Is Lane Lambert the right coach for the Seattle Kraken?
The Seattle Kraken have a new man behind the bench, having announced Lane Lambert as the team’s next head coach ahead of the 2025-26 NHL season.
Most recently, he spent the 2024-25 season as an assistant on Craig Berube’s staff with the Toronto Maple Leafs, after previously serving as head coach of the New York Islanders through 2022-23 and 45 games of 2023-24.
Now taking over a Kraken team that fell short of the Stanley Cup Playoffs in 2024-25, he hopes to bring the club to heights not seen under previous head coaches Dan Bylsma and Dave Hakstol.
On Friday’s episode of Daily Faceoff Live, Tyler Yaremchuk and Frank Seravalli broke down how Lambert fits in Seattle.
Yaremchuk: The Seattle Kraken have found their man. Lane Lambert is going to be the next bench boss there, and after one and a half years as the Islanders’ head coach, he gets another crack at things with the Kraken. What do you make of this decision?
Seravalli: In some ways, maybe it’s to be considered a bit of a surprise that it’s Lane Lambert. I don’t think he was hugely talked about in the process, after obviously spending the last year with Craig Berube and the Toronto Maple Leafs as an assistant. Now he’s going to get another crack at being a head coach.
I think that’s exciting for a guy who was probably living under some very specific parameters on Long Island, and he’s someone who has spent a lot of time in the orbit of some really good coaches.
He was Barry Trotz’s guy, his right-hand man, for the longest time and part of that, I’m sure, rubbed off on him. He’s someone who certainly has presence, someone who has had a wealth of experience from all the time that he has spent on an NHL bench, and I think he’s a guy who makes sense for this Seattle Kraken team at this point.
Seattle are not at the moment, ready or set up to be a team that competes. But can he begin to put the pieces in order? If you think about it like a Rubik’s Cube, can three or four sides of the puzzle come together? Maybe you need someone else to come in later and finish off the puzzle, and it’s going to have to be done in conjunction with Jason Botteril aligning everything as the new GM. But can he be the guy who starts to unlock some of it? I think that’s what you’re looking for, and maybe he is the guy that finishes it off in the end, once it’s ready to go, but it’s not there yet.
You can watch the rest of the Kraken segment and Friday’s episode here…