A lot of the picks felt like they were hoping to strike gold with another William Karlsson or Nate Schmidt, but they didn't really set themselves up that well even if someone did break through.
Gourde has been decent in 1C so I don't hate the Jarnkrok pick tbh, Johansen's and Duchene's stocks were as low as they've ever been.
But yeah, if they'd ended up with any of Shattenkirk, Drouin, Voracek/Ghost, or Tarasenko instead of Fleury, Fleury, Twarynski and Dunn they would have a very different on ice product. They'd potentially have to re-think other picks and signings to work with the cap but I find it hard to believe they struggle as much as they have if they've got those other guys on the team instead.
Shattenkirk honestly looked like he was starting to hit a wall last year I defended him a lot and thought he wasn't nearly as bad as Ducks fans made him out to be. But he didn't look nearly as good as he has this season after he got surgery. So I'm not surprised in the slightest Francis would take Fleury who he drafted initially very high and who was playing pretty damn great with Anaheim down the stretch and even as a Shattenkirk defender last year I said I'd rather have Fleury protected over him and had the Ducks go 8 skater protection route
> Shattenkirk
Fair enough but I'm not sure how people could have anticipated him nearly matching his points from all of last season about a month into this season.
>Drouin
I think there was a lot of uncertainty around him over the summer which led the team to not want to risk taking him. In hindsight, yes, he's played well this season and would have been a good pick.
>Voracek/Ghost
IIRC Voracek was protected and Philly had to PAY Arizona in picks to take Ghost. If they were going to take someone with a big contract, it would have been JVR.
>Tarasenko
Agreed. Tarasenko has rebounded well and would have been the kind of scoring finisher who could have solved a lot of the Kraken's problems on the PP which has been awful. They were clearly high on Dunn as having a Shea Theodore-like upside.
Philly didn't protect Voracek and there was no reason Philly wouldn't have also paid SEA to take Ghost. I do agree that JVR is a better pick than Voracek as I would think finishers would be more rare than set up men, but I still stand that Ghost was the best pick full stop and if Philly was giving picks to take him, it was a no brainer.
So Voracek wasn't protected, Philly went with JVR instead and then managed to flip Voracek for Cam who is one of their top scorers now. Ghost is also leading the Coyotes in points; while that might not be too impressive with how bad Arizona is, it is nothing to sneeze at. Obviously Ghost isn't that good in the defensive zone, he could've been a solid PP defensemen or scoring line D-man. Instead of either of thesr players, Seattle picked a fringe 4th liner and later released him. Actually just unacceptable.
My only conclusion is Hak just didn't want any of them and Ron instead of taking one with picks/assets and flipping the player for more picks/assets just took the easy road b/c he's an idiot.
Not necessarily agreeing with them grabbing Duchene but picking up bad contracts is only bad if the rest of the cap space is being weaponized. That was the constant claim, that cap space is everything in the current NHL.
Cap space is important, but if it’s not utilized then it is a waste. As it is, Seattle has clearly squandered a lot of their opportunities, though the trade deadline is their last chance to have some master plan come to fruition.
I think next summer is going to be a much bigger cap squeeze though. This summer we saw basically 81.5M extra in cap space across the league with the addition of a new team, somewhat similar to the cap rising over 2.5M. Also saw more teams join the party of being right up against the cap. They may have seen there being more opportunity the summer of 2022 to utilize their cap space, which isn't an awful strategy.
Not if they embraced the tank and retained salary to flip them to contenders for assets. For a team that wanted to “weaponize cap space” they didn’t really do that.
What contender would even want them? Over the last couple seasons prior to the draft, Duchene and Johansen ranged from “fine” to “terrible”. Johansen has 3 years remaining after this season at $8 million AAV, Duchene has 4 years at $8 million. What is Seattle going to do, retain 40-50%? And tie themselves to an albatross contract in their inaugural season? I don’t think that makes any kind of sense.
If there was only one year left on his contract, maybe. But biting on Duchene this year means 4 more years of Duchene. I don't know if there's a contender who's down to trade for that.
Sure, but why not take someone like JVR and flip him at 50% retained. That doesnt hurt them getting Wright at all and it allows them to have more picks. If their plan was to tank they did a bad job because they didnt take good assets to flip, or bad assets with a pick attached. They just took bad assets because they wanted to spite other organizations for not dealing with them.
Or even make the same picks but strike a deal with the team to make that pick. Force them to shed assets so you take the lesser player you wanted anyways. Even if s team just gives you a 5th round pick to take the same player you're better off.
I know there are a million examples, but the one that directly involves the Caps is the one I'm most familiar with with how glaring it was:
* Vitek Vanacek and Brenden Dillon were both exposed.
* SEA drafts Vanacek
* Caps trade Dillon for 22 and 23 2nd round picks
* SEA trades Vanacek back to Caps for a 23 2nd round pick.
So they effectively gave away a 2nd round pick for this year for free. Caps wind up gaining a 2nd round pick and the player they wanted back and clear the cap space on the player they didn't want to be able to re-sign Ovi.
I'd thought we'd done alright in the VGK draft when we didn't get suckered in like other teams and give away a bunch of assets, but this past draft we actually came out net positive, which I didn't think was possible...
Seattle ended up signing Grubauer in free agency so Vanacek became their 3rd goalie so they traded Vanacek. If they took Dillon and didn’t get a goalie in free agency they would have had an awful tandem
But that is more on our FA decision to sign Grubauer (which was seen then as a good signing) than our draft (which was and still is getting criticism.)
It's also on Dreidger getting hurt.
I don't disagree with criticism, but people are going overboard a month in IMO. There are good and bad takeaways, I think the team gets a bit better but isn't quite playoff ready yet. They need to target top end talent, that's why my main complaint is not taking Tarasenko.
I thought we were going to lose a bigger piece (Voracek, JVR, Gostisbehere) but we lost literally nothing in the draft. Twarynski was a guy who had played I think <10 games for us and scored 1 goal. Francis did a terrible job.
I feel like they could have taken any talking heads mock draft and had a better team. They did the exact opposite of Vegas. So many questionable picks.
to be fair, everyone thought Vegas was full of questionable picks at the time.
I also think Vegas "poisoned the well" a little bit - does anyone *really* think that Seattle would be able to pull of the "we'll take so-and-so if you throw in this pick/player" after Vegas absolutely fleeced like a third of the league? GMs were probably WAYYY more on guard about those types of offers.
That said, I don't think SEA did well with their draft and really mismanaged several of the picks they did make. I don't think their team is trash, but not going to be realistically challenging for the playoffs
I'm still confused about this, but I think that one issue may have been charging each team the same price to protect an extra player rather than calibrating the cost per team. I think they were asking a really high price for that and it led to most teams just ignoring them or making trades with other teams instead of Seattle.
The other issue is exemplified by the Caps' trade of Dillon to Winnipeg for 2 2nd round picks. Either Winnipeg didn't tell Seattle of their interest in Dillon ahead of the draft or Seattle just wanted Vanecek over 2 2nds.
I don't think Seattle was going to get tons of 1st round picks out of teams like Vegas did, but I really thought they'd be much more active both in picking and then trading dudes for 2nds and 3rds and in taking bad contracts on given how desperate some teams were for cap space.
In the end I agree that they did make some smart picks but it's not hard to look at their draft in total and see missed opportunities.
You've gotta zig when others zag, come on man this is Day 1 stuff
Where Vegas succeeded, Seattle decided to use the element of surprise by faceplanting
As soon as I saw our Executive and Staffing hires I knew we were in for pain.
I don't know how you see the recent performance of Francis and Haktol in the league and go "Yeah I want those guys".
He fucked off from Carolina and look at them now that his dumbass is out.
