The Seattle Kraken are running out of answers in another lost season

There’s no doubt that the Seattle Kraken have fallen far short of replicating the success the Vegas Golden Knights experienced immediately upon entering the National Hockey League.

It hasn’t been pretty up in the Pacific Northwest, where the Kraken have gone 1-8-1 in their last 10, tumbling out of the Western Conference playoff picture and back into a place the Golden Knights have never truly been in their NHL existence: the draft lottery race.

The honeymoon period has already come to an abrupt end for Kraken head coach Lane Lambert, the third man to occupy that role in as many years. After Seattle’s most recent loss, a 5-3 setback to the Colorado Avalanche on Tuesday, Lambert took questions for exactly one minute, with exactly one person — a Kraken employee — permitted to speak to him.

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“I think we played hard, like we have been. We just can’t find a way to get over the finish line.” 🗣️ Hear more from #SeaKraken head coach Lane Lambert after tonight’s final.

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6:57 AM · Dec 17, 2025

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The Kraken later acknowledged their restrictive media relations strategy as “a mistake” that “won’t happen again,” but the damage had already been done. Having largely flown under the radar over their first four seasons in existence as a team without much to define them, the Kraken are finally under the microscope — and not in a good way.

How many teams around the league are in a worse spot than the Kraken? Are there any? Their recent drafting record hasn’t been particularly inspiring, but is that just a by-product of an unsuccessful development system? And how in the world do they keep finding ways to hand out truly awful contracts?

Let’s start way, way back at square one. Right from their NHL beginnings at the 2021 Expansion Draft, the Kraken showed numerous signs that they wanted to operate differently than their expansion siblings in Vegas. Then-GM Ron Francis assembled an extremely veteran-laden team, captained by 38-year-old Mark Giordano, and established a precedent of the Kraken being aggressive spenders in free agency.

Here’s the thing: Seattle’s UFA-first approach has never, ever worked, and it’s only gotten worse over time. Philipp Grubauer for six years at a $5.9 million cap hit? Disastrous. Brandon Montour at a $7.1 million cap hit through 2031? Not ideal. Chandler Stephenson making nearly as much as Montour until he’s 37? No, no, no.

These mistakes have compounded to the point where the outlook for the Kraken is downright dire, and the passionate fanbase in Seattle, no longer just content to have its very own NHL team, is clamoring for real change. Under that kind of pressure, teams can rise to the occasion, or they can wilt — especially when they haven’t experienced it before. So far, we’ve seen more of the latter.

Kraken captain Jordan Eberle has 20 points in 31 games this season. On every other team in the league, that wouldn’t be enough for him to be their scoring leader. But in Seattle, Eberle is the only player with 20 points, and it’s not exactly a deviation from the norm for a team where nobody has ever broken the 70-point mark in a single season. (Jared McCann led the Kraken last year with 61 points, putting him in a tie for 79th in league scoring).

Seattle has only ever chosen forwards in the first round of the draft in their history, but the early returns haven’t been particularly strong. Matty Beniers, their first-ever selection back in 2021, has four goals and 18 points in 31 games this year; Shane Wright, who fell into their lap with the No. 4 pick in 2022, is stuck at 13 points (six goals, seven assists). Berkly Catton, Eduard Sale, and Jake O’Brien are very much still works in progress.

It would be difficult for even the most devoted Kraken fan to define Seattle’s core group at this point, if they have one. Would it be Beniers, Wright, McCann, Catton, Vince Dunn, and Joey Daccord? Does that even qualify? Is there a single top-line or top-pair skater in that group? And if not, will any of them become one?

Seattle’s prospect pool isn’t even that deep, due in part to their management team’s reluctance to weaponize their cap space after the expansion process. Instead of being paid (in the form of draft picks or prospects) to take on other teams’ problematic contracts, the Kraken chose to hand out their own, severely limiting their ability to maneuver for no good reason. With this Kraken executive group, now led by Jason Botterill, it’s difficult to look at the moves they’ve made and paint a clear picture of where they want to go.

All this mismanagement has led to where the Kraken sit now, squarely in the middle of their fifth NHL season: 29th in the league, dead last in goals, and with appalling underlying results across the board. If Lambert and Co. believe things will turn around for this group, the analytics just don’t support it. According to Natural Stat Trick, Seattle is a bottom-five team at 5-on-5 in shots, high-danger chances, and expected goals — and that’s to say nothing of their league-worst penalty kill, operating at a miserable 67.8 percent success rate.

The Kraken arrived in the NHL back in 2021 on a wave of excitement. They made big, sweeping declarations about being cutting-edge and progressive in their decision-making processes at every level. But it’s been nearly half a decade, and aside from a one-off run to the playoffs in 2023, the Kraken have yet to show they’re capable of anything out of the ordinary. If anything, they’ve built an extremely low ceiling for themselves, and if this year is any indication, we might still not know how low their floor could be.

How can the Kraken possibly turn this around? That’s the question they’ll have to answer, and you can bet there’ll be more than just one person asking it.

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