What went wrong for the Kraken this season, and what’s next
The Seattle Kraken hoped to take a step in 2024-25 but failed to meet those expectations.
On Monday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, Frank Seravalli and Carter Hutton recapped the Kraken’s season and discussed what the club needs to do in order to climb the standings in the coming campaign.
Frank Seravalli: The Kraken made the coaching change with Dan Bylsma. I don’t know if it has worked out quite as everyone would have envisioned. I do think that the temperature is rising on the Bylsma hot seat. The Kraken want to see results. They want to see this team take a step forward. I just don’t know, at this point in time, that we can say this team has taken any meaningful step forward. What do you see when you watch their team and what’s missing?
Carter Hutton: I look to goaltending a little bit. I think Joey Daccord has done a great job, but Philipp Grubauer has had a tough year. This is a guy who has been unreliable. You need to find a guy to fix that up because he is making a ton of money. With that being said, you look at the contracts they added last summer. You look at Chandler Stephenson. You look at Brandon Montour. Yes, they got very good deals, and they made a lot of money, and I’m never going to knock a guy for that, but I don’t believe these guys are ‘A1’ difference makers on teams. I think they’re good supplementary guys, and they can do that. When you look down the Kraken’s lineup, they just don’t really have anyone who is that superstar. We talk about Matty Beniers and Jared McCann, and they’ve done well, but those guys aren’t ‘superstar status’ players. When we look at this league, if you don’t have a superstar in the regular season, it’s really tough to get in the playoffs. I always feel this way with teams like this, where you have to play a certain way to get into the playoffs. You have to be able to run and gun, you have to be able to outscore teams, but then you have to be able to grind teams out come playoff time, and I just feel like they’re kind of caught in between. I know you can’t grow superstars on trees. They have to be homegrown. It’s very tricky to find them in free agency. They have a lot to task here. They have a complete team and the bar was set very early with that playoff run they had, and now expectations are higher in Seattle.
You can watch the full segment and the rest of the episode here: