The Kraken Added Depth. They Also Lost It.
Eeli Tolvanen's 29 points last season ranked fourth on this team. Fourth. On a roster that finished 34-48 and averaged two goals a game down the stretch, that's not a luxury departure — that's a hole in a hull that was already taking on water.
The framing Seattle's front office has leaned on all summer is incremental improvement: acquire Mackie Samoskevich, lock up Bobby McMann, hold the core together, and let health do the rest. Taken individually, none of those moves is wrong. Taken together, they describe a plan that is quietly running in place. Samoskevich is 23 and arrived in exchange for the No. 25 pick, which is a reasonable bet on upside. But Tolvanen played 49 games in 2026 and produced at a pace that put him in the team's top four scorers. Replacing established production with projected production is not a wash — it's a gamble dressed up as continuity.
The injury picture makes that gamble harder to ignore. Jared McCann, Seattle's most efficient scorer when healthy, has been sidelined since late June with no updated timeline through late August. Joey Daccord, the starting goaltender, is in the same limbo. The front office's incremental plan was always predicated on getting those two back. Without them, the Tolvanen departure doesn't read as a roster adjustment — it reads as subtraction in a season that cannot afford it.
What I keep coming back to is the shape of last year's collapse. Seattle didn't fall apart because of one bad week; they deteriorated across the final two months, winning just eight of their last 37 games. March and April were genuinely brutal. The offense dried up, and the team had no answer for it. The offseason priority, stated plainly, was to fix that. So far, the moves made have replaced one young scorer with another young scorer while the established one walked to New York — and the two players most capable of changing the offensive calculus are still unavailable.
My read is this: the Kraken's front office isn't wrong to believe in incremental improvement, but incremental improvement requires a stable baseline to improve from. Right now, that baseline is shifting. Tolvanen gone, McCann and Daccord status unknown, Pittsburgh reportedly circling the center depth — the roster that takes the ice in October may look meaningfully different from the one management is publicly describing. That's not a plan. That's a series of decisions that haven't finished adding up yet.