The Kraken ended 2026 in an absolute cloud of misery. They did not make the playoffs, they did not even challenge much down the stretch, even if their fate was to be thrown into the torment nexus known as the Colorado Avalanche, they didn’t get close.
Hell, they didn’t even improve year over year in the standings. And yet, that was decidedly not the case prior to the Olympic break!
Things were going well! They weren’t perfect by any stretch, but they were holding their own and had spent a good portion of their year hovering somewhere in a playoff spot! They were getting good performances and when they got players back from the deadline and the olympics, they got even more, and it still didn’t add up to a shot at the NHL playoffs.
Ron Francis left his post, morale around the team is worse than ever, and plenty of outside commentators (and inside commentators)
What the hell happened here?
Well…why don’t we look at it?
Early Returns seemed bright…
The Kraken at the beginning of the 2024-25 team was not especially great.
The Kraken at the beginning of the 2025-26 season was…good? Maybe streaky, but they were getting off to a start that was genuinely pretty good in comparison to year’s past, where they mostly just lost in bunches. Instead, they won in bunches! A lot more bunches than previous! To the point that, for a good portion of this season, they were in some part of the Pacific Division’s playoff picture!
…but the Underlying numbers were not kind to this team.
Let’s get one thing out of the way. This is, on some level, what Lane Lambert and the Kraken wanted.
Lane Lambert’s system is, to put it bluntly, not built for long puck possessions that wear the opponent out. It is about grinding the opponent into dust while they have the puck, therefor making every single possession count, about making transition chances feel dangerous. That does not necessarily mean they need to have the puck to do that.
Throughout the 2025-26 season, Seattle distinguished itself by being a team that actively disliked having the puck. They were:
- 31st in Corsi For-%: with a 45.41%
- This was also true in High danger situations.
- 30th in Fenwick For-%: with 45.63%
- 30th in Expected Goals For-%: with 44.84%
And if you’re not big on what all that means, here’s the basics; having the puck and shooting the puck are the single most important things you can do in hockey. You miss every shot you don’t take yadda yadda michael scott. It’s a good quote, but it’s true; you need to be attacking the net at all times if you want to score, because there’s never a true guarantee that any one shot will go in. Just ask any number of extremely skilled players who have somehow skied a puck on an open net. Corsi, Fenwick, and Expected Goals all dig down into shots and shot attempts. Corsi measures shot attempts, Fenwick unblocked shot attempts, and Expected Goals is your “shot quality” stat.
And they were near the bottom in all of these categories.
They rarely had the puck enough to get shot attempts off, let alone ones with any objective measure of quality. The only teams consistently worse than they were are teams that have been mismanaged to hell and back like the Maple Leafs and Blackhawks, an especially cynical observer could say they received the company they deserved in that regard. Part of this was, again, not necessarily alien to Lane Lambert’s style of play; the Islanders under him had the exact same problem, that they solved in the exact same way; making every possession count.
The problem is that the Kraken never had a Mathew Barzal to make that worth it.
But here’s the thing! Here is the thing! All of that This is fine…if your defense is overwhelming, but as we can see from the heatmap, the Kraken were just about okay, maybe slightly above average for a league that had a major drop in Save-% across the board, and far more critically…if you can leverage your low shot quantity with absolute shot quality. This is where Lane’s Islanders and Lane’s Kraken differ significantly; The Islanders shot from exclusively two places in his time as their head coach; the front of the net, and the points, presumably fishing for rebounds. The Kraken meanwhile, consistently failed to make this work for them enough to keep their spot in the playoff picture was that they rarely had enough players whose skill level could leverage these situations at a moment’s notice, leading to that heatmap you see there where the right side of the defense was effectively the quarterback of the roster.
And yet! This kind of worked! For a very long time!
For awhile, the Kraken managed to actually leverage enough of this to become fairly proficient at getting to Overtime! Didn’t always win, but certainly got there and got points out of it.
For awhile, if you asked the question “Are the Kraken any good?”, the answer usually felt kinda like this going into the Olympics:
This, of course, was course-corrected hard after the olympic break.
Old? Or just dependent on Old?
The Kraken are old. That’s the feeling, anyway.
However, according to EliteProspects.com, the Kraken are actually one of the younger teams in the league; currently sitting at 21st overall with an average age of 27.54. So why the feeling of them being old?
I think a more accurate depiction then, is that the Kraken are hopelessly dependent on their old players to get anything done. That seems more accurate…and infinitely more frustrating to deal with.
The Kraken scored 226 goals this year, and of those 226, 23% of those came from players over the age of 30. The average age of any player with over 10 goals in the season on the Kraken (for the whole season anyway, we have to exclude Bobby McMann from this) was 28.