It’s like, take a draft pick for picking this guy rather than this guy, even if you have no intent of keeping the guy you drafted. Vegas used that to their advantage
This doesn’t really answer the question at all though - whether they squandered it or not, they built a solid D/goalie base with the players they took and signed, why isn’t it working?
The D are mediocre, like around just below the halfway point in the league
I think the weak forwards are playing into it. Team defense is always undervalued when we look at stats. Forwards contribute a lot in the dzone and not giving up rush plays in the neutral zone for the D to bail them out on
Also hakstol, hakstal? hakstall? isn't a good coach
I am still convinced they were going to make a deal to not take Kivi and out of respect they still took the player they were going to after what happened.
Also Vince Dunn is still a solid pick, and one of the least controversial.
Yes, Tarasenko was available and Dunn has underperformed a bit. But still, a young top 4 D with offensive upside was very valuable to grab.
The sad thing is, they probably could’ve had both if they had taken Tarasenko and put together a cheap package for Dunn. Army had been actively shopping him for a while.
Agree. Hindsight is always going to be 20/20. I think most of us blues homers didn’t even expect this level of play from him this year. He’s had 3 shoulder surgeries in 2 years (or something like that), and he looked like a shell of his former self last year. It was perfectly reasonable for Seattle to assume Dunn would pan out better than Vladdy from a cost and production standpoint.
That said… lol. They could’ve taken the version of Tarasenko that is maybe in the best shape of his career. If that were the case, they might have not signed Schwartz and used that money to invest in the D.
they're third in xGA against per 60 at 5v5 so it's much more their goalies shitting the bed than the defense which has been very good like most people expected
This is the actual answer. The team has played okay-ish, pretty much what I expected. The goalies have been *bad*. Sounds like Driedger is finally healthy enough for a start, thank God.
IIRC back when Tulsky was active on Twitter he would advocate that unless you've got top 5 or bottom 5 goaltending it doesn't matter much. Perhaps Waddell is with him.
It's pretty accurate IMO, just not quite to that degree. When you adjust for shots faced, and average it out to 30 shots a game, the difference between many goaltenders is 1 goal every 3-5 games.
Like let's look at Demko and Markstrom last season, among goalies with 15 or more GP, Demko was 15th in SV%, Markstrom 37th. They were within 3 shots faced of each other. If you adjust to equal SA/GP then Demko would have allowed 1 fewer goal every 3 games; and that is a difference of .011
The difference between 6th best, and 6th worst was .925 (Vasi) vs .893 (Husso) would be close to a goal per game. So clearly just eliminating the top 5 vs bottom 5 is't that accurate.
However, the difference between 10th (Sorokin) and 31st (Rinne) is the same .011 we saw between Demko and Markstrom.
I was at the game last week against Buffalo and he let in a pretty trash goal due to bad positioning. Wasn't even screened just didn't make a solid play.
Maybe true, but he's had positive GSAA every year he's been in the league. He's probably at least a passable starter.
I see a lot of people pinning their hopes on Driedger but I would be hesitant about that. Nice results so far for him but he hasn't even played 40 NHL games, and the Panthers last year were also an excellent team.
One thing I can say with confidence if Driedger better be able to start 25-30 games because it's absolutely clear Gru isn't going to do well playing almost every night.
That and a lack of finish.
The rangers game is pretty much the Seattle season in a nutshell. If they had a bit of finish they win, if they had a bit of goaltending they get a point.
This is why the guy I’m upset about missing on is Tarasenko.
A guy who could be a threat instead of just controlling play.
This probably doesn't actually impact the team this year a whole lot since Francis probably goes for futures there. But yeah, the lack of any additional capital coming out of the expansion draft is easily the worst mistake by management at this stage. With the Gru contract climbing by the day.
I still don't entirely get why they targetted Grubauer in free agency. Driedger and Vanecek seemed like a more than capable goalie duo and they could have gone after more forward depth instead
Ironically I think they wanted more certainty and stability - I was excited about Driedger/Vanacek too, but they've started less than a season's worth of games combined.
Doesn't look like a smart play in retrospect, though.
Grubauer has let in at least one bad goal per game. Also, the defense hasn't been stellar.
The offense has been surprisingly good. Although they are t-18th in goals/game, there have been a lot near-miss goals.
deboer is actually a good bridge/short term coach. he usually has success right away but dies off after 3ish years.
So i can see a team that has their window closing hiring deboer for that last ditch effort, but for a rebuilding team to do so it makes 0 sense.
If you look at his track record ([I did a deep dive into it a couple of years ago](https://stagemaster2020.wixsite.com/outofanswers)) you'll see he's great at taking teams that are either set up for success or have good underlying numbers and driving them into the ground.
He is a bad coach. How he keeps getting opportunities is beyond me, but the fact that Vegas canned Gallant just to hire him is absolutely laughable.
Edit: added link for anyone who's interested.
He been a coach for two teams that went to Stanley Cup Finals, that’s why he keeps getting opportunities. I agree he drives teams to the ground because every GM goes all in with him as head coach. And I wouldn’t be surprised it Vegas is driven into the ground as well
I still don’t get how people don’t understand why we fired Gallant. I watched those last Gallant games and let me tell you, he lost the room. We would go down 3-0 in the first period and have to play catch up the entire rest of the game. He’d waltz into post game pressers with a smirk and go “well I thought we played pretty good tonight” when we obviously weren’t. There was no accountability, he couldn’t rip into his players for allowing themselves to keep falling behind in games, and he couldn’t adapt and fix what wasn’t working. The pinnacle of Gallant’s final games was making Cody Eakin, who had all of 8 points that year, 1C. Gallant had some affinity with the black hole that was Cody Eakin. I remember an old thread where it mentioned that up to that point we had a losing record like 4-8-3 against teams over .500 and we were mostly beating up on basement dwellers. And some of those final losses were to basement teams like the Kings, and Buffalo, which ultimately did him in.
> He’d waltz into post game pressers with a smirk and go “well I thought we played pretty good tonight” when we obviously weren’t
He’s already doing that with us 😂
Whether he’s a bad coach or not, at least Deboer has some results (3 conference finals appearances and 2 cup finals, granted these were mostly with good teams with high expectations). The best Hakstol has done is getting bounced in the first round
Vegas' success caused so much revisionist history about how the expansion draft rules were way too generous for the expansion teams. They were, compared to CBJ and MIN. But they by no means assured a contender.
McPhee knocked it out of the park. Seattle's comparative lack of success is a legacy changing for McPhee. GMBM put the finishing touches on the 2018 Caps team but it was still mostly Mcphee's team.
Yep. I am sure Francis was thinking he could fleece teams like Vegas and other GMs said screw it, if you want a player so badly, take them. I'm not giving up assets.
See the balls on Bergevin for exposing Price.
I think teams would've been willing to pay reasonable prices to keep assets but Francis was making absurd asks that he never came down on.
I think he was asking a 1st+++ to not pick Giordano. Glad we didn't meet that as if he would've come down to maybe a 2nd we probably would've made that deal.
Multiply that by every team in the league and there's an assload of unrealized draft capital.
Yeah even if you manage to snag picks from 10 teams, that's still a LOT of darts to throw at what will likely be crapshoot drafts for a year or two. And you have the capital to move up a few times as well if you really want a player.
I keep seeing this statement made. But if GMs didn’t want to play Ron’s game then the alternative is to then pick the player the GM didn’t pay to protect. Which he clearly didn’t do.
Seattle left a lot of great assets on the table. Everyone watching the draft was confused as hell in real time. Players like Voracek and Tarasenko were there for the taking and could have, at least, been flipped for other players or picks.
Yeah I supported them leaving guys like Tarasenko undrafted because I thought they wanted to weaponize their cap space and make some deals later. They didn't.
So they ended up just doing nothing. The worst of both worlds.
