Why my Seattle Kraken predictions are (currently) wrong

Occasionally, I’m wrong.

No, it’s OK, I get that you’re shocked. My takes are usually air tight, my reasoning impeccable. If you’ve ever scrolled down to the comments section of one of my pieces, you know that it’s typically just hundreds of readers posting identical replies of “Yep, nailed it completely.” Call me Tage Thompson, because they thought my success rate was unsustainable, and then I got better.

Except, not always. And that means that every now and then, I need to eat some crow. I had an appetizer last week, when my podcast pals dug up a September clip of me saying that the only hope the Devils had was if they responded well to Andrew Brunette after the inevitable early firing of Lindy Ruff. That, uh, hasn’t happened yet. It’s still early, and the Devils could lose their next 55 games to drop back down to .500, but I’m going to go ahead and pencil that one in as a missed call.

But it may not be my biggest whiff of the season, because I was also completely wrong about the Seattle Kraken. That would be the team that just had a seven-game win streak and currently sits at 15-6-3, good for second in the Western Conference. All that in just their second year in the league, despite being just one season removed from an abysmal 30th-place showing.

I did not see this coming. I’m guessing you didn’t either. I’m not sure I can remember seeing any preseason picks that had the Kraken making the playoffs, let alone pushing for the division lead. In my annual prediction contest, 669 of you named Seattle as a team that had no chance of making the playoffs, which was more picks than the Sabers, Senators and Blue Jackets combined. Three times as many of you thought the Kraken missing the playoffs was a sure thing as picked the Ducks, and they’re dead last right now.

So I know I’m not alone. But I can only be accountable for myself, so let’s do this. Ten ways I was wrong about the Kraken, at least so far.

1. I thought they’d be bad. Like, really bad.

We’ll start with the most obvious miss, which is also the most important. When I made my preseason picks, dropping each team into a division based on my expectations for the 2022-23 season, I had the Kraken in with the bottom feeders, meaning they’d be among the eight worst teams in the league. Honestly, if I’d had to get more specific, I probably would have said bottom five.

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I did acknowledge that they’d added a few talented pieces like Andre Burakovsky and Oliver Bjorkstrand, and that they’d be better than they had been in Year 1. But then I cut to the chase, writing that “this is still an expansion team in the traditional sense, which is to say they’re bad.” It’s fair to say that hasn’t held up so far.

2. I figured their only path to major improvement was Philipp Grubauer

My one hedge when it came to writing off the Kraken was that the starting goaltending could be significantly better. In fairness, that’s my hedge on pretty much every team, but in this case it felt plausible. Philipp Grubauer had been very good in Washington and Colorado, including being a Vezina finalist in 2021. He’d stunk in Seattle in Year 1, but stuff happens, especially when you have a completely new team trying to gel in front of you. I held out the possibility that the old Grubauer could reappear, and that would save the Kraken. It would have to, since the backup was Martin Jones, and …

3. I had no faith at all in Martin Jones

The original plan had been for Grubauer to form a two-headed monster with Chris Driedger, but injuries scrapped that plan. That led to the Kraken signing Jones to a one-year discount deal. It made sense as insurance, as Jones is a veteran with 400 games on his resume. But he hadn’t posted a save percentage over .900 since 2017-18, so if he was asked to play more than a handful of games it would mean that the Kraken were in big trouble. They needed Grubauer to be good.

Well, we’re nearly a third of the way into the season, and Grubauer hasn’t been good. If anything, he’s been worse, posting an .868 save percentage and a 3.40 goals-against average that would feel right at home in the early 90s. He’s also been hurt, missing almost all of November. That has meant that Jones has had to step in, starting 17 games. And he’s been… OK? He’s been fine. He still can’t get that save percentage up to .900, but he’s been adequate. That shouldn’t be anywhere near enough for a second-year team, but somehow it has been, because …

4. I never saw the offense coming

If you’d pressed me to keep coming up with scenarios where the Kraken would succeed, I’d have fallen back on the old pre-Vegas expansion team standby: Grind it out, wear teams down, and try to win 2-1. It’s the Bettman-era NHL, after all, where everyone wants to be boring and a 6-5 win gets you bag-skated. Even teams that are stocked with offensive talent still insist on playing a defense-first style, so an expansion team would have no choice but to focus on low-event hockey and hope the bounces went their way.

Instead, the Kraken are playing firewagon hockey. They rank near the top of the league in goals scored, with three lines that can be dangerous and a power play that makes teams pay. Burakovsky has been huge, Matty Beniers looks like a stud, and you now remember that they have Jordan Eberle.

Can it continue? I don’t see how it could, because this team doesn’t have the talent to shoot around 13 percent all year. But as we’ve already established, sometimes I’m wrong.

5. I didn’t see them winning any games 9-8

OK, nobody did. I just need to mention this game.

Come on. If you were playing a video game and that happened, how many times would you have to pause and go check the setting to see what you’d screwed up? Games like that just aren’t a part of the modern NHL.

It’s not like the Kraken scored nine against some basement-dweller. The Kings are a playoff team, one known for keeping the puck out of their own net. But the Kraken went into the Kings’ own building and beat them so badly that they waived their $5 million goalie the next day.

