. “I tried to get it off, but it’s pretty sticky there,” Burakovsky said.
Burakovsky said he tried to get the temporary tattoos off, but “They were a little sticky.” 😂
— Sound Of Hockey (@sound_hockey) October 21, 2024
His favorite costume was Brandon Tanev, who went as Professor Snape. “They have the same haircut.” #SeaKraken pic.twitter.com/9SVh1cylI9
Darren Brown
Darren Brown is the Chief Content Officer at soundofhockey.com and the host of the Sound Of Hockey Podcast. He is a member of the PHWA and is also usually SOH’s Twitter intern (but please pretend you don’t know that). Follow him @DarrenFunBrown and @sound_hockey or email darren@soundofhockey.com.
Everett Silvertips finally returning home after a nearly month-long stint on the road
As the elderly version of Rose in Titanic said, “It’s been 84 years…”
Well, not actually, but if it’s felt like a long time since the first-place Everett Silvertips have been home, that’s because it very much has. Nearly a month has passed since the Silvertips last touched the ice during a game at Angel of the Winds Arena, as they recently embarked on their seven-game road trip across central Canada, as well as a lone stop in Portland, their longest road trip of the season.
How did they do? Well to put it simply, they flourished.
The road trip
The cross-conference trip is usually the biggest obstacle of the year for WHL teams scheduling-wise, as it takes nearly two weeks to complete, spanning thousands of miles in bus travel, a different city night after night, and with (almost) no friendly fans, it’s no one but you, your teammates and coaches to guide the way through it.
Fortunately for some of the Silvertips’ families, the road trip meant getting to see their players in action; a total of six players on the current roster are from Saskatchewan and Manitoba. One of those players was defenseman Tarin Smith, who had a convoy of family and friends that gathered in Prince Albert to celebrate his homecoming.
As for the actual hockey played, the Silvertips were cruising to begin the trip. They won four straight games to start off, outscoring their opponents 17-8. The first two games of the trip in Prince Albert and Saskatoon proved they could win in tight games, with Everett winning both in overtime.
The Silvertips then went to Brandon and Regina, where they utterly dominated both games, 4-1 and 5-1 respectively, also receiving big-time performances from Landon DuPont, with three goals and two assists across both nights.
Off to an insanely hot start to his WHL career, DuPont has looked poised, comfortable, and has eased into the league cohesively. He has 13 points in 10 games played thus far and leads all WHL rookies, along with defensemen, in shots on goal with 43 and plus-minus at plus-12. Aside from a lone down game in Moose Jaw near the end of the road trip, he’s recorded a point in every game this season.
The lone loss of the trip came to the defending WHL champion Warriors, 4-2, but the Tips followed that up with a win over fellow Eastern Conference finalists in Swift Current, 6-3, to end the swing.
After making their trip across central Canada, the Silvertips took a week off before making a brief stop in Portland last Saturday night, a game that saw them win their first game in nearly three calendar years (1,068 days to be exact) at Veterans Memorial Coliseum, thanks to a 3-0 shutout victory over the Winterhawks. The Silvertips concluded the road trip at 6-1-0-0, completing a stretch where a lot of teams would even feel lucky to squeak out three or four wins.
Now, with all the adversarial travel and grind-it-out first month in the books, the Silvertips return home with not only the best winning percentage in the league at .800, but also the second-best among all teams in the CHL, just behind the Windsor Spitfires of the OHL at .850.
With this stretch of play in the rearview mirror, it was good enough for them to crack into the last two weeks of CHL Top 10’s.
Answering the bell
A lot of the question marks that were prevalent during this offseason for the Silvertips seem to have been answered. A main concern was how the offense would look with new coach Steve Hamilton at the helm. So far, so good. The team is currently third in the league in total goals for, with 45. Tyler MacKenzie and Carter Bear are leading the way as offensive playmakers, with 15 and 14 points respectively, and the team is getting contributions from all around.
Meanwhile, dealing with a whole new tandem in net can be tricky, but once goaltender Jesse Sanche got settled in, he’s been really tough to beat. With a 5-2-0-0 record thus far, he leads the league in goals against average at 1.93 and is second in the league in save percentage at .929.
From the scoring to the saves, there’s a lot to look forward to as this Silvertips team returns home—well, for now, that is.
Some strange parts about the schedule for the team are that they are currently embarking on a stretch where, between Sept. 29 and Nov. 20, a total of 52 days, they will play 12 road games and just five, often bunched together, home games. For a team that prides itself on its home-ice advantage, Everett doesn’t get a lot of opportunities to show that off in the early season.
There are definitely questions as to how the Silvertips will be able to sustain rhythm and flow through the long time away. But if this current stretch of winning is any indication, they’re more than equipped to survive the madness.
Silvertips make a few other announcements
Taking the rivalry up another notch, the Silvertips announced that they’ll be playing at Climate Pledge Arena for this year’s rendition of the ‘Battle of the Sound,’ hosted by the Seattle Thunderbirds on Dec. 27. These two teams met in the first ever event of this kind in February, 2022, when Everett hung four goals on the T-Birds in a 4-0 shutout.
This game will be highly anticipated, as Kraken prospects Julius Miettinen and Kaden Hammell could be on full display at their potential future home NHL barn. Not to mention DuPont getting the chance to play his first semi-pro game in an NHL arena.
In more upcoming events, this weekend the team will break out this year’s breast cancer awareness jerseys for ‘Pink the Rink’ night on Saturday against the Wenatchee Wild.
The team will wear the limited-edition hot pink sweaters, then will auction them off after the game with Providence Health and Services, with proceeds going towards breast cancer patients in the Everett/Snohomish County area.
The Silvertips are back home for the week, with a whole lot of Wenatchee coming up. Three of the next five come against the Wild, with matchups at Angel of the Winds Arena set for Wednesday and Saturday. They will also welcome in the Edmonton Oil Kings on Friday night.
Header photo taken by Brian Liesse.