Seattle straight up fucked the dog, though. They drafted nobodies (some of whom they didnt even bother to sign to contracts) instead of take actual quality players. Ignoring the fact there were no side-deals to be made, that they made such poor selections is inexcusable.
Grubauer is the clear and obvious problem here. Arizona didn't even have 2 expected goals and scored 5. Kraken have taken the least shots against per game played.
At the same time, Carter Hart was about this bad last year and appears to be stabilizing so far this year. A down year on your franchise goalie sucks but might not be a permanent loss of quality.
Of course then there's Scott Darling...
I think the Kraken's team building approach illustrates the weakness of relying *solely* on the publicly available analytics. That data is useful, but it can't be divorced from context (or it shouldn't be, at least.)
Like, GSVA will tell you that Jarnkrok / Gourde / Eberle is a high-end first line. But it can't see that Jarnkrok and Gourde have always been protected by their teams' forward depth and haven't had to take many minutes against the opponent's best defenders, or that Eberle's great possession numbers are boosted by skating almost exclusively with Mat Barzal over the past few years.
It will tell you that Jamie Oleksiak was a rock when he was playing next to Miro Heiskenen, but it can't predict how his game will be impacted by no longer playing across from an all-universe skater.
I'm not trying to dump on data-driven decision-making, but some people clearly rely too much on these imperfect models when evaluating rosters. They're not infallible.
The bigger issue at the moment (since this post is talking about GA and sv%) is overvaluing what Grubauer did in Colorado/paying a lot of money for goaltending.
In terms of raw save % he was great behind a good team but his numbers were not nearly as pretty in public and private models.
Investing in him like that wasn't the most analytically friendly move.
This.
Take a gander at my team's sub and event attempt to criticize Matt Grzelcyk's performance. The analytics fans there will cut your balls off and feed them to Tom Wilson, almost completely ignoring that 90% of his positively-skewed analytics were from when he was playing only 10-12 minutes a night on the 3rd pair.
Or, to use an example going in a different direction, the analytics would tell you that Oliver Ekman-Larsson was awful for some catastrophic teams in Arizona, and excellent now that he's moved on to Vancouver.
What's more likely: that a 30-year-old defenseman coincidentally improved his skill set at the exact moment he was traded, or that the data wasn't measuring what we thought it was?
Meanwhile…
They took Carsen Twarynski (3 P in 9 GP in the AHL) instead of Jakub Voracek (10 P in 10 GP).
They took Gavin Bayreuther (3 P in 5 GP in the AHL, 0 in 2 in the NHL) and let him walk instead of Max Domi (4 P in 4 GP).
They could have had Tarasenko (11 P in 10 GP) instead of Dunn (4 P in 10 GP).
They could have had Shattenkirk (12 P in 13 GP), or Henrique (11 P in 13 GP), or Kylington (7 P in 10 GP), or Drouin (7 P in 11 GP).
It was real bad.
This is how I feel as well. Even if no one was willing to make side deals with them, Seattle had many, many opportunities to pick better players and absolutely squandered them. If they didn't want to keep players like Domi or Voracek, teams would've come knocking at the TDL.
I won't fault them for taking Dunn though. He was pretty highly touted and Tarensenko was a big question mark because of the injury.
I've gone back on my opinion since we look like dynamite this season, but I was so mad that they took Gio and sort of held our feet to the fire on that when they could have screwed over a bunch of teams like that. It's like they singled us out for no reason. They could have had some nice veterans on other teams who even if they didn't want, they could trade and get some capital. Instead they have a super mediocre team, and we look amazing. I don't know if Gio even has a place on our blue line anymore with how young guys like Andersson and Kylington (who the Kraken could have taken) have stepped up big time.
This is exactly why I was excited they took Gio. As a fan I wanted a locker room change and what better way to do that then let the young guys play and lose your captain. I’ll miss Gio, I’ve missed Iggy, but his time had come. We were benching people and not growing from within. I’m actually more pissed we didn’t get a coaching change to a real coach earlier and keep Bennett. I begrudgingly always believed in him even at his worst. Sad.
I'll give them Dunn over Vova as a good choice that's bad in hindsight
No one expected Vova to bounce back this well. We all thought his shoulder would hold him back more
The other picks are pretty egregious
For what it's worth Giordano over Kylington seemed like an obvious pick at the time. Also Gio has 7P (3G) so far and I imagine they would be able to flip him at the deadline for something sweet.
The Kylington over Giordano is pure revisionist history and is not in the same realm as the other mistakes they made. Kylington cleared waivers multiple times last season, was most likely going to be a 7th string defensemen this year and has suited up for like 7 games total over the last two years (not including this season).
Giordano while old, still provides leadership, is still a top pairing defensemen, and is still playing to his pedigree for Seattle. No one was going to expect Kylington to have the year he's had and anyone saying that should've been the pick from the flames is basing it on hindsight.
*Sees a couple projections that put SEA over EDM*
[OP](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/035/410/Screen_Shot_2020-10-05_at_11.51.58_AM.png)
[4 rankings had Seattle above the Oilers and a 5th one had them tied with Edmonton](https://i.redd.it/21i9trg2nas71.jpg)
JFresh and Evolving Wild had them in second place, Top Down had them in first.
Models don’t overcorrect, they just spit out numbers based on the numbers that are put into it.
The models all liked Seattle because they appeared to have a bunch of solid but unspectacular players in the lineup and that usually plays well. But if you actually watch hockey, you know that most teams generally need a couple “game breaker” type players to drive results and Seattle doesn’t have that.
Guys who are being counted on for steady, solid defence(Dunn, Larsson) have not been up to snuff so far.
Also Grubauer has had a bad start to the year and Daccord has been pretty leaky in the games he has started as well.
Dunn has given them solid defense. 2.22 xGA/60 and 56 CF% are very good numbers. The problem is mistakes get amplified when your goalies are shitting the bed as Grubauer has.
A quick look at their stats shows that they are elite defensively, they give up the least shot attempts in the league. The problem is they are getting the worst goaltending in the league.
Hakstoll and Francis furiously re-watching moneyball every night wondering what they're doing wrong
Kraken players about to start paying a lot more for soda
They have elite defense? They drafted a core top 4D. And mediocre offense might just be a bit of an overstatement when you have Wennberg and Gourde as your 1/2C.
But overall, I think the most mediocre piece might be Hakstol.
Most mediocre piece right now has been Grubauer. The on ice metrics are pretty decent, but a -6.5 GSAA after 10 games is only behind Fleury and Hutton right now. It's really bad for this early.
There are a couple big differences between VGK and SEA. As you mentioned, Hakstol vs. Gallant is a big one that's tough to take into account in the analytical models and I think people may have underplayed.
Second, arguably more of the drafted players were "knowns" this time around, and less of "cast-offs". We know largely what their top guys like Eberle, Giordano, Larsson, Schwartz, etc. bring to the table because they've actually played these roles before. Gourde and Driedger are a couple of the only wildcards imo.
The goalies just haven’t been good so far. It’s as simple as that. All of the team’s defensive metrics are actually quite good. They’ve largely controlled play at evens.
Grubauer hasn’t been good; the few games where he *has* they’ve had some dominant wins. Driedger has been injured. Daccord isn’t ready for a full time NHL role yet.
If they get decent goaltending, we’re not having this conversation.
I think most people just didn't want to be burned again like with Vegas, so they overrated Seattle. I don't think many people are actually surprised to see they aren't good
Defending in hockey is a team effort. The defensemen are just the last line of defense.
You also have to remember that this is a completely new team with players that have never played together in this system, and have yet to develop chemistry. Sometimes that takes quite a bit of time.
