Seattle Kraken players reflect on another lost season

"We failed," Kraken captain Jordan Eberle, veteran defenseman Adam Larsson and coach Lane Lambert all said during exit interviews.

There was plenty of personal accountability Friday. First-year coach Lambert understood the group he inherited, as defenseman Brandon Montour put it, and had them playing a style of hockey that worked for them. The Kraken hung around in the playoff picture until mid-March.

But at the end of the day, those dang prognosticators were right - the Kraken finished 27th of 32 NHL teams, which was where most major news outlets placed them. And at the end of the day, how they landed there doesn't matter.

The Kraken played dull but thoroughly effective hockey for the first three-quarters of the season. It wasn't pretty, but the scores remained close. They dropped 10 of 11 games in November and December but recovered, and even improved.

"Before the break, we would make mistakes and we would get excited to try to fix them," defenseman Vince Dunn said. "To try to come out the next period - or the next shift - and change the momentum of the game. But toward the second half, the consistency level wasn't there."

By the time the Seahawks lifted the Lombardi Trophy and attention shifted to the Kraken at long last, they were spent. They returned to action in a playoff spot after the Olympics and went 7-17-2 following the break. That was the second-worst NHL record during that time.

In a playoff hungry-league and city, they wasted an opportunity.

"We took some strides, but we ultimately missed the goal here," Larsson said. "As the team moves forward, I think the guys that have been here for a while need to take a hard look in the mirror."

Thanks to a terrible overall season for the Pacific Division, Seattle came very close to slipping in anyway. The Vegas Golden Knights won the division with 95 points. That wouldn't have been enough to make the playoffs at all in 2024-25.

And yet the slide was brutal, and never-ending. Lambert looked and sounded bewildered by the lack of course-correction. No one knew how to fully describe what was happening. Eberle, too, took responsibility for his part as the captain.

"You ... try to figure out how to motivate the group and guys, and try and get everyone on the same page," Eberle said. "At the end of the day, we missed the playoffs and I failed. So you try and learn from that."

Players and coaches have to work with what they're given, and they want to make it work. They won't admit they didn't have the right pieces. But with four of five seasons of Kraken play ending in mid-April under three different coaches, part of the issue has to be structural, not lack of desire.

The Kraken recently announced they would part ways with the man who built the team, Ron Francis, when the season ended. CEO Tod Leiweke promised an audit of hockey operations, new additions and improvement.

Building from within is still part of the plan, as Seattle has struggled to attract top free-agent talent during its short history. The Kraken's homegrown players started moving up into the lineup at a steadier clip, with Berkly Catton, Ryan Winterton, Jacob Melanson and others spending half the season or more with the big club.

But those players are inherently inexperienced, and there were growing pains. There was a clear divide between the veterans and the "young guys" on Friday. Jared McCann seemed to call out the Kraken's youth, but it sounded like a more fiery version of what Lambert has been saying - experience is hard-won. Having gone through adversity is a benefit the rookies don't have. That contributed.

But most of the minutes are still given to the veterans. This core didn't give them a playoff run, again. They can't bank on it working in the future. There is urgency, at least in words.

Veterans and rookies alike could be on the move this summer, as the tone has taken a hard shift. The Kraken aren't a few small moves away from title contention. Leiweke again declined to call it a rebuild, but this franchise needs more than light tinkering.

"It's a failure of a year," Dunn said. "It's crazy because we were in it, all the way until the end. So in my eyes, it was very achievable. If something's very achievable, then it's a failure."

McCann undergoes procedure

Franchise leading scorer McCann will start his offseason in recovery for a second straight year. He said he had a procedure done Thursday in Utah "just to kind of fix some things up."

"I'm definitely on the path to getting better now," McCann said.

He's staying in Seattle and anticipates 8-10 weeks of healing before he can return to strength training. He'll work with the Kraken's medical team and expects to be ready for the 2026-27 opener in October.

It's all related to the same lower-body issue that hampered him during the second half of last season. The procedure that kept him off the ice for most of last summer didn't work as well as he'd hoped. He tried to play through it, but he missed the last three games of the Kraken season.

He missed 30 total games, the most he's sat out since the Kraken claimed him in the expansion draft. He managed his fifth straight 20-goal season, hitting that milestone April 9. And that's in spite of there being "only a handful of games" where everything felt right.

"I was able to play a little bit this year, but not as much and not to the caliber that I'm used to," he said.

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