On Saturday, the Seattle Kraken emptied their locker rooms and made themselves available to the media. On Monday, it was general manager Ron Francis’ turn to share his thoughts publicly. While some of the answers provided by him could seen from a mile away, others were sufficiently interesting to raise an eyebrow, especially something Francis said in response to a reporter’s query. What can we glean from these exit interviews?
Francis Does Not Commit to Coach Hakstol and His Staff
Let’s not bury the lede here. We’ll get to the players’ thoughts in a moment, but the key moment of the past few days was when the GM admitted that the franchise is not fully committed to head coach Dave Hakstol or his staff.
The revelation happened when Francis related how the club was mulling over what went wrong this season. “There’s a lot of things we have to look at and factor in, and we’ll continue to do that in the next few weeks.” When a reporter doubled town to know what that meant for Hakstol, Francis continued: “Well, you’re going to read into that one way or the other, but this is the process we do every year, and that’s where we’re in right now.”
Related: Kraken Fun Facts After Season-Finale Win Over Wild
It’s one thing to say that a team is doing self-evaluations at season’s end, especially after failing to make the playoffs. It’s another to be so cagey about the head coach’s job security. A club either has confidence in the person behind the bench or does not. In some cases, the team hasn’t given up, but the leash is tight. The answer above does not in any way hint at the first possibility.
Does that mean somebody else is coaching the Kraken this fall? Not necessarily. This isn’t the platform for conjecture, but most would agree that if all was fine and dandy with Hakstol’s job security, Francis would have said something to that effect.
Note that after last season’s relative success — a second-round, seven-game exit at the hands of the Dallas Stars — Hakstol was a Jack Adams Award candidate and was given a two-year contract extension.
Kraken Draft Capital and Learning Lessons
Apart from that dramatic moment, there were some important droplets of information shared by the GM. As of this writing, Seattle has nine picks in the upcoming NHL Entry Draft that will be held in Vegas. Francis did not close the door on making a trade to tweak the lineup. The draft capital is there to perform such a move without jeopardizing the club’s ability to make a decent amount of selections this summer.
Francis was also very transparent about how much the team has fallen off regarding its ability to score and be consistent. He mentioned that the Kraken were the only team in the NHL to have a top 10 defence yet not make the postseason. To his point, Seattle finished ninth in goals against average (2.83), an excellent figure handicapped by an attack that only mustered 2.61 goals a night, 29th best.
Francis suggested that some of the issues may have been the players’ inability to learn the lessons the club talked about last summer after their playoff exit. The team had performed very well overall, but that never meant the job would get easier. If anything, it would be more difficult, and perhaps that notion didn’t sink in thoroughly enough.
Players’ Thoughts: Consistency, Consistency, Consistency
Hearing the players talk, which they did two days earlier on Saturday, April 20, the buzzword, if it can be called that, was consistency. Nearly everyone, from Jordan Eberle to Justin Schultz and Jaden Schwartz alluded to the unit’s inability to put in the same effort night in and night out.
There was one segment of the season when things went well. That was from Dec. 30 through Jan. 13. Seattle was on a wonderful run of nine consecutive victories. Three were earned against sides that ultimately made the postseason: Los Angeles Kings, Washington Capitals, and Vegas Golden Knights. Other than that, no other winning streak lasted more than two games. That happened eight different times, making it a glass-half-full, half-empty scenario. Five losing streaks lasted as long as four matches. That’s 20 defeats already if we don’t count the ones that lasted longer.
Eberle and Oliver Bjorkstrand brought up the notion of team unity. Eberle talked about how the roster sometimes didn’t work well together as a group, and Bjorkstrand hinted at a certain lack of connectivity. Both are forwards, and when one notices that the Kraken were 25th in shots on goal (2,347), one realizes that there is indeed a problem somewhere. The team created far better scoring opportunities in 2022-23 and were simply better finishers, with an 11.6 percent shooting efficiency. That dropped to 9.1 percent in 2023-24.
The only person who sounded the least bit chirpy was Joey Daccord, but he had good reason to be. He was very frank about how pleasantly his career turned around, going from a third-string goalie to the busiest season of his NHL career thus far.
There’s no point in exaggerating by saying the mood was somber. It was a matter of admitting that a great opportunity was in front of them (making the playoffs and improving on last season) and they basically fumbled the ball, to borrow a football expression. We’ll find out soon enough what the offseason holds for the Kraken and what they’ll do to rise from the deep and become a threat again.