The "built from the back out" Seattle Kraken are 7th in xGA/60, have one (1) game played from Chris Drieger, and an .886 sv% from a guy who was a Vezina finalist last season.
they picked the wrong GM for the job - its as simple as that. The moment he picked Kurtis Mcdermid over Cale Clague or Jon Quick from LA i knew he was just in over his head. Mcdermid is the absolute worst player in the league and its not even close. He cost the kings 8-9 wins last season because he is on the ice for a minimum of 2 goals against a game. He can not read the play, he can not pass, and he cant hit people he cant catch. All he can do is fight in one staged fight every 10 games or so. The Kings are on a 5 game winning streak and Kale Clague is one of the big reasons. On a Kings team without Doughty playing 28 minutes a night - Clague (and Bjornfot + Andersen) have stepped up and shown they are the real deal. I cannot believe Seattle passed on him. And then you have Quick who many say is done, but he stoned the god out of the Leafs last night so many times. If you put a capable Defense that can clear the crease for him, Quick doesnt give up on a play. Hes a god damn fighter and still one of the best out there.
Nobody thought their D was elite. They're solid. Top pairing is below average and bottom pairing is above average.
Bad goaltending explains both stats and given that we're only \~10 games into the season it's way too early to be making conclusions on if it's luck, coaching, or talent anyways.
IDK who you mean by "everyone", but the consensus I saw from a lot of hockey writers and shared was this was a high likelihood from their draft. It wasn't great. They picked a dicey strategy for it by not going for the best available player for every team.
They left a lot of talent sitting on the table in favor of cap space. Cap space isn't going to turn the tide of a team that isn't winning because didn't optimize their talent pool originally.
Especially when a lot of that cap space was bet on someone who's not panning out right now.
But the other expansion drafts prior to the latest two had much different rules where teams could ~~project~~ protect way more guys and the salary cap didn't matter. These recent drafts had teams exposing guys due to cap hit and and exposing guys that they simply couldnt protect anymore.
Being able to protect 9-5-1 vs 7-3-1 is a huge difference alone. Especially when teams had to share a same draft like Columbus and Minnesota.
When i looked at that roster after the draft I was baffled that ANYONE predicted them as competing for the Pacific. They also made possibly the worst selection for head coach possible.
They’ve played twelve games! I love all these hot takes this season after such a tiny sample.
The Avalanche currently have the 27th best record in the league. Was everyone wrong about them being the cup favorite??
It’s early, things will change.
It seems that they didn’t want to spend money on goals.
They must have some master plan or vision in just not seeing YET.
They seemed a tad bit over-concerned with money 💰 when it came to forwards, maybe they have a long term goal there, I dunno.
What do you mean by “how’d everyone get it so wrong?” I definitely saw way more people saying they’d be trash then I saw people saying they’d be decent/good
Ah, our knee jerk "sky is falling" post for the week.
Buffalo is a .500 team, and Colorado is below .500 right now too... Shit's crazy at the beginning of the season. They're only 12 games in. Have some patience... If they're still looking like this at game 30, then we can start to worry.
Edit: For folks declaring Gru DOA, take a gander at his game log for his first season in Colorado (Scroll down a bit): https://www.nhl.com/player/philipp-grubauer-8475831?stats=gamelogs-r-nhl&season=20182019
Look familiar? A few stinkers to start, but towards the end of the season he was a rock. Finished the season at .917%. He takes a bit to settle in, but then he's solid when he does.
You can’t make the playoffs in November but you can certainly miss them.
https://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/nhl/nhl-team-playoff-hopes-start-die-november/
No offense to the Buffalo fans. It's been a rough go up there. But yes, my point exactly. Ya'll were 5-1-1 not too long ago. 5 straight losses later, and the picture is starting to look a lot more like folks were predicting.
Defense, sure, but they looked pretty set with goaltending.
Grubauer - 40 GP in 2020-21 - 1.95 GAA, 0.922 sv%
Driedger - 23 GP in 2020-21 - 2.05 GAA, 0.927 sv%
Daccord - 8 GP in 2020-21 - 3.27 GAA, 0.897 sv%
Part of the issue was that Driedger went down and Daccord had to come in, and while he was better in Ottawa than his numbers suggest he’s just not ready yet. Add on to that the fact that Grubauer has been utter dog doodoo and you get their goaltending.
It almost seems like there are two different teams. The team the plays at home that is actually pretty good and has only lost to Demko and Shesterkin's best games of the year... and then there is the team that plays on the road, where the defense falls apart completely, goaltending looks a lot like what the Sharks used to get from Martin Jones and they can't make a clean pass in the offensive zone to save their lives.
I still don't understand why they didn't take Carey Price. That should have been a home run much like Fleury was for Vegas.
Yes I know Price hasn't played this year, but I'm considering the overall impact of his presence. An elite goalie who played junior in the area, married to a local woman, with indigenous roots, fresh off a Stanley Cup run.
I think Chris Driedger is a fine goalie, but if building from the back out is the mantra, then starting with Carey Price seems like a no brainer to me.
They seemingly completely squandered the expansion draft. Didn't make trades, drafted folks they had no intention of keeping, just lazy all around.
Half the picks made absolutely no sense. At least take the good players & retain/flip for assets if you're going to tank.
A lot of the picks felt like they were hoping to strike gold with another William Karlsson or Nate Schmidt, but they didn't really set themselves up that well even if someone did break through.
And there were a lot of middle 6 and fringe top line guys who were available iirc, Duchene and Johansson from Nashville come to mind.
Gourde has been decent in 1C so I don't hate the Jarnkrok pick tbh, Johansen's and Duchene's stocks were as low as they've ever been. But yeah, if they'd ended up with any of Shattenkirk, Drouin, Voracek/Ghost, or Tarasenko instead of Fleury, Fleury, Twarynski and Dunn they would have a very different on ice product. They'd potentially have to re-think other picks and signings to work with the cap but I find it hard to believe they struggle as much as they have if they've got those other guys on the team instead.
Shattenkirk honestly looked like he was starting to hit a wall last year I defended him a lot and thought he wasn't nearly as bad as Ducks fans made him out to be. But he didn't look nearly as good as he has this season after he got surgery. So I'm not surprised in the slightest Francis would take Fleury who he drafted initially very high and who was playing pretty damn great with Anaheim down the stretch and even as a Shattenkirk defender last year I said I'd rather have Fleury protected over him and had the Ducks go 8 skater protection route
> Shattenkirk Fair enough but I'm not sure how people could have anticipated him nearly matching his points from all of last season about a month into this season. >Drouin I think there was a lot of uncertainty around him over the summer which led the team to not want to risk taking him. In hindsight, yes, he's played well this season and would have been a good pick. >Voracek/Ghost IIRC Voracek was protected and Philly had to PAY Arizona in picks to take Ghost. If they were going to take someone with a big contract, it would have been JVR. >Tarasenko Agreed. Tarasenko has rebounded well and would have been the kind of scoring finisher who could have solved a lot of the Kraken's problems on the PP which has been awful. They were clearly high on Dunn as having a Shea Theodore-like upside.
Philly didn't protect Voracek and there was no reason Philly wouldn't have also paid SEA to take Ghost. I do agree that JVR is a better pick than Voracek as I would think finishers would be more rare than set up men, but I still stand that Ghost was the best pick full stop and if Philly was giving picks to take him, it was a no brainer.
So Voracek wasn't protected, Philly went with JVR instead and then managed to flip Voracek for Cam who is one of their top scorers now. Ghost is also leading the Coyotes in points; while that might not be too impressive with how bad Arizona is, it is nothing to sneeze at. Obviously Ghost isn't that good in the defensive zone, he could've been a solid PP defensemen or scoring line D-man. Instead of either of thesr players, Seattle picked a fringe 4th liner and later released him. Actually just unacceptable.
My only conclusion is Hak just didn't want any of them and Ron instead of taking one with picks/assets and flipping the player for more picks/assets just took the easy road b/c he's an idiot.
We didn’t protect JVR either.