Three Takeaways – Early missed opportunities cost Kraken against Avalanche
Tuesday’s Seattle Kraken loss to the Colorado Avalanche showcased what happens when early opportunities aren’t seized. Seattle dominated most of the opening frame, even getting an open net for what seemed like a sure Yanni Gourde goal just nine seconds into the game.
[PING!] Yanni Goirde hits the post 9 seconds (!!!) into the game. #SeaKraken pic.twitter.com/2iRdiIwwDA
— Sound Of Hockey (@sound_hockey) October 23, 2024
However, the Kraken failed to convert on that and their other chances in the opening frame, leaving them chasing by the time the first horn sounded.
“It was maybe our best first period of the year, the way we came out, the way we played,” Kraken coach Dan Bylsma said. “We had a number of chances to get a goal in that period, but it capped off by their late goal at the end of the first that forced it into a response game from us.”
Here are our Three Takeaways from a 3-2 Kraken loss to the Colorado Avalanche (that was really a 3-1 game, but Seattle got one with three seconds left to make it a one-goal difference in the end).
Takeaway #1: Missed opportunities early
You knew the Avalanche were going to score late in that first period, didn’t you? With 1:28 left, after Seattle had tilted the ice for most of the period, Joel Kiviranta cruised across the blue line, sniping one off the post and in behind Philipp Grubauer.
#SeaKraken largely dominated the first period, but Joel Kiviranta sniped one off the post with 1:28 left.
— Sound Of Hockey (@sound_hockey) October 23, 2024
SEA hit two posts and had a couple other near misses, but nothing doing.
1-0 #GoAvsGo, shots: 12-5 Kraken pic.twitter.com/NfXG1hNVLv
I’ll talk more about that one in Takeaway No. 3, but it certainly sapped the momentum that the Kraken had built en route to a 12-5 shots-on-goal advantage in the first 20 minutes.
The Kraken haven’t been strong in most first periods this season, typically improving in the second. That script flipped Tuesday, and after the Avalanche took a 1-0 lead to the dressing room, they came out and tilted things the other direction with a whopping 17-5 shots-on-goal advantage of their own in the middle frame.
Aside from Gourde hitting the post on a clear-cut 2-on-1 right after the game’s opening face-off, Tye Kartye also hit the post in the first, and several other players had near misses that made Justus Annunen’s stat sheet look better than it really was.
“It was a tough pill to swallow,” Jared McCann said. “I thought we played well in the beginning there. And we’ve just got to find a full 60 consistent minutes.”
Takeaway #2: Penalties proved costly
For as much as the Kraken had momentum in the first period, they somehow didn’t draw any power plays until the final two minutes of the game. Ryker Evans did get the Kraken within one on said power play, but not until there was just :03 left in the game.
On the other end, the Avalanche got three chances, with two of those coming in the second period. It wasn’t an outrageous number of infractions, but the penalties in the second helped turn the tide of the game.
“They have good players, and they can be a handful in the offensive zone, which their power play allowed them to be,” Bylsma said. “And [there were] a couple shifts there in the second that turned the momentum in their favor.”
Nathan MacKinnon scored a beauty of a power-play goal in the closing seconds of the frame, dangling across the tops of the circles and firing it against the grain behind Grubauer.
Yuck. 🤢
— Sound Of Hockey (@sound_hockey) October 23, 2024
MacKinnon made that look so easy, although Colton may have gotten a piece of it. Either way, PPG, 3-1 #GoAvsGo, as we head to the 3rd period. #SeaKraken got outshot 17-5 that frame. pic.twitter.com/hkwQaqHJq0
It was a backbreaker, too. McCann had tied it with his 100th goal as a Kraken at 11:57, but after Kiviranta got his second of the game at 14:56 to regain the lead, MacKinnon gave Colorado insurance with just :08 left in the second.
Going to the dressing room seconds after taking a two-goal deficit almost always spells defeat, and then—facing a big final-period mountain—Seattle came out for the third, and Jamie Oleksiak took another penalty just 29 seconds in and made things even harder.
Those penalties really put the nail in the Kraken’s coffin on this night.
Takeaway #3: Should we talk about the goaltending?
I’ve been a little gun-shy to talk about goaltending in Three Takeaways so far this season, because it’s often been hard to say definitively if the goalies have played well or not. If you look at the games holistically, I think it would generally be fair to say that the goalies have been mostly good, but not lights out, and on several occasions, there have been specific goals allowed that have tainted my view of the performances.
**Editor’s note: Plus, it’s a divisive topic, and every time I bring up the goalies, somebody yells at me in the comment section.
Here’s what I’ll say about this particular night, though, and then I’ll turn it over to Bylsma to give his thoughts.
There were parallels in this game to the one Seattle lost 2-0 to the Dallas Stars on Oct. 13. There was a goal in that game by Wyatt Johnston in which Grubauer got beaten cleanly off a rush on an unscreened shot that hit the far post and went in. The goal scored Tuesday by Kiviranta to make it 1-0 and sap the momentum out of the Kraken had a similar look to it.
In both games, I thought Grubauer bounced back and made some great saves as the game went on, but the context of getting beaten cleanly by those two shots impacted how I viewed the performances on the whole. The opening goal against the Avalanche on Tuesday and the goal by Johnston in Dallas were stingers for Grubauer to allow. Yet in both games, more scoring from Seattle would have also swept those under the rug, and on both of those goals, the Kraken could have been better defensively.
So, I find myself feeling oddly conflicted about this game as well.
Worth noting, against the Avs, Grubauer stopped 25 of 28 shots and had a positive night in terms of analytics, saving .24 goals above expected, according to MoneyPuck. I think that aligns with how I see the performance too. It was… mostly good, and he made some tough stops, as indicated by that positive number.
But if we could just erase that one goal against…
Ok, now here’s what Bylsma said about Grubauer’s outing on Tuesday: “I think we’ve probably given up the most chances tonight of any game that we’ve played to this point. A lot of those came on the power play, but he made the breakaway save, he made a couple east-west saves that were really big for us, gave us a chance. And when it was 2-1, two big saves to keep us in the match, keep us in it. And we need to come up with a little more run support for Grubi.”
I also asked Bylsma before the game about his goalie usage and what might have to happen for him to lean on one or the other, and here’s what he said to that: “I think we started this off believing that we have two good goaltenders that can get the job done for us. And I think they’ve each had some success in the start of the season. Joey had won two games early on, but Grubi’s numbers were better. And through those first four games, they each played two. I think Grubi was able to get the win in his last start and have the ‘W’ column success in that game.
“Joey probably played his best game against Nashville. I think really after the 5-on-3, really starting there was when Joey probably got to his best goaltending so far this year. And the number of games that are coming and the frequency of them kind of sets up for each guy getting an opportunity to be in the net. But their play will also dictate the kind of rotation we have going forward.”
Darren Brown
Darren Brown is the Chief Content Officer at soundofhockey.com and the host of the Sound Of Hockey Podcast. He is a member of the PHWA and is also usually SOH’s Twitter intern (but please pretend you don’t know that). Follow him @DarrenFunBrown and @sound_hockey or email darren@soundofhockey.com.
Monday Musings – A different Kraken team
Last Saturday, the Seattle Kraken came back from a two-goal deficit against the Minnesota Wild to win the game, something they never did last season. Fast forward to this past Saturday, when the Kraken won a Saturday night home game for the first time since April 8, 2023. It’s still early, just six games into the season, but this team continues to feel very different from last year.
The return of depth scoring?
One of the keys to the Kraken’s success in the 2022-23 season was their depth scoring, with a lineup that essentially featured three second lines and a third line. That season, the Kraken had 19 games where five unique players scored goals. In contrast, they managed only seven such games during the 2023-24 season. However, this season, two out of their first six games have already featured five or more unique goal scorers.
In 2022-23, the Kraken got significant production from the so-called fourth line of Morgan Geekie, Daniel Sprong, and Ryan Donato. While this season’s fourth line of Yanni Gourde, Brandon Tanev, and Tye Kartye hasn’t matched that production yet, they’ve been effective at driving zone time and generating shot attempts. They’ve also added two timely goals this season: Kartye scored a crucial third-period goal to tie the game against Minnesota, and Tanev netted a go-ahead goal against Nashville, just three minutes after the Predators erased a 2-0 lead.
It’s too soon to say if the Kraken will see the same kind of depth scoring they had in 2022-23, but through Sunday’s games, they are tied with Vegas and New Jersey for the most unique goal scorers.
Areas for improvement check-in
Last week, I highlighted three key areas where the Kraken needed to improve: penalty killing, the power play, and reducing unchallenged shots from the slot. Both the penalty kill and power play have shown moderate improvement. The penalty kill improved from 71.4 percent in the first week to 77.8 percent in the second week. The power play saw a slight uptick, moving from 14.3 percent to 15.4 percent. Though still ranked 25th in the league in power play percentage, I’m encouraged by the increased zone possession and the variety of options we’re seeing.
Here’s a breakdown of the percentage of power play time allocated to players, along with some of the individual stats they’ve generated while on the man advantage.
It’s fascinating to see that Montour doesn’t have a registered shot on goal during the power play this season, despite leading the team with 25 total shots on net through the first six games. I guess if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it—keep doing what you’re doing, Monty!
Another area of opportunity I mentioned last week was reducing shots against from the slot. Based on the eye test, it feels like those chances have been more limited since the Minnesota game, where the issue was particularly noticeable. Below is a visual comparison of goals against the Kraken in Week 1 versus Week 2.
There’s probably a better way to measure this, but it’s clear that the number of goals coming from the slot has decreased over the last three games, which confirms what I’ve been seeing. On the flip side, the goals Seattle has conceded are now coming from less dangerous areas, which might point to a different issue. We’ll keep an eye on this moving forward.
Kraken face-offs
Ah, face-offs—one of my favorite topics! In last week’s Monday Musings, I mentioned that the Kraken had only won 31 percent of their face-offs on the power play. When the opposing team gains possession, it allows them to clear the puck and limit the Kraken’s scoring chances while the team regroups and attempts to re-enter the zone. This was likely a major factor hindering the power play during the first three games of the season.
I’m happy to report that the Kraken have won 75 percent of their power-play face-offs over the last three games.
Chandler Stephenson leads the team with a 53.6 percent face-off win rate in all situations, and an impressive 81.3 percent on the power play. This is one of the many underrated contributions Stephenson brings to the team. He played a key role in the Kraken’s overtime winner against the Flames on Saturday. He won the opening face-off, and although the Kraken briefly lost possession, the Flames never really established control. Jordan Eberle eventually scored the game-winner on that very first shift. Bylsma called out in his post-game presser that getting Stephenson out first in overtime is part of his strategy, because gaining possession first is critical.
Other Musings
- Public Service Announcement: The Kraken’s home game Tuesday against the Colorado Avalanche is at 5:30 p.m. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve told about this time change, and they had no idea—despite having tickets! The game is on ESPN that night, which explains the earlier start time.
- Saturday’s home win against the Flames was the Kraken’s first victory over Calgary at Climate Pledge Arena in franchise history. Now, there are only two teams the Kraken have yet to beat at home: Toronto and Tampa Bay (and Utah, if you count them, although Seattle did defeat Arizona at home).
- We still need Matty Beniers and Andre Burakovsky to get going. Burakovsky looks like he’s close, but Matty has seemed a bit off at times and isn’t generating the shots I’d expect from him. He missed an open net Saturday, which would have been a pretty goal. It’s early, so I’m not worried yet.
- Saturday night’s win against the Flames was the Kraken’s second win of the season in a game where they never held the lead. Last season, they only managed that feat once. So far, they’ve only led for 25 percent of their total game time this season.
- Vince Dunn missed his second game of the season on Saturday night. I’m really hoping he draws back in this week as some of the stronger teams in the league visit Seattle.
- It feels like ages ago, but the Nashville game was incredible—seven different goal scorers!
