There were times last season when Kraken forward Yanni Gourde seemed to be imploring his new teammates to do a better job of emulating his former squad, which had won two Stanley Cups.
It wasn’t entirely the fault of Kraken players that they couldn’t replicate the relentless Tampa Bay Lightning for 82 games and wound up with the NHL’s third-worst record. Part of it was the folks above them: The ownership group that couldn’t get Climate Pledge Arena completed for the preseason, a front office that at times seemingly prioritized salary-cap space over the on-ice product and a coaching staff deploying a system that didn’t always mesh with personnel.
Oh yeah, and the goalie let in a bunch of stoppable pucks early. Also, COVID-19 skewered any chance of new players bonding together and limited practice time required to modify the on-ice system to better fit the team.
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Fast-forward a season, and many of those excuses are gone. So, too, are 13 of the 30 players chosen by the team in the July 2021 expansion draft — some good, some not very good — as well as another six acquired through subsequent trades, free-agent signings and waiver claims.
The Kraken have feverishly shipped bodies out since the March trade deadline and spent the summer trying to fix themselves, adding talent up front and on the blue line to score more goals and buy goalie Philipp Grubauer time to regain his Vezina Trophy finalist form. But for the fixes to work, with fewer built-in excuses, this season’s Kraken players must uphold their end of the bargain by keeping Gourde satisfied on a nightly basis.
“It’s just being consistent a little bit more in our structure and playing 60 minutes,” Gourde said during the preseason. “I mean, at the end of the day last year I think there were lapses. Times where we weren’t at our best, and then when we were losing games because of four or five minutes.
“I think we’ve got to be more consistent doing the right thing over and over again and play for 60 minutes. That’s for sure.”
Some pundits and analytical projections rated the Kraken a 90-point playoff contender a year ago, one that badly underachieved those expectations. Not surprisingly, with all the summer additions, some again peg them a dark-horse team headed for 80-85 points and perhaps even sneaking into the playoffs if they build early momentum.
But that would require more than mere roster fixes. As Gourde alluded, it needs to carry over to on-ice play.
“The work ethic and the tenacity of our team was really good last year,” Kraken coach Dave Hakstol said. “This team kept coming back. They competed throughout the entire season. There were a few games where we looked at each other and said, ‘That wasn’t good enough.’ But there weren’t very many as far as effort.”
That said, for all the talk of the Kraken being “competitive,” they still played just well enough to lose. As Gourde and Hakstol suggested, they’d put in enough effort to hang tight in one-goal games before either blowing a lead or — most frequently — surrendering a late empty-net goal instead of finding the equalizer.
There’s a fine line between winning and losing in professional sports, and the Kraken, with mind-numbing consistency, managed to remain on the wrong side of it. Sure, flip those one-goal results around, and points would pile up in a hurry.
But who’s going to cause such a swing? Even changing outcomes by a single goal’s margin is often easier said than done.
But the Kraken will try to narrow the differential.
A significant part of their goals against was attributable to goalie Grubauer, being counted on for significant improvement from his career-worst season. So the biggest chance to flip results through fixes within the team’s control was on offense.
The Kraken scored the league’s fourth-fewest goals, fifth-worst in five-on-five play. Their power play was abysmal.
“We need to find ways to be better offensively,” Hakstol said. “And part of that is some of our personnel and the additions we have. And some of it is being better in certain areas in terms of getting inside and finding some of those scoring opportunities.”
They’ve added winger Oliver Bjorkstrand in a trade with Columbus, free-agent winger Andre Burakovsky from Colorado and will have their No. 2 overall draft pick from 2021, centerman Matty Beniers, ready to go after a 10-game trial run last spring.
“You add all of these pieces, and the excitement starts there,” said holdover winger Jordan Eberle, who scored 21 goals last season as the team’s first All-Star Game selection. “We’ve obviously gotten better, and we want to show it on the ice.”
They will also have somewhat surprising goal-producer Brandon Tanev back from his season-ending knee surgery last December as well as winger Jaden Schwartz returning after injuries sidelined him for more than half the Kraken’s debut campaign.
“I think our expectations are a lot higher. … Obviously our start last year wasn’t where it needs to be,” Schwartz said. “So I think that’s going to be a big goal for us.”
The Kraken started 1-4-1 last season and were 4-12-1 just five weeks in, with Grubauer allowing some soft goals. It didn’t help that defensemen weren’t always communicating with him and that players were turning pucks over at key moments while adjusting to the Kraken’s fast-paced transitional style.
Grubauer’s advanced statistics showed him allowing an NHL-worst 31.5 goals more than “expected” last season. Though some of that number was flawed — not accounting enough for turnovers and odd-man rushes allowed — Grubauer certainly needed to improve.
His play steadied, as did the defense, by the second half even if stats alone didn’t always reflect that. And that needs to continue, especially with backup Chris Driedger out until February after knee surgery and replaced by Martin Jones.
“It’s important to look at what the mistakes were last year from a personal and team perspective for sure,” Grubauer said. “Because you can learn from that, and you can adjust it. You want to make small changes. It didn’t work out for us last year. We didn’t have the year we wanted to have as a team and individually, so it’s time to step that up.”
On the team-improvement front, general manager Ron Francis signed offensive-minded defenseman Justin Schultz and imported the new forwards partly to help Grubauer out. The thinking is that the longer the Kraken maintain offensive possession, the less time teams will have to test Grubauer.
Schultz also balances out a blue-line corps that skewed toward left-handed point shots and slower-moving, defense-first types.
The Kraken can roll out three balanced defensive pairings with nobody forced to play on their opposite-shooting side.
It looks great on paper. But paper isn’t where the Kraken play games. Though they could potentially compete with Vegas, Los Angeles and Vancouver for standings positioning beneath Pacific Division favorites Calgary and Edmonton, they can’t take several weeks to get going.
“The ‘compete level’ has been high,” Gourde said of training camp. “The intensity is high. It’s been super fun. And the new faces, the new additions have been working very hard.”
And that must continue beyond a winning preseason for the summertime fixes to flip results in the Kraken’s favor.