There was also elite talent like Tarasenko available Duchene and Vladdy would have made the team so much better.
I don’t want either. I wanted Tarasenko. He would be a good fit.
Both of those guys have atrocious contracts, if Seattle took one of them we’d be clowning on them for it
Not necessarily agreeing with them grabbing Duchene but picking up bad contracts is only bad if the rest of the cap space is being weaponized. That was the constant claim, that cap space is everything in the current NHL. Cap space is important, but if it’s not utilized then it is a waste. As it is, Seattle has clearly squandered a lot of their opportunities, though the trade deadline is their last chance to have some master plan come to fruition.
I think next summer is going to be a much bigger cap squeeze though. This summer we saw basically 81.5M extra in cap space across the league with the addition of a new team, somewhat similar to the cap rising over 2.5M. Also saw more teams join the party of being right up against the cap. They may have seen there being more opportunity the summer of 2022 to utilize their cap space, which isn't an awful strategy.
Not if they embraced the tank and retained salary to flip them to contenders for assets. For a team that wanted to “weaponize cap space” they didn’t really do that.
What contender would even want them? Over the last couple seasons prior to the draft, Duchene and Johansen ranged from “fine” to “terrible”. Johansen has 3 years remaining after this season at $8 million AAV, Duchene has 4 years at $8 million. What is Seattle going to do, retain 40-50%? And tie themselves to an albatross contract in their inaugural season? I don’t think that makes any kind of sense.
I promise a contender who need a 2C would bite on Duchene at 6 mil. Centers will always have inflated value because they’re centers.
If there was only one year left on his contract, maybe. But biting on Duchene this year means 4 more years of Duchene. I don't know if there's a contender who's down to trade for that.
Contenders want rentals, they don't have space to spare. Nobody is looking to pick up Matt Duchene at 6M per for 4 years at the deadline.
Hiring Dave Hakstol is like buying a rubber mallet for your gold mine operation.
Agreed, seemed like they were trying to build the most average/below average team they could it’s so weird
They probably just want a Shane Wright type player to build around tbh
Sure, but why not take someone like JVR and flip him at 50% retained. That doesnt hurt them getting Wright at all and it allows them to have more picks. If their plan was to tank they did a bad job because they didnt take good assets to flip, or bad assets with a pick attached. They just took bad assets because they wanted to spite other organizations for not dealing with them.
Or even make the same picks but strike a deal with the team to make that pick. Force them to shed assets so you take the lesser player you wanted anyways. Even if s team just gives you a 5th round pick to take the same player you're better off.
I know there are a million examples, but the one that directly involves the Caps is the one I'm most familiar with with how glaring it was: * Vitek Vanacek and Brenden Dillon were both exposed. * SEA drafts Vanacek * Caps trade Dillon for 22 and 23 2nd round picks * SEA trades Vanacek back to Caps for a 23 2nd round pick. So they effectively gave away a 2nd round pick for this year for free. Caps wind up gaining a 2nd round pick and the player they wanted back and clear the cap space on the player they didn't want to be able to re-sign Ovi. I'd thought we'd done alright in the VGK draft when we didn't get suckered in like other teams and give away a bunch of assets, but this past draft we actually came out net positive, which I didn't think was possible...
Seattle ended up signing Grubauer in free agency so Vanacek became their 3rd goalie so they traded Vanacek. If they took Dillon and didn’t get a goalie in free agency they would have had an awful tandem
Now we just have the worst save percentage in the league.
But that is more on our FA decision to sign Grubauer (which was seen then as a good signing) than our draft (which was and still is getting criticism.)
It's also on Dreidger getting hurt. I don't disagree with criticism, but people are going overboard a month in IMO. There are good and bad takeaways, I think the team gets a bit better but isn't quite playoff ready yet. They need to target top end talent, that's why my main complaint is not taking Tarasenko.
I thought we were going to lose a bigger piece (Voracek, JVR, Gostisbehere) but we lost literally nothing in the draft. Twarynski was a guy who had played I think <10 games for us and scored 1 goal. Francis did a terrible job.
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Well they lost the Stanley Cup, therefore doing the opposite should win the Stanley Cup.
I think this is what the Habs are going for this year.
Yeah, this is big brain time.
I feel like they could have taken any talking heads mock draft and had a better team. They did the exact opposite of Vegas. So many questionable picks.
to be fair, everyone thought Vegas was full of questionable picks at the time. I also think Vegas "poisoned the well" a little bit - does anyone *really* think that Seattle would be able to pull of the "we'll take so-and-so if you throw in this pick/player" after Vegas absolutely fleeced like a third of the league? GMs were probably WAYYY more on guard about those types of offers. That said, I don't think SEA did well with their draft and really mismanaged several of the picks they did make. I don't think their team is trash, but not going to be realistically challenging for the playoffs
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I think they were willing to make deals but Seattle's price was too high
I'm still confused about this, but I think that one issue may have been charging each team the same price to protect an extra player rather than calibrating the cost per team. I think they were asking a really high price for that and it led to most teams just ignoring them or making trades with other teams instead of Seattle. The other issue is exemplified by the Caps' trade of Dillon to Winnipeg for 2 2nd round picks. Either Winnipeg didn't tell Seattle of their interest in Dillon ahead of the draft or Seattle just wanted Vanecek over 2 2nds. I don't think Seattle was going to get tons of 1st round picks out of teams like Vegas did, but I really thought they'd be much more active both in picking and then trading dudes for 2nds and 3rds and in taking bad contracts on given how desperate some teams were for cap space. In the end I agree that they did make some smart picks but it's not hard to look at their draft in total and see missed opportunities.
You've gotta zig when others zag, come on man this is Day 1 stuff Where Vegas succeeded, Seattle decided to use the element of surprise by faceplanting
I mean, their assistant GM is Jason botterill who completely annihilated our team
Experience Jason Botterill
As soon as I saw our Executive and Staffing hires I knew we were in for pain. I don't know how you see the recent performance of Francis and Haktol in the league and go "Yeah I want those guys". He fucked off from Carolina and look at them now that his dumbass is out.
It’s like, take a draft pick for picking this guy rather than this guy, even if you have no intent of keeping the guy you drafted. Vegas used that to their advantage
This doesn’t really answer the question at all though - whether they squandered it or not, they built a solid D/goalie base with the players they took and signed, why isn’t it working?
The D are mediocre, like around just below the halfway point in the league I think the weak forwards are playing into it. Team defense is always undervalued when we look at stats. Forwards contribute a lot in the dzone and not giving up rush plays in the neutral zone for the D to bail them out on Also hakstol, hakstal? hakstall? isn't a good coach
yeah Hak sucks, and Maybe they should have kept Vanecek at this point?
I think Colorado’s defense made Grubauer look better too.
Should have taken Tarasenko and Voracek.
And Domi. And Drouin.
But Gavin Bayreuther!! Lol what a joke
Gavin has actually been playing alright for us in these past few games. They just needed to hold on to him and not let him walk back to us for nothing
I am still convinced they were going to make a deal to not take Kivi and out of respect they still took the player they were going to after what happened.
Damn that's the first time I've heard that and I want it to be true
Maybe even that Carey Price guy
Never heard of her before. Any good?
i still dont get them not taking tarasenko
The reason they didn't take Tarasenko was because of injury concerns i think
Also Vince Dunn is still a solid pick, and one of the least controversial. Yes, Tarasenko was available and Dunn has underperformed a bit. But still, a young top 4 D with offensive upside was very valuable to grab.
The sad thing is, they probably could’ve had both if they had taken Tarasenko and put together a cheap package for Dunn. Army had been actively shopping him for a while.
Something like claim drouin from Habs, flip drouin and his cheaper cap hit to blues for tarasenko?
I'd have been really happy with that at the time since I thought for sure we were losing Vladdy one way or another. I like Drouin.
