Climate Pledge Arena home of the Seattle Kraken.
The Seattle Kraken are halfway through their inaugural season. At the 41 game mark, Seattle has a record of 13-24-4, good for 30 points. That puts them last in the Pacific Division, and they have the fourth-lowest point total in the league. Now is a good time to review what’s happened so far and look forward to what’s ahead. We will do it roundtable style.
Pacific Northwest Sports contributors Jonathan West and Ciara Durant join me for this discussion. We also have a special guest RJ Eskanos.
RJ joins us as the Content & Media Manager for Emerald City Hockey, independently covering the Seattle Kraken. He founded ECH with Dylan Travers in the summer of 2020 with the goal of providing high-quality, interactive coverage of the team through its website, social media, YouTube channel, and podcast. RJ is a local member of the Seattle Kraken media.
It’s their goaltending or lack thereof. I was never sold on Chris Driedger, but I expected better from Philipp Grubauer. The surprise isn’t that he’s played poorly. It happens. Every goalie (except Ken Dryden) goes through a rough stretch during their career.
I’m surprised at how abysmal he’s been — like bordering on historically bad. It’s not all on the Seattle Kraken defense either. So far, Grubauer let in far too many pucks that he should have. He’s missing saves he should make and gives up too many second chances.
Goaltending. When the Kraken signed Philipp Grubauer after selecting Chris Driedger in the expansion draft, I said they might just have the best goalie tandem in the NHL. I wasn’t alone. ESPN ranked them as the number four goalie tandem in the league going into the season. The Kraken having the worst goaltending in the league by far is something I don’t think anyone would’ve predicted.
Empty seats. A sellout crowd is announced at each game, but the hockey vibe in the Greenhouse should be better. When a franchise spares no expense in its launch, there shouldn’t be consistently big blocks of empty seats when fans in the suburbs think ticket prices are untouchable.
There is a disconnect. And yes, there is still a pandemic. But before the Sonics return and during dismal Husky and Seahawks seasons, late 2021 was a perfect window to filter new fans into Lower Queen Anne.
The biggest surprise of the season, for me at least, has been Seattle’s dreadful goaltending. Both Grubauer and Driedger came off the best season of their career before going to Seattle. Now, neither of them has a save percentage above .900%. Where is the big disconnect? That’s hard to say. But their poor performances between the pipes are a big part of why Seattle hasn’t found themselves in the W column more this year.
Are they solely responsible? No. But this isn’t the goaltending tandem we signed up for. As far as positive surprises, for me, it’s Jared McCann. He hasn’t been afraid to call his team out when the time calls for it, and despite Seattle’s rough start in the NHL, he has been having a pretty good season.
Absolutely. Halfway into the season, the Kraken have struggled to find consistency in their game but have shown frequent flashes of brilliance. If they can put all the pieces of their game together consistently and keep a .500 or better pace over the final 41 games, all the early season losing will be forgiven.
While that kind of turnaround won’t result in a playoff berth, the most important effect will be to show that the organization has the right people in place and that the long-term plan, while it had its early obstacles, is one the fans and players can believe in.
Perhaps more important than the team’s on-ice play is their work to reach out to local fans and grow their fanbase in the community. In the long-term, that will be the real measure of this season’s success.
The Kraken have done a lot, but there’s much more work to do in the season’s final three months. One silver lining of losing is that ticket prices are falling, which may allow some people to go to games; who would have otherwise not had the chance.
It depends on what needs to be redeemed. From an entertainment standpoint, the Seattle Kraken put on a good show for an arena full of die-hard fans. They have also done a great job in the community.
Moving to the on-ice product, Seattle is a dozen points behind seventh-place Vancouver in the Pacific Division. I’ve gotten so used to them losing that at this point, they should go with it and get the top pick in next year’s draft. However, it might be tough because Arizona is awful, and they’ll get worse after the deadline.
Admit that the team is bad; if that ticks off some of the current players, they can look in the mirror for answers. Then they have to get some good prospects and picks at the deadline to show the fans that this organization is building a solid young core in addition to Matty Beniers.
Yes. Simmer down on the digital focus and ramp up on the human experience and true local connections. Adding elements such as the team dog, the local organist from the movie Slapshot, and a KUBE 93 broadcaster has been a good start to improving the arena atmosphere.
Keep it going with hiring more local talent and expanding on foot beyond Climate Pledge Arena and Northgate. And announce the mascot before the All-Star break.
On the ice? We need better defensive play. Like it or not, the focus is on them with a lack of star power up front. That means better defensive zone decision-making on the puck and less time in the box. Yes, I’m looking directly at Jeremy Lauzon, who has a nightly reserved seat in the sin bin.
Bouncing off RJ and JW, the Kraken could definitely continue improving upon the human experience and their community impact. While I no longer live in the Seattle area, I remember how it felt when I was involved in the Seattle hockey community growing up. There was always a huge sense of community, which is a big part of why I fell in love with the game. Continuing to take those steps is really important in not only growing the fan base but growing the game as well.
