Better luck next year: How do the Seattle Kraken break out of this state of mediocrity?

This is a very grim situation with no easy path out of it.

Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the next team to be eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention: The Seattle Kraken.

In some ways, the Seattle Kraken were always set up, through no fault of their own, to deliver nothing but immediate disappointment.

When the Vegas Golden Knights entered the NHL as an expansion team a couple of years earlier, and then immediately went to the Stanley Cup Final in year one and became a yearly contender, it no doubt raised expectations for what the Kraken could (or should) do when they entered the league. It was always going to be unrealistic to expect a repeat of the Vegas magic.

Vegas was the perfect storm of more favorable expansion draft rules, meeting a group of 30 other general managers that mostly panicked and had no idea what to do with those rules. Because most of them learned their lessons the hard way the first time around, the Kraken were not able to feast on as many of them as Vegas did, and were ultimately not able to collect as many assets or get as many good players right at the start.

Even with that being the case, Seattle’s front office under the leadership of Ron Francis did a largely mediocre job in building its roster that initial offseason and the years that followed.

Part of that has been not getting much draft-lottery luck.

Another part of it has just been poor talent evaluation and bad roster moves.

It has all added up in to what is now one of the most mediocre team’s in the NHL.

The best players this franchise has had in the first five years of its existence are probably Jared McCann and Vince Dunn.

McCann has the top-three goal-scoring seasons in franchise history, coming in at 40, 29 and 27. He’s the only player that’s ever topped 70 points in a season, and he did it one time, and it was exactly 70 points.

The only other players to ever top 60 points in a season are Dunn (64) and Jordan Eberle (63). They have both done it one time.

As a team they’ve ranked 29th, 5th, 29th, 16th, and 28th in goals per game.

The individual player numbers (which we will get to later in this post) are even more depressing.

In terms of controlling the pace of play and scoring chances, they’ve been 19th, 11th, 16th, 29th and 31st in expected goal share during 5-on-5 play.

Their overall place in the league standings have been, in order, 30th, 12th, 25th, 27th, and 27th.

It’s just all painfully average. Bordering on bad. In some ways they are everything that old NHL expansion teams used to be, but not quite as bad or bad enough to perpetually pick in the top-two every year to at least land some long-term difference-makers.

For a large portion of the 2025-26 season the Kraken were hanging around in a watered-down Western Conference playoff race, and even in a position to add at the trade deadline. Despite the record and playoff positioning, the entire thing seemed like nothing more than smoke-and-mirrors. Their underlying numbers were dreadful. They had no offense. The entire thing was being held up by an unexpectedly strong goaltending performance in the first half of the season. Over the final month-and-a-half of the season, the house of cards collapsed and they found themselves in a familiar position. Out of the playoffs, but not at the absolute bottom of the league where they would be best positioned for a top pick. They only have a 7.5 percent chance of moving up to the No. 1 pick, only a 7.7 percent chance of moving up to the No. 2 pick and only a 0.2 percent chance of moving up to the No. 3 overall pick. Unless their lottery luck changes, it is likely to be a No. 6 or 7 overall pick and a good but not great prospect.

It’s not ideal. It’s also not a great way to break the cycle.

Breaking the cycle is not going to be easy, and nothing that happened this season suggests it is on the horizon.

Let’s talk more about it.

What went right this season