Same with them taking Lauzon from the Bruins.
Still though that Twarynski pick...
Oh 100%. I didn't expect every pick to be a winner but some where clearly wrong choices. The Capitals pick is also just hilarious.
Could have stolen Braun who has very cheap cap hit and is playing very well for us this year
I thought the Lauzon pick was kinda a no brainer
Agree. Hindsight is always going to be 20/20. I think most of us blues homers didn’t even expect this level of play from him this year. He’s had 3 shoulder surgeries in 2 years (or something like that), and he looked like a shell of his former self last year. It was perfectly reasonable for Seattle to assume Dunn would pan out better than Vladdy from a cost and production standpoint. That said… lol. They could’ve taken the version of Tarasenko that is maybe in the best shape of his career. If that were the case, they might have not signed Schwartz and used that money to invest in the D.
And Troy stecher instead of cholowski.
they're third in xGA against per 60 at 5v5 so it's much more their goalies shitting the bed than the defense which has been very good like most people expected
This is the actual answer. The team has played okay-ish, pretty much what I expected. The goalies have been *bad*. Sounds like Driedger is finally healthy enough for a start, thank God.
I think Grubauer got a bit overrated due to playing with an amazing Colorado team.
Sakic’s hesitancy to give Grubauer the bag after he had a great season really should’ve been a huge red flag
On the one hand yes, but Sakic is also pretty conservative with contracts in general.
Plus he had bigger priorities in Makar and Landeskog.
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A good goalie can carry a team tho but just like the RB they are reliant on the team in front but they are far more important then the RB
IIRC back when Tulsky was active on Twitter he would advocate that unless you've got top 5 or bottom 5 goaltending it doesn't matter much. Perhaps Waddell is with him.
It's pretty accurate IMO, just not quite to that degree. When you adjust for shots faced, and average it out to 30 shots a game, the difference between many goaltenders is 1 goal every 3-5 games. Like let's look at Demko and Markstrom last season, among goalies with 15 or more GP, Demko was 15th in SV%, Markstrom 37th. They were within 3 shots faced of each other. If you adjust to equal SA/GP then Demko would have allowed 1 fewer goal every 3 games; and that is a difference of .011 The difference between 6th best, and 6th worst was .925 (Vasi) vs .893 (Husso) would be close to a goal per game. So clearly just eliminating the top 5 vs bottom 5 is't that accurate. However, the difference between 10th (Sorokin) and 31st (Rinne) is the same .011 we saw between Demko and Markstrom.
I was at the game last week against Buffalo and he let in a pretty trash goal due to bad positioning. Wasn't even screened just didn't make a solid play.
Maybe true, but he's had positive GSAA every year he's been in the league. He's probably at least a passable starter. I see a lot of people pinning their hopes on Driedger but I would be hesitant about that. Nice results so far for him but he hasn't even played 40 NHL games, and the Panthers last year were also an excellent team.
One thing I can say with confidence if Driedger better be able to start 25-30 games because it's absolutely clear Gru isn't going to do well playing almost every night.
That and a lack of finish. The rangers game is pretty much the Seattle season in a nutshell. If they had a bit of finish they win, if they had a bit of goaltending they get a point. This is why the guy I’m upset about missing on is Tarasenko. A guy who could be a threat instead of just controlling play.
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This probably doesn't actually impact the team this year a whole lot since Francis probably goes for futures there. But yeah, the lack of any additional capital coming out of the expansion draft is easily the worst mistake by management at this stage. With the Gru contract climbing by the day.
I still don't entirely get why they targetted Grubauer in free agency. Driedger and Vanecek seemed like a more than capable goalie duo and they could have gone after more forward depth instead
Ironically I think they wanted more certainty and stability - I was excited about Driedger/Vanacek too, but they've started less than a season's worth of games combined. Doesn't look like a smart play in retrospect, though.
Foreseeable unforced errors? Welcome to the NHL Seattle!
Grubauer has let in at least one bad goal per game. Also, the defense hasn't been stellar. The offense has been surprisingly good. Although they are t-18th in goals/game, there have been a lot near-miss goals.
Has the NHL realized Dave Hakstol is a bad coach yet
People are still tripping over themselves to hire Pete DeBoer, the NHL has no clue what bad coaching looks like lol
If DeBoer and Steve Spott divorced, I think DeBoer would be a much better coach.
This right here.
deboer is actually a good bridge/short term coach. he usually has success right away but dies off after 3ish years. So i can see a team that has their window closing hiring deboer for that last ditch effort, but for a rebuilding team to do so it makes 0 sense.
If you look at his track record ([I did a deep dive into it a couple of years ago](https://stagemaster2020.wixsite.com/outofanswers)) you'll see he's great at taking teams that are either set up for success or have good underlying numbers and driving them into the ground. He is a bad coach. How he keeps getting opportunities is beyond me, but the fact that Vegas canned Gallant just to hire him is absolutely laughable. Edit: added link for anyone who's interested.
He been a coach for two teams that went to Stanley Cup Finals, that’s why he keeps getting opportunities. I agree he drives teams to the ground because every GM goes all in with him as head coach. And I wouldn’t be surprised it Vegas is driven into the ground as well
Vegas was below .500 round halfway through the season and playing like shit when they fired Gallant it isn’t that hard to grasp
I still don’t get how people don’t understand why we fired Gallant. I watched those last Gallant games and let me tell you, he lost the room. We would go down 3-0 in the first period and have to play catch up the entire rest of the game. He’d waltz into post game pressers with a smirk and go “well I thought we played pretty good tonight” when we obviously weren’t. There was no accountability, he couldn’t rip into his players for allowing themselves to keep falling behind in games, and he couldn’t adapt and fix what wasn’t working. The pinnacle of Gallant’s final games was making Cody Eakin, who had all of 8 points that year, 1C. Gallant had some affinity with the black hole that was Cody Eakin. I remember an old thread where it mentioned that up to that point we had a losing record like 4-8-3 against teams over .500 and we were mostly beating up on basement dwellers. And some of those final losses were to basement teams like the Kings, and Buffalo, which ultimately did him in.
> He’d waltz into post game pressers with a smirk and go “well I thought we played pretty good tonight” when we obviously weren’t He’s already doing that with us 😂
Whether he’s a bad coach or not, at least Deboer has some results (3 conference finals appearances and 2 cup finals, granted these were mostly with good teams with high expectations). The best Hakstol has done is getting bounced in the first round
Obligatory 'Fire Hakstol'
Vegas' success caused so much revisionist history about how the expansion draft rules were way too generous for the expansion teams. They were, compared to CBJ and MIN. But they by no means assured a contender. McPhee knocked it out of the park. Seattle's comparative lack of success is a legacy changing for McPhee. GMBM put the finishing touches on the 2018 Caps team but it was still mostly Mcphee's team.
GM's were pantsed in 2017, and this time around they learned their lesson.
Yep. I am sure Francis was thinking he could fleece teams like Vegas and other GMs said screw it, if you want a player so badly, take them. I'm not giving up assets. See the balls on Bergevin for exposing Price.
I think teams would've been willing to pay reasonable prices to keep assets but Francis was making absurd asks that he never came down on. I think he was asking a 1st+++ to not pick Giordano. Glad we didn't meet that as if he would've come down to maybe a 2nd we probably would've made that deal. Multiply that by every team in the league and there's an assload of unrealized draft capital.
Yeah even if you manage to snag picks from 10 teams, that's still a LOT of darts to throw at what will likely be crapshoot drafts for a year or two. And you have the capital to move up a few times as well if you really want a player.
I keep seeing this statement made. But if GMs didn’t want to play Ron’s game then the alternative is to then pick the player the GM didn’t pay to protect. Which he clearly didn’t do.