That game was wild and we may not see another like it for a decade, but it wasn’t a total outlier. The Kraken have also had an 8-5 win over the Sharks, and have already had five games this year that finished 5-4. If you watch a Kraken game, somebody’s scoring.

Also, they’ve had seven overtime games but none of them have gone to the shootout. I think I might love these guys.

6. I really thought Shane Wright was going to be a factor

Let’s take a quick detour to one of the few ways I was too positive about the Kraken.

I was at the draft in Montreal, when the Canadiens swerved us by passing on Wright (to one of the great crowd reactions of all time). I was stunned when he kept falling, all the way down to fourth. And I figured that once the shock wore off, it would be just about the perfect situation for him — a chance to go to a relatively low-pressure environment and develop on a team without any playoff hopes. He wouldn’t even have to be the team’s top rookie, with Matty Benier leading the way.

I was right about Beniers being good, just like everyone else was, but the rest of that paragraph turned out to be wrong. The Wright drama has been an ongoing story, with the rookie getting scratched often and barely seeing the ice when he did play. I don’t know how many points I had him penciled in for by December, but I’m pretty sure it was more than one.

Maybe it all works out. Wright should play for Team Canada at the world juniors, and could rediscover his game there. It’s worth pointing out that Wright is at least saying all the right things about being on board with the plan. If you’re a Kraken fan, you could even spin this as a positive — if they’re this good without contributing their top pick, imagine what they could do when his NHL game starts to click.

7. I wasn’t sold on the Ron Francis plan

I had a ton of respect for Francis as a player, and I thought he did reasonably well as a GM under strange circumstances in Carolina. But I was underwhelmed by his early work in Seattle, especially the almost total lack of trading around the expansion draft. And while I kept hearing talk of how the Kraken’s best asset was all the cap space they had to weaponize, I wasn’t seeing it actually happening. That led to more than a few sideswipes taken at the Seattle GM.

So far, it’s looking like he knew what he was doing. That cap space got him his leading scorer in Burakovsky as a UFA, Justin Schultz has been a nice add, and Bjorkstrand’s been fine given he cost them next to nothing. More importantly, the slow-but-steady approach that I criticized as being too slow without enough steady seems to have been the right plan after all.

Is it possible that a sportswriter sitting on his couch doesn’t know quite as much about running a team as an NHL GM does? I’m not willing to go that far, but I’ll concede it’s at least possible.

8. I thought Dave Hakstol was the wrong coach

I wasn’t impressed with Hakstol’s stint in Philadelphia, and didn’t see anything from his time as an assistant in Toronto to make me think he deserved another head-coaching job. When Francis chose him as the Kraken’s first coach, I didn’t see the fit, and after last year’s disaster I wondered if Hakstol would even make it through the end of Year 2.

At this point, I think it’s safe to say he will. He may even get some Jack Adams love. We focus on wins and losses, but Hakstol has the Kraken playing a fundamentally sound game, above break-even on the key percentages. The power play has been good, the Kraken usually start on time, and they’ve been disciplined enough to rank near the bottom of the league in penalties taken.

One glaring exception: The penalty kill stinks, but it’s so bad that it almost has to improve just by regression. And it’s not hurting them as much as it could because they stay out of the box.

Dave Hackstol. (Steph Chambers/Getty Images)

9. I’m still not completely sold that any of this continues

I won’t dwell on this one, but I do have to mention it. I was far too pessimistic about the Kraken heading into the season, so let’s acknowledge the possibility that I’m now over-correcting and getting too excited about a start that can’t last. That shooting percentage just doesn’t seem likely to last. The schedule has been relatively manageable so far, with only a handful of games against top contenders. By contrast, they get the Panthers, Lightning and Hurricanes on the road over the next week or so. And it’s hard to win in this league without at least average goaltending, so they need to figure something out there.

Add it all up, and it’s possible this early success is less like the 2018-19 Islanders announcing their arrival as contenders and more like last year’s Ducks, who were leading the Pacific in January before collapsing. Maybe I get to write another “I was wrong” piece in a few months, only this time from the other side of the coin. But I don’t want to think about that, because of this last point…

10. I didn’t realize they’d be this wildly fun and likable

Again, expansion teams that win are supposed to have to be boring to do it. Not these guys. The 9-8 win over the Kings was the NHL’s game of the year. Beniers is fun. John Forslund is fun — come on, if you didn’t like “the pepperpot on the spot” then something is wrong with you. The Wright drama was intriguing in its own way. Heck, below-average goaltending is fun, at least if you don’t care who wins. If you sit down in front of your TV and have to figure out which team to watch on a given night, the Kraken are a great pick.

But more than that, this is an out-of-nowhere success story from a franchise with no real history that you can resent, even though that’s what hockey fans love to do. Sure, maybe you roll your eyes at an expansion team being this good this soon, but unlike the Golden Knights, the Kraken at least paid their dues for a season first.

If there’s a more bandwagonable team in the league right now, I’m not sure who it is. And I’m never wrong about this stuff.

(Top photo of the Kraken’s Oliver Bjorkstrand, left, and Ryan Donato, right: Ethan Miller / Getty Images)