- We’ve got an official name change: Kraken prospect goaltender Niklas Kokko is now going by Nikke Kokko in North America. Nikke earned his first North American professional win on Friday night.
Player performances
Clarke Caswell (SC/SEA) – The Seattle Kraken’s fifth-round pick from the 2024 NHL Draft recorded six points over two games this weekend for the Swift Current Broncos.
Cale Fleury (CVF) – One of the original expansion selections for the Seattle Kraken, Fleury scored a hat trick in the Coachella Valley Firebirds’ 6-5 win over the San Diego Gulls on Saturday night.
Jordan Eberle (SEA) – The newly appointed captain is off to the best start of his career, with five goals in the Kraken’s first six games of the season, including the game-winning goal in overtime on Saturday night.
Goal of the week
What I really liked about this goal was that Yanni was at the tail end of his shift and was heading to the bench for a change, but he spotted the opportunity and stayed on the ice to set up the first pass to Jared McCann. Those are the little things I love seeing in this game.
Chart of the Week
It’s early, but the Kraken are off to their best start in franchise history.
The 2022-23 Kraken team really hit their stride from games nine to 23 but obviously this good start is better than the alternative.
What’s Good?
I am a sucker for things like this:
The week ahead
This will likely be the toughest stretch of games so far this season, with Winnipeg, Carolina, and Colorado coming to town. I was hoping for five points last week, and the team ended up with six, so it feels like we’re playing with a bit of house money right now. This week, the minimum goal should be three points, with four being the target. Obviously, we’re all rooting for more, but keeping pace is perfectly fine at this point in the season. I know Colorado is having a rough start, but I wouldn’t count out any team that has Cale Makar, Nathan MacKinnon, and Mikko Rantanen.
How about you? How are we all feeling about the team right now?
Three Takeaways – Eberle’s OT winner gives Kraken 2-1 win over undefeated Flames
Who knew a boring, low-event game could be so exciting? That’s the beauty of hockey, though. Even in a game where neither team surpassed 23 shots on goal, the tension in the building was palpable as the game went down to the wire. In the end, it was the Seattle Kraken celebrating victoriously after Jordan Eberle came through in the clutch, firing home the game-winner to blow the roof off Climate Pledge Arena.
Heck, even goalie Joey Daccord was over-the-moon excited—so much so that when he tried to jump on the pile, he missed and went tumbling to the ice in a hilarious heap.
“I got the zoomies,” Daccord joked after the game.
I can’t stop watching this. It gets better and better with every angle I see.
— Sound Of Hockey (@sound_hockey) October 20, 2024
😂 😂 😂 #SeaKraken pic.twitter.com/ere4Qbpwk6
Here are our Three Takeaways from a thrilling 2-1 Kraken overtime win over the previously undefeated Calgary Flames.
Takeaway #1: Jordan Eberle is on fire
Things have been going well for Eberle since he was named captain of the team. Eberle’s OT game-winner was his third as a Kraken, the most in team history. It was also his fifth tally of the season, putting him in fourth place in the entire NHL for goals.
“I’m getting opportunities, and they’re going in,” Eberle said, deadpan. “I know, obviously, how it works. You’re going to have hot streaks, and you’ll have slow streaks. But it’s been good to see the puck go in early. It always gives you some confidence.”
The goal itself was a thing of beauty. The Kraken had won the center-ice face-off to start the overtime period and maintained control for the better part of a minute. Rasmus Andersson made a good defensive play to pinch off Brandon Montour behind the net and take the puck away.
It looked like the Flames were heading on the offensive, but Eberle tracked back and picked Nazem Kadri’s pocket. At that point, the Flames were in complete disarray, with all three players headed north and scrambling to get back on defense. Brandon Montour got a great look but was stopped by Dan Vladar, recovered his own rebound, and then had the presence of mind not to force it back into Vladar. Instead, he found Eberle streaking down the slot, and Eberle sniped it home.
“Great play [by Montour],” Eberle said. “He just kind of fed it, put it on a tee for me, and I didn’t really have to do too much.”
Coach Dan Bylsma was gushing about his captain after the game. “I don’t even know how old he is right now, but he just looks like a young Jordan Eberle,” Bylsma said (Eberle is 34, by the way). “He’s skating well, he’s competing well, he’s got a sneaky skill to his game, a sneaky compete to his game… With him being named captain six games ago, I think it’s awesome to see him also lead the way on the scoresheet.”
Eberle did not get off to this kind of start last season. As we later learned, he broke his hand in a fight with Colorado’s Logan O’Connor in the fourth game of the season and played through it, so that surely hampered him. But do you know when Eberle scored his fifth goal of the season in 2023-24?
JANUARY 13TH!
It took Eberle 38 games to score five goals last season. This season, it took him just six.
Takeaway #2: Another new way to win
The Flames got off to a great start this season, and with the way they were rolling, this was always going to be a tough matchup for Seattle. Calgary prides itself on rolling four effective lines, using similar tactics to what the Kraken deploy in terms of personnel.
The recipe was there for a tight-checking, close game, and that’s exactly what we got.
“It’s a bit of a slog of a game, and you have to be determined to stay with it and not give them anything,” Bylsma said. “Continue to be determined to get back the other way. That’s what this game presented, and that’s what Calgary presents.”
I wrote about this after the win Thursday over Philadelphia, but the Kraken keep finding new ways to win, quite different from last season when they seemed to constantly find new ways to lose.
“That’s what we’re trying to develop,” Bylsma said. “Games come in a lot of different ways. This game was by far the lowest-event game that we’ve played at this point in time.”
Takeaway #3: Kraken convert on critical 5-on-3
After Joey Daccord fumbled a puck on Calgary’s power play late in the first period, and it wound up in the back of Seattle’s net a couple of touches later, the Kraken needed to find a way to level the score. They kept getting power play chances in the second, and when Jonathan Huberdeau slashed Matty Beniers to give the Kraken 47 seconds of 5-on-3 time, it was easy to sense that a turning point was coming in the game, one way or another.
The Kraken called timeout, and assistant coach Jess Campbell drew up a play on her whiteboard. It took a while for the Kraken to break through, but with the first of the two penalties ticking down, Chandler Stephenson and Jared McCann executed a give-and-go across the tops of the circles. As Jaden Schwartz set a screen in front of Vladar, Stephenson leaned into a one-timer and ripped it past the Calgary netminder.
THE CHAN CHAN MAN! 🚨
— Sound Of Hockey (@sound_hockey) October 20, 2024
On the 5-on-3, McCann tees it up, and Schwartz provides the screen for Stephenson’s first goal as a #SeaKraken.
1-1 pic.twitter.com/lxZaIe3cnD
“That was kind of what we wanted to open up, Ebs to be able to find Canner or myself,” Stephenson said. “That’s what I think you want to try to do on a 5-on-3—shoot the puck. It seems like any team that shoots it, it usually goes in, rather than teams that try to make the perfect play.”
One has to imagine that if Seattle failed to score on that 5-on-3, the game might have gone the other way.
“5-on-3’s always feel like a pivotal point,” Bylsma said. “What’s the success rate historically on a 5-on-3? It’s not 100 percent. It’s not close to 100 percent, but it feels like you should score. And I think when you don’t, it’s a big drawback. But we got the 5-on-3, we were able to find a goal there, and it’s Chandler’s first one. I think he’s done a lot of good things the last couple games for our team, but getting him on the scoresheet is, I think, really important for our group.”
Darren Brown
Darren Brown is the Chief Content Officer at soundofhockey.com and the host of the Sound Of Hockey Podcast. He is a member of the PHWA and is also usually SOH’s Twitter intern (but please pretend you don’t know that). Follow him @DarrenFunBrown and @sound_hockey or email darren@soundofhockey.com.
Down on the Farm: a weekly Kraken prospects update
Welcome to Down on the Farm (written edition). Your favorite segment on The Sound Of Hockey Podcast comes to the website with a weekly check-in on all Seattle Kraken prospects. The goal is to delve deeper than we can on the podcast, featuring a prospect each week, and to broaden our coverage with a statistical update on every Kraken-affiliated player below the NHL level.
Typically, these updates will include the following data: (1) year-to-date performance, (2) the player’s production in the last week, (3) the player’s Data Score (for rough cross-league comparisons), and (4) the player’s schedule for the week ahead.
Starting next week, I’ll also plan to answer one Kraken prospect question each week, if you have them. So, send your questions in the comments of a previous week’s article, on X (formerly known as Twitter) @deepseahockey or @sound_hockey, or in the Sound Of Hockey Discord.
Without further ado, let’s go down on the farm…
Featured Kraken prospect: Andrei Loshko
Niagara IceDogs (OHL) | 7 games played | 5 goals | 8 assists | 1.86 PPG | 55.5 Data Score
The Kraken drafted the Belarusian-born Andrei Loshko in the fourth round of the 2023 NHL Draft out of the QMJHL. He was traded within that league halfway through last season. This year he finds himself with yet another new junior club, the Niagara IceDogs; and this time he’s in an entirely new league too—the OHL. Loshko was a top-of-the-lineup player in the QMJHL, but he got caught up in a numbers game, as teams can only have a fixed number of European-born “import” players and players 20 years old or older. Fitting into both categories, Loshko was squeezed out.
At Kraken rookie camp, Loshko’s appeal as a prospect was apparent. He won contested puck situations and board battles, and consistently made plays to advance the puck or set up his teammates with simple, composed actions amidst surrounding chaos. His frame and speed combination appeared adequate for the professional level too. Overall, Loshko had the look of an effective role player with a realistic pro trajectory.
Following camp, Loshko returned to the IceDogs and has been on a scoring tear. He has five goals and eight assists in seven games played, for a 1.86 points-per-game (PPG) clip. He has scored in six of the seven games he has played in and is currently sixth in the OHL in scoring, tied with none other than Carson Rehkopf. Beyond the scoring, he has shown a knack for give-and-go plays in transition and in the offensive zone—a skill players often can carry into the pro game. This is encouraging. If he can maintain his career-best scoring pace, it will further bolster his profile.
Loshko is currently unsigned. As a 2023 draft pick out of the CHL, the Kraken have until the end of this season—June 1, 2025, to be exact—to sign Loshko to an NHL contract, or the team will lose his exclusive rights. His contract status will be one to watch as the season progresses.
Let’s Get Quizzical
The Kraken have drafted only one player out of the U.S. National Team Development Program. Whomst? Read on for the answer. (Hint: Kraken draft pick Matty Beniers played for the U.S. National Team Development Program but was drafted from the University of Michigan. So it’s not him.)
Notes on three more Kraken prospects
Berkly Catton
Spokane Chiefs (WHL) | 9 games played | 3 goals | 12 assists | 1.67 PPG | 55.0 Data Score
That one could look at Catton’s 1.67 PPG across nine Spokane Chiefs contests and shrug their shoulders is an indication of Catton’s established greatness in the junior ranks. After all, he averaged 1.7 PPG last season. That said, the scoring came with increasing frequency over the last week, as he tallied two goals and seven assists in four games, achieving a 2.25 PPG clip. He’s your Sound Of Hockey Prospect of the Week.
Nathan Villeneuve
Sudbury Wolves (OHL) | 2 games played | 0 goals | 1 assist | 0.5 PPG | 19.3 Data Score
After Villeneuve’s impressive preseason stint with the Kraken, he returned to his junior team, the Sudbury Wolves, as a still-suspended player. His 15-game ban related to a violation of the OHL’s social media policy and carried over from last year. He got back into game action this week, though, recording an assist in two games. More notably, he continued to agitate and mix things up physically, tallying a fighting major in just his second game back.