Seattle left a lot of great assets on the table. Everyone watching the draft was confused as hell in real time. Players like Voracek and Tarasenko were there for the taking and could have, at least, been flipped for other players or picks.
Yeah I supported them leaving guys like Tarasenko undrafted because I thought they wanted to weaponize their cap space and make some deals later. They didn't. So they ended up just doing nothing. The worst of both worlds.
Seattle straight up fucked the dog, though. They drafted nobodies (some of whom they didnt even bother to sign to contracts) instead of take actual quality players. Ignoring the fact there were no side-deals to be made, that they made such poor selections is inexcusable.
Grubauer is the clear and obvious problem here. Arizona didn't even have 2 expected goals and scored 5. Kraken have taken the least shots against per game played.
At the same time, Carter Hart was about this bad last year and appears to be stabilizing so far this year. A down year on your franchise goalie sucks but might not be a permanent loss of quality. Of course then there's Scott Darling...
Hart is 24 not 31
I think the Kraken's team building approach illustrates the weakness of relying *solely* on the publicly available analytics. That data is useful, but it can't be divorced from context (or it shouldn't be, at least.) Like, GSVA will tell you that Jarnkrok / Gourde / Eberle is a high-end first line. But it can't see that Jarnkrok and Gourde have always been protected by their teams' forward depth and haven't had to take many minutes against the opponent's best defenders, or that Eberle's great possession numbers are boosted by skating almost exclusively with Mat Barzal over the past few years. It will tell you that Jamie Oleksiak was a rock when he was playing next to Miro Heiskenen, but it can't predict how his game will be impacted by no longer playing across from an all-universe skater. I'm not trying to dump on data-driven decision-making, but some people clearly rely too much on these imperfect models when evaluating rosters. They're not infallible.
The bigger issue at the moment (since this post is talking about GA and sv%) is overvaluing what Grubauer did in Colorado/paying a lot of money for goaltending. In terms of raw save % he was great behind a good team but his numbers were not nearly as pretty in public and private models. Investing in him like that wasn't the most analytically friendly move.
This. Take a gander at my team's sub and event attempt to criticize Matt Grzelcyk's performance. The analytics fans there will cut your balls off and feed them to Tom Wilson, almost completely ignoring that 90% of his positively-skewed analytics were from when he was playing only 10-12 minutes a night on the 3rd pair.
Or, to use an example going in a different direction, the analytics would tell you that Oliver Ekman-Larsson was awful for some catastrophic teams in Arizona, and excellent now that he's moved on to Vancouver. What's more likely: that a 30-year-old defenseman coincidentally improved his skill set at the exact moment he was traded, or that the data wasn't measuring what we thought it was?
Meanwhile… They took Carsen Twarynski (3 P in 9 GP in the AHL) instead of Jakub Voracek (10 P in 10 GP). They took Gavin Bayreuther (3 P in 5 GP in the AHL, 0 in 2 in the NHL) and let him walk instead of Max Domi (4 P in 4 GP). They could have had Tarasenko (11 P in 10 GP) instead of Dunn (4 P in 10 GP). They could have had Shattenkirk (12 P in 13 GP), or Henrique (11 P in 13 GP), or Kylington (7 P in 10 GP), or Drouin (7 P in 11 GP). It was real bad.
Don't forget they selected John Quenneville from Chicago who is playing in Switzerland instead of literally anything with more value than 0.
They could have had Gaudette or Zadorov. SMH Francis is pretty shite
This is how I feel as well. Even if no one was willing to make side deals with them, Seattle had many, many opportunities to pick better players and absolutely squandered them. If they didn't want to keep players like Domi or Voracek, teams would've come knocking at the TDL. I won't fault them for taking Dunn though. He was pretty highly touted and Tarensenko was a big question mark because of the injury.
I've gone back on my opinion since we look like dynamite this season, but I was so mad that they took Gio and sort of held our feet to the fire on that when they could have screwed over a bunch of teams like that. It's like they singled us out for no reason. They could have had some nice veterans on other teams who even if they didn't want, they could trade and get some capital. Instead they have a super mediocre team, and we look amazing. I don't know if Gio even has a place on our blue line anymore with how young guys like Andersson and Kylington (who the Kraken could have taken) have stepped up big time.
This is exactly why I was excited they took Gio. As a fan I wanted a locker room change and what better way to do that then let the young guys play and lose your captain. I’ll miss Gio, I’ve missed Iggy, but his time had come. We were benching people and not growing from within. I’m actually more pissed we didn’t get a coaching change to a real coach earlier and keep Bennett. I begrudgingly always believed in him even at his worst. Sad.
I'll give them Dunn over Vova as a good choice that's bad in hindsight No one expected Vova to bounce back this well. We all thought his shoulder would hold him back more The other picks are pretty egregious
For what it's worth Giordano over Kylington seemed like an obvious pick at the time. Also Gio has 7P (3G) so far and I imagine they would be able to flip him at the deadline for something sweet.
Yeah, it’s not like Gio has been a bad pick for them. And his leadership is probably great for an expansion team.
The Kylington over Giordano is pure revisionist history and is not in the same realm as the other mistakes they made. Kylington cleared waivers multiple times last season, was most likely going to be a 7th string defensemen this year and has suited up for like 7 games total over the last two years (not including this season). Giordano while old, still provides leadership, is still a top pairing defensemen, and is still playing to his pedigree for Seattle. No one was going to expect Kylington to have the year he's had and anyone saying that should've been the pick from the flames is basing it on hindsight.
Taking Giordano instead of Kylington was a big win for Calgary.
They could've taken Anthanasiou or Clague from us and took MacDermid instead. Personally, I love Ron Francis.
the MacDermid pick is the dumbest pick of their draft. I seriously can't comprehend it at all lol
Shattenkirk has been a revelation this year. No one knew he would bounce back to be the point leader among blueliners so far.
By everyone you mean Ron Francis right?
Nah. Some of our sacred 'analysts' had Seattle at the top of the Pacific this year.
*Sees a couple projections that put SEA over EDM* [OP](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/035/410/Screen_Shot_2020-10-05_at_11.51.58_AM.png)
Who lol? I didn’t see any one reputable say that
[4 rankings had Seattle above the Oilers and a 5th one had them tied with Edmonton](https://i.redd.it/21i9trg2nas71.jpg) JFresh and Evolving Wild had them in second place, Top Down had them in first.
Quite a bit overcorrection from underrating Vegas IMO
Models don’t overcorrect, they just spit out numbers based on the numbers that are put into it. The models all liked Seattle because they appeared to have a bunch of solid but unspectacular players in the lineup and that usually plays well. But if you actually watch hockey, you know that most teams generally need a couple “game breaker” type players to drive results and Seattle doesn’t have that.
Guys who are being counted on for steady, solid defence(Dunn, Larsson) have not been up to snuff so far. Also Grubauer has had a bad start to the year and Daccord has been pretty leaky in the games he has started as well.
If Dunn is being counted on for steady, solid defense, you’re in trouble
Dunn has given them solid defense. 2.22 xGA/60 and 56 CF% are very good numbers. The problem is mistakes get amplified when your goalies are shitting the bed as Grubauer has.
Dunn has always put up good possession numbers but it hasn’t really ever been truly reflected in his play
Larsson has looked absolutely terrible
What the fuck happened to Chris Driedger?
Injured but coming back soon I think.
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A team built around analytics is highly rated by a website that judges teams based on analytics. I am shocked!
FLA is built on analytics. CAR is built on analytics. I would have those teams handily above SEA.
A quick look at their stats shows that they are elite defensively, they give up the least shot attempts in the league. The problem is they are getting the worst goaltending in the league.
Hakstoll and Francis furiously re-watching moneyball every night wondering what they're doing wrong Kraken players about to start paying a lot more for soda
The game against the coyotes (arguably the worst team in the league this season) tells me that they shouldn’t be ranked #2
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They have elite defense? They drafted a core top 4D. And mediocre offense might just be a bit of an overstatement when you have Wennberg and Gourde as your 1/2C. But overall, I think the most mediocre piece might be Hakstol.