As far as things on the ice go, I don’t think there’s a way for the Kraken to redeem their season. However, if the team continues to focus on making small improvements over the season, that will speak volumes of their dedication to their fans and each other. They showed that they could compete against some of the best teams in the league, so they have both the drive and the manpower to do it.
Their roster may be missing a bit of star power, but if they can at least show they have the will to compete and don’t get too complacent with losing, that is a redeeming quality in itself. I’ve learned over the years that in the midst of struggle, if they can find a way to keep things fun and somewhat competitive on the ice, it will keep fans happy while they, hopefully, come up with a plan to improve the roster over the summer.
Ed Stein
I’ve been highly critical of Francis. Where do I begin?
He totally blew the draft, which the team sold as a big win to their fans. Gavin Bayruether and Carsen Twarynski, give me a break. I understand why the Kraken opted for big players; you can’t teach size. However, that size needs to come with a little bit of speed and agility.
Not being like Vegas didn’t exclude flipping players, getting picks, and leveraging cap space for prospects. Francis failed to play the game, then made excuses after.
The Chris Driedger signing happened too soon. For what they paid him, waiting the two days until league-wide free agency began would have worked. In the meantime, the Seattle Kraken could have drafted a useful player from Florida, such as Radko Gudas or Frank Vatrano, and still signed Driedger.
Francis signed the wrong free agent defenseman from Edmonton. He should have added Tyson Barrie, who has 17 points in 35 games, including 9 on the power play. Barrie re-upped for three years, $13.5M. Instead, the Kraken signed Adam Larsson (four years, $16M). His -17 ties him for seventh-worst in NHL +/- this season. They drafted plenty of big defensemen. Larssen is redundant.
This team lacks a faceoff “ace.” Francis signed Riley Sheahan on the cheap (one-year, $850K), saying “he wins more faceoffs than he loses.” Well, Sheahan hasn’t won more than he lost. When he isn’t scratched, Sheahan has a 47.5 winning percentage in the dot. The Kraken could have landed Luke Glendening, a career 55 percent winner, for a slightly higher investment. He signed in Dallas for two years, $3M, and won 59.3 percent of his draws this year, a tick lower than the 60.9 from last season.
That’s a big question. I’ve been a pretty strong critic of Francis’ offseason performance. We’ve covered it in-depth in our podcast, but I’ll try to hit on some of the main points here. In my opinion, Francis misjudged the expansion draft process. He played the game wrong.
The expansion draft is about leveraging claims on other teams’ players and cap space. The way to gain assets from that leverage is to make trades. Francis didn’t make a single side deal during the expansion draft, a fact that baffled just about everyone at the time. He claimed that the side deal offers Vegas took advantage of simply weren’t there.
But given Francis’ reported asking price, there was probably some wiggle room had he been willing to budge, even if there was no chance to replicate the heavily lopsided deals Vegas made. Francis also didn’t take advantage of his team’s abundance of cap space. The Coyotes’ offseason moves showed that opportunity existed to stockpile assets by taking on undesirable contracts, which the Kraken didn’t do.
I don’t know how much could have actually been done, and not sure if anyone will publicly know the story of what went on in the Seattle Kraken expansion draft war room. Jesse Granger, who covers VGK for the Athletic, recently tweeted about Seattle versus Vegas at this point.
This is more feast vs. famine. I think general managers around the league were ready for Seattle last summer after (Vegas GM) George McPhee gamed the system five years ago. It’s hard seeing the lineup that was selected in July, but maybe that truly was the best available, minus a few selections.
If that holds true, it will be rough sailing for a while- at least until the summer off-season. Not making a splash in free agency so far is definitely on this GM… along with a huge contract for a relatively unproven goaltender.
After his selections in the expansion draft, I really wanted to give Francis the benefit of the doubt. With the success we saw in Vegas a few years ago, clearly, a team of misfits can have their Cinderella story. But maybe Vegas was the outlier instead of the new normal with expansion teams. Nonetheless, they created a recipe for success, and while I don’t believe Francis should have followed it exactly, he should have taken notes.
I really believe that not making side deals is coming back and biting him in the butt. Whatever claim he may have made about there not really being a market for side deals following the draft, I find that hard to believe. Francis gives me the impression that he is very inflexible and values his players much more than he probably should. While it’s great to value your players, that kind of pride is often what leads teams to the bottom of the standings.
With all the hype surrounding Seattle’s analytics department, you think Francis would have made a series of moves proceeding the draft that could have beefed up his roster a little bit. I’m not necessarily of the opinion that he should have selected bigger names like Carey Price.
However, there were several other players on the table that he definitely should have picked up. Instead, he was left with what was essentially an AHL team at the end of the day. I thought maybe he’d have a strategy come together in the following days, but we saw him make one trade.
Join us later this week for Part 2 of our Seattle Kraken mid-season review.