Justin Janicke
Univ. of Notre Dame (NCAA) | 2 games played | 1 goal | 3 assists | 2 PPG | 56.9 Data Score
An unsigned 2021 seventh-round draft pick, Janicke is likely one of the more under-the-radar Kraken prospects. Drafted out of the U.S. National Team Development Program—there’s your trivia answer—he has played the last four seasons for the University of Notre Dame. While his production has slowly ticked up over the years, he has never topped more than half a point per game in college, playing more of a forechecking role. Now, as a senior, he’s part of the Fighting Irish leadership group and has four points in Notre Dame’s first two contests. Janicke may not keep up this pace—as noted by Kraken Stats on X, his one goal was a strange one—nor ultimately get signed by the Kraken, but he was a standout in his first weekend of NCAA play and deserves to be highlighted.
Kraken prospect data
Our week-in-review tracking will begin next week, but, in addition to the note on Catton above, I’ll call out Alexis Bernier, who had two assists yesterday (Thursday) for Baie-Comeau Drakkar in a game against the Blainville-Boisbriand Armada. He was a +4 in on-ice goal differential over the last three games.
As mentioned above, Loshko and Rehkopf are in the top 10 in scoring in the OHL. Catton is in the top 10 overall in the WHL, with both Caden Price and Tyson Jugnauth in the top 5 in the WHL among defensemen—trailing only Tarin Smith and exceptional-status player Landon Dupont, both of the Everett Silvertips.
As a whole, Seattle’s goalie prospects haven’t gotten off to the strongest start, with no player’s save percentage currently above .900. That said, it is notable and encouraging that Semyon Vyazovoy has drawn six starts already in the KHL (Russia’s highest pro league), and Kim Saarinen, at just 18 years old, has five starts in Liiga (Finland’s highest pro league). Saarinen’s total is the second most among 18-year-olds in Liiga. Top prospect Niklas Kokko has yet to debut with the Coachella Valley Firebirds, with veteran Ales Stezka starting the team’s first two games.
Previewing the week ahead
The Kansas City Mavericks’ regular season opener is tonight (Friday) at 5:05 pm PT. You can catch that game on FloHockey. With the Mavericks joining the fray this week, only Ben MacDonald’s Harvard Crimson have yet to begin the 2024-25 hockey season. The Ivy League always starts later.
Oscar Fisker Mølgaard is still out with an injury he suffered in HV71’s regular season opener. He’s likely still a few weeks from returning.
The Firebirds have only one game in the next seven days, as their AHL schedule continues to be light in the early going. That game is tonight at 7:00 pm PT at San Diego. Again, you can catch it on FloHockey.
As is typical, the junior players have a busy slate of weekend games coming up. The Everett Silvertips and prospects Julius Miettinen and Kaden Hammell will take on the Portland Winterhawks and Tyson Jugnauth in Portland on Saturday. Prospect Caden Price will be back in Washington State over the weekend as Kelowna takes on Wenatchee on Friday and Tri-City on Saturday. You can catch those games, and all CHL games, on CHL TV.
Here are the games for the week ahead—from today through next Thursday:
* * *
Reminder to send us your prospect questions, and we’ll plan to feature them in a future post. Also, if you have ideas for additional information you’d like to see or how to deliver it, let me know. I have a few improvements I’m going to roll out over the next few weeks, but I’d like to tailor this to what you all want to see.
Curtis Isacke
Curtis is a Sound Of Hockey contributor and member of the Kraken press corps. Curtis is an attorney by day, and he has read the NHL collective bargaining agreement and bylaws so you don’t have to. He can be found analyzing the Kraken, NHL Draft, and other hockey topics on Twitter and Bluesky @deepseahockey.
Three Takeaways – Kraken fend off late Flyers rally for 6-4 win
Never a doubt! The Seattle Kraken rode a four-goal second period and cruised to an easy win and barely held on when the Philadelphia Flyers rallied back and threatened to overcome a three-goal deficit in the third period. But when things started to go sideways, Oliver Bjorkstrand scored a timely insurance goal at 14:52 of the third period to make it 6-4 and put things back on the rails.
“It’s a 60-minute game. It’s always about the next play,” Kraken coach Dan Bylsma said. “Things are going to happen, and bumps are going to happen, and you’ve just got to keep focused on the next play.”
Seattle did that, and although there were some hairy moments coming down the stretch, the Kraken deserved the win and ultimately got it, 6-4, over the Philadelphia Flyers on Thursday. Here are our Three Takeaways.
Takeaway #1: Second-period team?
The Kraken went off in the second period Thursday, scoring four unanswered goals to turn a 2-1 deficit into a 5-2 lead in just 20 minutes. Jared McCann got things started with a power-play goal, his third goal of the season and first PPG, ripping it through Ivan Fedotov’s gigantic wickets from his office at the top of the left circle.
“[Fedotov] is a monster,” McCann said. “You don’t see much mesh with that guy in net, so I feel like sometimes you’ve just got to get it off as quickly as you can, and I was able to find one tonight.”
Then Eeli Tolvanen cleaned up an Andre Burakovsky rebound, Jordan Eberle scored an easy tap-in off a nice feed from McCann, and Shane Wright got his first of the season, scoring just eight seconds after Eberle.
“[Eberle’s] been chirping me a lot, because apparently I don’t pass to him enough,” McCann joked. “But, yeah, he likes to drive the net, so I just tried to pull up there and find him.”
This is a pattern so far this season. The Kraken have had slow starts, and I think it’s fair to call the first period a “slow start” again on Thursday. The Kraken got outshot 11-9, had just 33 percent of the shot quality, and also didn’t get particularly great goaltending to bail them out in that opening frame. (I didn’t like either goal against from Grubauer in the first period, but like in the Dallas game, he ended up making some huge saves later on… He did end the night with -1.42 goals saved above expected, though.)
But the Kraken do also tend to tilt the ice in their favor in the second period, as we’ve seen in each of their wins (and one could argue they turned things around against Dallas, although they didn’t get that much going offensively that night).
“I don’t think any of us liked how the first had gone,” Bylsma said. “Yeah, they scored at the end of the period to go up 2-1, but I thought that was a huge kind of wake-up call to get us back in the game.