Some of this comes from the NHL Coach mindset of course; the untested variable of NHL rookie often throws things out of wack when you’re trying to compete for a playoff spot, so it feels like you have to keep them eternally sheltered, even when they start to show real promise. But even then it seemed like the older players were trusted well beyond their capacity to actually show improvement. Everybody does it, even the coaches you think are good are still struggling to fight through the rookie jitters of somebody.
The problem comes from when the Vets are asked to lead through, and are not capable of doing so. Chandler Stephenson had an up year, but his ability to tally points masked underlying numbers that made it clear that it didn’t matter what Berkly Catton and Eeli Tolvanen did as his most frequent linemates, they were going to be spending a lot of time in front of Daccord and Grubauer. Just about every prospect, even if they were doing well, were largely relegated to depth roles where their skillset would be useful in pinches, but otherwise found themselves relegated to about 12 minutes a night while players who were objectively worse but had a track record that Lane Lambert could fall back on would play in the top 6 spots; up to and including letting certain players overtake Matty Beniers in terms of ice time.
This led to a feeling of a team that was older than it was; it seemingly only had time for the vets.
The Siren Song of the Pacific Division
It’s been hammered to death already, but the Pacific Division was an utter disaster this year. Connor McDavid being out in round 1 only highlights it.
Teams that shouldn’t have been nearly half as bad, or half as good, were struggling to get anything going throughout the year, some had overwhelming crippling flaws that sent them on spiraling losing streaks, and even the best teams in the division were at any point only three to six points out from overtaking one another. As I’m sure everyone from the more easterly time zones have already brayed about; there were a number of Eastern Conference teams that would’ve been easy playoff teams if they just played in the West.
In some ways, it was helpful to the Kraken’s season, because it meant that even if they struggled, the rest of the division struggled a lot more, and that gave them wiggle room to mess up and keep them buoyed for a few weeks.
But it was ultimately disastrous to them because it was much like the regular season itself; fun, exciting…and a liar.
Shooting-% benders, Hot goalies, losing streaks spiraling into losing streaks, all of these things are helpful to get somewhere in the NHL, but are ultimately temporary. The regular season can feature all of those things and can whisper the sweet nothings of “you’ve finally turned a corner!”, and “you’re farther along in your rebuild than you thought!”, and the most insidious of all: “You could really make some noise”. No division in the sport this year heard these clarion calls blare out harder than the entire Pacific Division.
And no team fell for that quite like the Seattle Kraken.
Instead of looking at the reality of competition league-wide going up dramatically due to the truncated schedule, their precarious position within it, and looking at their roster and wondering if they could realisitically meet the storm about to hit them, the Kraken bought in a fun but ultimately mystifying trade. They added. I like Bobby McMann and want him back but…shouldn’t you have done something about the fact that several of your best players are still well over 30 and one is almost certainly leaving the team after this year? Maybe make an improvement on defense?
Nope. They thought they were in a good enough spot. They failed to reconcile the schedule’s crushed time frame and that for once there were enough teams with good things going on in the West that they would have to bring a whole other gear of performance to the table, and added on slightly when they probably should’ve done more to actually improve larger swathes of the team, or focused on the future.
A bad misread turned into a spectacular disaster of a season ending.
The Bill Came Due.
Lambert prefers to let the game come to his team so that they can break out and attack in transition. This often means that while they are definitely capable of taking over a game, they will not control a game. That’s built into it.
This can work, it certainly did for the Kraken…but a bill begins to form.
You can call it shooting-%, you can call it a debt, you can call it momentum…whatever it is, a successful form of Lane Lambert hockey either needs world class, high-impact players to buoy it’s worst tendencies, or world class goaltending to cover it up. Not having the puck needs an offset. It also, critically, needs to self-reinforce. It needs to constantly be moving or it will lose that feeling. Further, it still struggles mightily against teams that are motivated to keep up consistent pressure.
It’s like a Pelagic Shark. You absolutely cannot stop or you will choke and die.
The Olympic Break, I would argue, did more damage to their playoff hopes than any one player’s performance, because it made all but three players on the Kraken roster take time off. Habits that had formed over the season that contributed to a poor offense had congealed, all of the realities of this roster came up at once, and none of the momentum of the Olympics followed through. The Kraken, lethargic and happy from two weeks off…ran into teams desperate for Round 1 of the playoffs for almost two straight months.
Their bill came due. And we, the terrified and increasingly jaded audience watched the Kraken find out in real time they just did not have enough to pay up.
At least goaltending actually worked out for once!
Arguably the most maddening part of this whole exercise is that if there’s one thing that absolutely improved for Seattle this year, it was the goalies.
Philipp Grubauer’s first four years in Deep Blue were not especially great, and so imagine the delighted surprise I felt whenever seeing Grubauer’s name in lineup cards as this year went on. He had his best year as a Seattle Kraken during this campaign, and I am genuinely happy to say that.
Even Joey Daccord, who finished with a worst SV% overall than Grubauer, was still a pretty darn good goalie in comparison to the rest of the league! For once, this was not really that big of a concern beyond load management thanks to some unfortunately timed injuries!