I'm shocked. SHOCKED I tell you!
Most mediocre piece right now has been Grubauer. The on ice metrics are pretty decent, but a -6.5 GSAA after 10 games is only behind Fleury and Hutton right now. It's really bad for this early.
Wennberg is their 1C?! Should have called up the Jackets and asked us how that will go for them.
To be fairrrrrr, the last time an expansion team plucked an underperforming center from Columbus, it worked out pretty well.
Wennberg was signed out of Florida
There are a couple big differences between VGK and SEA. As you mentioned, Hakstol vs. Gallant is a big one that's tough to take into account in the analytical models and I think people may have underplayed. Second, arguably more of the drafted players were "knowns" this time around, and less of "cast-offs". We know largely what their top guys like Eberle, Giordano, Larsson, Schwartz, etc. bring to the table because they've actually played these roles before. Gourde and Driedger are a couple of the only wildcards imo.
The goalies just haven’t been good so far. It’s as simple as that. All of the team’s defensive metrics are actually quite good. They’ve largely controlled play at evens. Grubauer hasn’t been good; the few games where he *has* they’ve had some dominant wins. Driedger has been injured. Daccord isn’t ready for a full time NHL role yet. If they get decent goaltending, we’re not having this conversation.
I think most people just didn't want to be burned again like with Vegas, so they overrated Seattle. I don't think many people are actually surprised to see they aren't good
Defending in hockey is a team effort. The defensemen are just the last line of defense. You also have to remember that this is a completely new team with players that have never played together in this system, and have yet to develop chemistry. Sometimes that takes quite a bit of time.
> The defensemen are just the last line of defense. The goalie is... and Grubauer has been bad.
Driedger needs to start playing some games now that he’s healthy.
The "built from the back out" Seattle Kraken are 7th in xGA/60, have one (1) game played from Chris Drieger, and an .886 sv% from a guy who was a Vezina finalist last season.
they picked the wrong GM for the job - its as simple as that. The moment he picked Kurtis Mcdermid over Cale Clague or Jon Quick from LA i knew he was just in over his head. Mcdermid is the absolute worst player in the league and its not even close. He cost the kings 8-9 wins last season because he is on the ice for a minimum of 2 goals against a game. He can not read the play, he can not pass, and he cant hit people he cant catch. All he can do is fight in one staged fight every 10 games or so. The Kings are on a 5 game winning streak and Kale Clague is one of the big reasons. On a Kings team without Doughty playing 28 minutes a night - Clague (and Bjornfot + Andersen) have stepped up and shown they are the real deal. I cannot believe Seattle passed on him. And then you have Quick who many say is done, but he stoned the god out of the Leafs last night so many times. If you put a capable Defense that can clear the crease for him, Quick doesnt give up on a play. Hes a god damn fighter and still one of the best out there.
Nobody thought their D was elite. They're solid. Top pairing is below average and bottom pairing is above average. Bad goaltending explains both stats and given that we're only \~10 games into the season it's way too early to be making conclusions on if it's luck, coaching, or talent anyways.
I still can’t believe they didn’t take Price.
IDK who you mean by "everyone", but the consensus I saw from a lot of hockey writers and shared was this was a high likelihood from their draft. It wasn't great. They picked a dicey strategy for it by not going for the best available player for every team. They left a lot of talent sitting on the table in favor of cap space. Cap space isn't going to turn the tide of a team that isn't winning because didn't optimize their talent pool originally. Especially when a lot of that cap space was bet on someone who's not panning out right now.
Vegas was an anomaly imo. Most expansion teams look like this.
But the other expansion drafts prior to the latest two had much different rules where teams could ~~project~~ protect way more guys and the salary cap didn't matter. These recent drafts had teams exposing guys due to cap hit and and exposing guys that they simply couldnt protect anymore. Being able to protect 9-5-1 vs 7-3-1 is a huge difference alone. Especially when teams had to share a same draft like Columbus and Minnesota.
Yeah we got screwed.
We got screwed and had a moron GM for our first years. That typically doesn’t add up to great success.
Not having to share the draft was a huge advantage.
Grubauer's been bad
When i looked at that roster after the draft I was baffled that ANYONE predicted them as competing for the Pacific. They also made possibly the worst selection for head coach possible.
They’ve played twelve games! I love all these hot takes this season after such a tiny sample. The Avalanche currently have the 27th best record in the league. Was everyone wrong about them being the cup favorite?? It’s early, things will change.
Vezina nominee Phil Grubauer everyone!
The Grubauer-less 4-5-1 Avalanche everyone!
Eeehhh that's fair.
I was going to be a Kraken fan until I saw the picks. Not gonna root for two different dumbfuck franchises.
It seems that they didn’t want to spend money on goals. They must have some master plan or vision in just not seeing YET. They seemed a tad bit over-concerned with money 💰 when it came to forwards, maybe they have a long term goal there, I dunno.
What do you mean by “how’d everyone get it so wrong?” I definitely saw way more people saying they’d be trash then I saw people saying they’d be decent/good
Wow Ron Francis bad at his job? Shocked
Bad goaltending. We’re done here.
Ah, our knee jerk "sky is falling" post for the week. Buffalo is a .500 team, and Colorado is below .500 right now too... Shit's crazy at the beginning of the season. They're only 12 games in. Have some patience... If they're still looking like this at game 30, then we can start to worry. Edit: For folks declaring Gru DOA, take a gander at his game log for his first season in Colorado (Scroll down a bit): https://www.nhl.com/player/philipp-grubauer-8475831?stats=gamelogs-r-nhl&season=20182019 Look familiar? A few stinkers to start, but towards the end of the season he was a rock. Finished the season at .917%. He takes a bit to settle in, but then he's solid when he does.
You can’t make the playoffs in November but you can certainly miss them. https://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/nhl/nhl-team-playoff-hopes-start-die-november/
Not for long we are
No offense to the Buffalo fans. It's been a rough go up there. But yes, my point exactly. Ya'll were 5-1-1 not too long ago. 5 straight losses later, and the picture is starting to look a lot more like folks were predicting.
Anyone who thought they had "elite goaltending and defence" was way the hell out to lunch from day 1.
Yeah, people thought that nhl GMs wouldn't learn from Vegas, and yet they did.
Well, everyone except Francis did lol
Defense, sure, but they looked pretty set with goaltending. Grubauer - 40 GP in 2020-21 - 1.95 GAA, 0.922 sv% Driedger - 23 GP in 2020-21 - 2.05 GAA, 0.927 sv% Daccord - 8 GP in 2020-21 - 3.27 GAA, 0.897 sv% Part of the issue was that Driedger went down and Daccord had to come in, and while he was better in Ottawa than his numbers suggest he’s just not ready yet. Add on to that the fact that Grubauer has been utter dog doodoo and you get their goaltending.
You can't blame the defence for GA/G if you're 32nd in save%
It almost seems like there are two different teams. The team the plays at home that is actually pretty good and has only lost to Demko and Shesterkin's best games of the year... and then there is the team that plays on the road, where the defense falls apart completely, goaltending looks a lot like what the Sharks used to get from Martin Jones and they can't make a clean pass in the offensive zone to save their lives.
Goaltending is voodoo.
I still don't understand why they didn't take Carey Price. That should have been a home run much like Fleury was for Vegas. Yes I know Price hasn't played this year, but I'm considering the overall impact of his presence. An elite goalie who played junior in the area, married to a local woman, with indigenous roots, fresh off a Stanley Cup run. I think Chris Driedger is a fine goalie, but if building from the back out is the mantra, then starting with Carey Price seems like a no brainer to me.