“That was probably our best second period of the year so far, playing fast, playing north, a great couple plays on the quick up… A lot of speed, a lot of energy back the other way, and when you do that, it allows players to play with skill.”
Takeaway #2: Lots of goal scorers (again)
For the second game in a row, the Kraken netted multiple goals from different players, continuing their well-rounded offense, and again, I was reminded of how the team won games two seasons ago. In Nashville on Tuesday, seven different players scored, and Thursday against Philadelphia, six different players tickled the twine.
It’s up and down the lineup, too, with veteran scorers like McCann, Eberle, and Bjorkstrand leading the way, but the secondary and tertiary scorers like Eeli Tolvanen, Shane Wright, and Montour also chipped in on this night.
“I think when you have everybody going like we did tonight, the last couple nights here have been good, and we’ve just got to be consistent with it,” McCann said. “We know we’re not going to score six, seven goals every game, but I think we could do a little better job at just focusing on keeping the puck in the other end.”
By the way, Ryker Evans only found the scoresheet with one assist, but it’s worth noting that he was plus-5 on the night.
Takeaway #3: Winning in different ways
The Kraken now have three wins on the season, which they didn’t accomplish until Oct. 30 last season, in what was their 10th game of the campaign (so, it took them half as many games to earn their third victory this season).
Each of the three has been very different, with the first being a come-from-behind shootout win in Minnesota, the second being a fairly convincing top-to-bottom win over Nashville, and this one being a classic, run of the mill, fall behind but then jump out to a big lead but then almost fumble it away win.
But the point is that the team is showing in the early stages of the season that it can win regardless of how the game is playing out.
“It’s critical,” Bylsma said. “Building a good team, a winning team, you’ve got to win games in different ways. They’re not always going to go to script, they’re not always going to go positive the whole way along. You’ve got to dig in, you’ve got to paddle, you’ve got to compete the whole 60 minutes to get a win.
“And sometimes, that means you’re coming back in a game, sometimes that means you’ve got to learn to play with a lead and play with a 5-2 lead going into the third period.”
This is another encouraging sign for this club, because if you think back to last season, there were so many times when the Kraken would get down in a game, and it just felt like there was no chance they’d come back. Or, they’d get a lead and give up a couple painful goals, and all of a sudden you knew they were going to fritter it away.
The more they experience these ups and downs and still come away with two points, the more comfortable they will be in these different scenarios as the season wears on.
“I think it’s one of those things where you’ve just got to keep battling no matter what the score is,” Brandon Montour said. “A good thing that we had in the past in Florida, especially, was it didn’t matter what the score was, we finished right to the end. And you bring that mentality wherever you are. I like how the guys have come together here.”
Darren Brown
Darren Brown is the Chief Content Officer at soundofhockey.com and the host of the Sound Of Hockey Podcast. He is a member of the PHWA and is also usually SOH’s Twitter intern (but please pretend you don’t know that). Follow him @DarrenFunBrown and @sound_hockey or email darren@soundofhockey.com.
The legend of Kraken head coach Dan Bylsma continues to grow in Seattle
From well before Dan Bylsma was promoted from the Coachella Valley Firebirds of the American Hockey League to head coach of the Seattle Kraken, it was publicly known that he has a comedic side. This became common knowledge across the hockey world during his time as coach of the Pittsburgh Penguins, which coincided with the filming of HBO’s hit series, 24/7 Penguins/Capitals: Road to the NHL Winter Classic.
In that series, some of Bylsma’s mood-lightening antics were revealed. Penguins players who lost contests in practice were “punished” by doing things like running to the top of what was then called Heinz Field in full hockey gear, which Jordan Staal did in one of the episodes. (Bylsma later lamented to us in his first interview with the Sound Of Hockey Podcast that Staal cheated at his punishment by hitching a ride on a golf cart to the other side of the Pittsburgh Steelers stadium.)
In another segment of the 24/7 series, filmed during the first practice of December when players get to shave their “Movember” mustaches, Bylsma held a shootout competition to determine who would be “Mustache Boy.” The loser, defenseman Paul Martin, had to keep his mustache for a second month.
During the aforementioned SOH Podcast interview, recorded with Bylsma in October 2022, Bylsma shared one of his favorite “punishment” stories from back in his Pittsburgh days. In this one, Bylsma included himself as a potential loser of the contest. He said defenseman Jay McKee had a “Semi-rig truck with a pickup truck bed on the back. It was a special-looking machine. We did a shootout to wash his truck, and I lost that one.”
And so, there was Penguins coach Dan Bylsma, in the bowels of Mellon Arena, scrubbing down McKee’s oversized vehicle.
As Bylsma’s career progressed, the antics evolved, but they certainly didn’t stop. On another more recent episode of the SOH Podcast, we asked Kraken goalie Joey Daccord about his favorite memory of playing for Bylsma in the AHL. He recalled a story from his days playing for the Charlotte Checkers in Seattle’s inaugural season, when the Firebirds were not yet in existence, and Bylsma was serving as assistant coach for the temporary AHL affiliate of the Kraken. The Checkers were on the road to face the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, where Bylsma had also coached before getting promoted to the Penguins in 2009.
“[We were staying at] like a little Holiday Inn in the middle of nowhere, and I think there was a wedding in the hotel,” Daccord said. “We were in Wilkes-Barre, where he coached, and he obviously coached and won the Cup in Pittsburgh, so not far away. And he was doing video on his laptop, cutting clips of the game from the night before in the lobby of the hotel with a hockey helmet on. No cage, just a hockey helmet on.
“So this older couple goes up to him and is like, ‘Oh, my God! Dan Bylsma! We’re huge fans, we’re big Pens fans, can we have a picture?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, sure, no problem!’ He stands up, takes the picture with the hockey helmet on.”
Daccord’s story made it clear that the legend of Bylsma has already grown in Seattle, even within the relatively young Kraken organization. At this point, every player that spent time in Coachella Valley has a favorite “Disco Dan” moment. But when Sound Of Hockey asked Bylsma what the goofiest thing he’s done to motivate his team was, he said, “That’s not for you to hear.”