So imagine how frustrating it is that everything else around them went kaput.
The Curse of Patience
I understand the Francis/Botterill plan as it previously stood. I really do. In fact, I kinda get it.
The Kraken came into a league where it was clear the balance of power in the Pacific was always going to be Vegas vs. McDavid in some capacity. The rest of the division was recovering, rebuilding, or just not that good to begin with. Eventually one of the california teams would rebound, maybe Calgary or Vancouver would too, but otherwise the Kraken seemed to be of the belief that they could build patiently, they could outlast one or two of those squads and then come up in the same wave as San Jose and Anaheim when one or both of Vegas or Edmonton inevitably failed to win a cup and pissed off the wrong superstar enough that they left.
The problem is that the approach can work…if you supplement it. Make not just moves on the margins, but swings that cause the league to take notice when you do. Throughout the Francis era and into the Botterill era, that became their Achilles heel.
They never quite figured out how to supplement their careful approach with enough shrewd moves to get them up to speed. Anaheim took major shots in the dark to supplement their core, San Jose did the same. They ended up coming away with a playoff berth and an all-timer player, respectively. Seattle meanwhile nibbled at the margins, their one major acquisition became a very difficult millstone around their necks to remove, and went to the playoffs once, and seemed to come away with the impression they were closer than they previously thought. That disastrous reading of events left the team blindsided when it turned out that no, the Kraken were very much not that close, and have been repeatedly putting off course correction on that issue or wildly overcorrecting and creating new problems.
The NHL of 2025-26 is faster than it’s ever been in it’s entire existence. Not just in terms of player speed, but executive speed. You need to be willing to think of your prospects not just as beloved youths who could one day wear your sweater, but also as potential chips in getting your team better long-term. You need to be able to be flexible with everything in order to succeed. Seattle, more than maybe any other team, struggled with that.
So now Francis is gone, and Botterill’s in charge.
What do you do now?
What you have to work with.
With all the doom and gloom, it is important to remember that there are quite a number of teams that are in the same position as the Kraken if not actively worse because they had a season just like Seattle’s; a lot of promise being blown out the window through the tragedy of post-deadline failure, and a good number of them are seriously considering making big changes to who they are as an organization.
So what you have to work with is the following:
- Roughly $28,375,121 in Cap Space as of right now.
- Two first round selections in the next two drafts.
- A prospect pool ranked 7th in the NHL by the Athletic.
- Several of those prospects are part of an AHL squad that has gone to the playoffs just about every year they’ve been in the American Hockey League and are instrumental to their performance, suggesting they are quite ready to go try out for big boy jobs.
- A roster that seems tailor-made to fill holes in a better team’s depth; either with youth that needs a fresh start, or a veteran who could bring a cussedness that is sorely lacking.
- A league fresh and full of teams that either want to make panic moves, or just found out in real time that they are not where they thought they’d be.
- A GM that needs to start making his mark on this team and quickly.
These are the conditions that, if applied properly, could turn the Kraken’s fortunes around nicely if done right. They’ll have to get a little ruthless about it, although at this point I think Seattle fans would appreciate some form of ruthlessness if it was done to parts of the roster they didn’t like, and may have to get used to the idea of ruthlessness towards players they do.
They gotta make some deals somehow.
If there’s a silver lining, the rumor that Seattle was in on Artemi Panarin bodes bizarrely well. It suggests that even if Botterill is perhaps an uninspired pick as GM to the average observer, he at least gets where some of the issues are sitting. This team needs to get some genuine scoring talent somehow, and if it’s through the draft or through a transaction, then so be it…and he seems willing to go to the plate to try and fix it. But he needs to keep that instinct and act on it. He was too late this time. He shouldn’t be with the next one.
How the Kraken react to this deeply disappointing season and of course, to the reality that they are no further along than they were about a year ago, is going to be critical to this offseason. Blowing it up is an option, or getting risky with trades…whichever route they choose, I think it’s clear the Kraken need to do something.
The Storm are still building back up, the Torrent are coming out of Year 1…and they will almost certainly be getting a brand new set of roommates very soon. And let me be clear; barring the NBA losing their minds, that team will be ass. They will be absolutely miserable. But at least they’ll be back. After the skullduggery that fans endured to watch OKC turn into what it is now, I have a mind that Seattle hoops fans will try to make sure the ownership group never has any incentive to do what happened to them last time ever again.
The Kraken need to find a feeling of hope that can hook fans, because hope is only so good if you’re actually willing to put the work in to make it feel real, and they need to make a concerted effort to modernize and update their practices so that the actually smart people they employ get a say, and the team can start to be competitive again in the playoff picture.
We can only hope they’ve finally learned this painful lesson and take action.
Until then, we have to wait until the Playoffs begin to die down, and the results of the Draft Lottery on Tuesday.
Let’s start there and work our way out.