Thankfully, his players were a bit more forthcoming.
Building trust
When defenseman Ryker Evans finished his 20-year-old season with the Regina Pats of the WHL, he signed his entry-level contract with the Kraken and reported to Charlotte to begin his pro hockey career. It didn’t take him long to learn that Bylsma’s approach to coaching was a bit different from what he had encountered previously.
“When I first went to Charlotte, [it was] my first week there,” Evans recalled. “[Bylsma] comes up to me, and he’s like, ‘I want to trust you.’ So he stood in front of the net while I was shooting pucks.”
Standing in front of the net while a player practices shooting is not the most absurd thing. Players do that for one another all the time to practice tipping shots and screening the goalie. But they wear padding from head to toe. Bylsma was not wearing any padding at the time.
“The goalie’s playing net, and he’s standing in front of the net. Just standing there… I thought that was crazy. [I was] just a guy coming out of junior. I’ve never seen a coach do that,” Evans said with a laugh.
This tracks with what we’ve seen from Bylsma in training camp and practices. He loves sliding around on the ice in his tracksuit, acting like a defenseman trying to break up shots and passes, and making players chip pucks over him during drills. When we asked Bylsma in training camp about his willingness to put his body in harm’s way, he joked that the puck is “just rubber.”
Thankfully, Evans didn’t hit his new coach with any shots in Charlotte, but he admitted he may not have been firing the pucks with 100 percent effort. “I probably wasn’t shooting that hard. It was scary. It was really scary.”
Pre-game escapades
A consistent theme we picked up from chatting with players who spent time in Coachella Valley under Bylsma is that his antics can really ratchet up just before the players hit the ice for a game. Those moments are some of the tensest in sports, and Bylsma uses schtick to lighten the mood.
Former Firebirds like Tye Kartye and Shane Wright have seen Bylsma dig deep into his bag of tricks, especially when announcing the starting lineup.
“One that I liked was when… I think it was in the playoffs in Coachella, or maybe it was the end of the regular season,” Kartye said. “But he came in with the Firebird head on. Like, the mascot.”
Yes, we are talking about the actual head of Fuego, the Firebirds’ mascot. Dan Bylsma entered the dressing room before a game wearing the mascot’s head.
But the best part?
“He was just talking normal,” Kartye said. “And everyone was obviously a little thrown off by that. So that, I enjoyed. That one was pretty funny.”
Kartye said Bylsma—from inside Fuego’s head—announced the starting lineup and told the team what play to run off the opening face-off, but that particular message may not have landed. “I don’t know if anyone got the play because everyone was laughing at the hat.”
Wright confirmed that this event did happen as Kartye remembered it, but it wasn’t the only outlandish bit Bylsma pulled during his time in Coachella.
“He did do that,” Wright said, chuckling. “He would also draw stuff on his face. He would have the Firebirds logo drawn on his face pre-game, and then just be deadpan. Like, no emotion, no reaction, just [acting] like nothing was wrong.
“We’re all cracking up, trying not to laugh while he’s talking to us, but he just does those things to keep it light, keep the guys loose before the game, and I love it. I love when he does that.”
Even some veteran Kraken players who have never played full-time for Bylsma before have already seen Bylsma’s pre-game magic. Jared McCann saw him in action at Seattle’s first-ever preseason game against the Vancouver Canucks in Spokane. For context, this was when Bylsma was helping to run training camp with the Kraken, but his role for that season was as an assistant coach with the Charlotte Checkers, the temporary AHL affiliate. He wasn’t even the AHL head coach yet.
“He came into the room with some kind of marker on his face. And I was just like, ‘Oh, Dan, you’ve got some stuff on your face,’” McCann remembered. “And I didn’t know if he realized, but I didn’t realize myself that he was kind of playing a joke. And he goes over—he’s fully… suit on, tie, everything—and he dunks his head in the cold tub and just starts yelling.”
There is a method to the madness (and yes, it is madness). Bylsma knows these are nerve-racking moments. He wants his players to feel as comfortable as possible when the puck drops, so he digs into his magic hat to ease the stress of the moment.
“I think that’s exactly why he does it,” Wright said. “Just to keep it light, keep it loose, keep the guys relaxed, and to remind us to have a little fun out there as well.”
McCann added: “He’s a laid-back guy, but when he has to be serious, you can tell. He’s got that good dynamic of both. He’s a guy you can go talk to, but he also expects a lot out of his team. There’s not going to be any favoritism on this team, so it’s good.”
Hockey isn’t brain surgery
Sometimes losses in the NHL can feel devastating. As we saw last season, the mood around a struggling team can get tense and downtrodden, because in the top hockey league in the world, winning really is everything. But Bylsma is one of those coaches who can recognize that, although it is a results-based business, it’s still a game. It’s still meant to be played with an element of fun.
“I think anything you do in life, and anything you want to do in life, you should do it with some energy and passion and joy, and not head down, brow beating,” Bylsma said.
The veteran coach harkened back to his youth and playing days, when he spent 11 summers doing manual labor.
“I have a vision of my landscaping days when I had to shovel rocks and dig a ditch and shovel more rocks. That’s hard work to me,” Bylsma said. “Playing hockey and getting better at it and enjoying it and competing at it is an enjoyable thing. And I think it always should be done that way. It should be with a smile, but also with a sneer at times.”
It was a heartfelt answer to our question about his approach to mixing humor and seriousness to motivate his players. But with any serious answer, Bylsma always likes to mix in some levity.
“If you need any [landscaping] work around your house, give me a call.”
Darren Brown
Darren Brown is the Chief Content Officer at soundofhockey.com and the host of the Sound Of Hockey Podcast. He is a member of the PHWA and is also usually SOH’s Twitter intern (but please pretend you don’t know that). Follow him @DarrenFunBrown and @sound_hockey or email darren@soundofhockey.com.
