For Kraken, Competition Is Key 

One theme keeps coming up time and again whenever the Kraken make a player acquisition: The importance of creating competition in training camp this fall.

Kraken general manager Jason Botterill even sounded apologetic this week after realizing he’d repeated the theme multiple times in the same media scrum session. He’d already brought the competitiveness topic up on three prior occasions in an eight-minute span before raising it a fourth time.

“I hate to keep bringing it up,” he said, chuckling, as he discussed the general types of players the Kraken have acquired this summer on a roster getting somewhat crowded at certain positions. “But to me, there’s competition and that’s what we really want.”

Botterill isn’t the only offender when it comes to uttering the “C” word. New head coach Lane Lambert has preached the need for competition on all four forward lines and up-and-down the roster in general since the day he was hired back in April.

“I think that’s what Lane (Lambert) is realizing and he’s going to really reinforce in training camp,” Botterill said. “It’s that…it’s imperative that we’re a four-line team. And that’s going to be our competitive advantage. We may not have that lead star player at the top end. But we need to find that more competitive edge up and down the lineup.

“Whether that’s a third or fourth line at the forward position. Or having a stronger second or third pair D. Those are things that we need to continue to work on.”

And it all starts in training camp. Having guys go in fighting for jobs keeps a team hungry.

This week’s addition of free agent defenseman Ryan Lindgren gives the Kraken another blueliner in a group that already has Vince Dunn, Brandon Montour, Adam Larsson, Ryker Evans, Jamie Oleksiak, Josh Mahura and Cale Fleury on NHL contracts.

The addition of free agent goalie Matt Murray adds him to a duet of Joey Daccord and Philipp Grubauer.

On the forwards front, you’ve got incoming trade acquisition Mason Marchment joining a team that already has wingers Jordan Eberle, Jared McCann, Jaden Schwartz, Kaapo Kakko, Eeli Tolvanen and potential prospect newcomers such as Jani Nyman looking at joining the top three lines. Not to mention, new center acquisition Freddy Gaudreau joining a forwards mix that already has prospects such as Ryan Winterton and Jacob Melanson vying for “bottom-six” jobs alongside Tye Kartye, John Hayden and Ben Meyers.

In other words, nobody can afford to get too comfortable. That’s what training camp competition does. Players already on-the-bubble will certainly feel those footsteps coming for their jobs, or at minimum their ice time. And their desperation will fuel some of their more established teammates higher up the food chain to be atop their game as well.

It's the same in every pro sport. Show me a team failing to meet expectations and you can almost always trace the roots of it back to complacency in training camp.

And complacency doesn’t mean those players were lazy. I’ve covered teams in multiple sports that were coming off strong seasons and had little apparent need for roster turnover. As such, they headed into camp the following season with roster roles all but set.

The rest of the story wrote itself. Instead of being hungry right from the get-go, it took those teams time to find a higher gear and they paid a standings price. The bad results snowballed, things grew tense and before you knew it, the season had gotten away from them irretrievably.

Those teams were missing the hunger they’d shown attaining success the prior year. And going in hungry is the most important thing training camp competition can foster. Once it’s there as part of your daily camp life, it’s tougher to turn off when games count for real.

Sure, we can talk about the Kraken rolling out four lines of roughly the same talent level this coming season. That’s what they got three seasons ago to not only make the playoffs but nearly advance to the Western Conference Final as well.

But regardless of whether this season’s fourth line scores akin to a second or third line for many teams, it’s the hunger and work ethic that matters more. As Botterill mentioned, the Kraken might not put out the same type of top end elite scorer other teams have – think Connor McDavid, Auston Matthews, Nikita Kucherov and Nathan MacKinnon, to name a few – but they sure as heck can try to outwork them.

It's an old adage: Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work as hard.

And that happens more often than you’d think. Especially in an NHL engineered for parity where the difference between first and last place talent can be measured in inches: Perhaps one extra puck battle won along the boards, or an additional rebound swatted home at the net front.

Sure, the Stanley Cup winning teams of late have tended to have at least one elite level player. But they also have balanced depth and strength up and down the roster. In fact, despite prevailing wisdom, the roster depth part might be more of a common denominator for champions than any “elite talent” requirement.

When the St. Louis Blues won the Cup in 2019, their leading playoff goal scorer was current Kraken winger Schwartz. Their leading goal scorer that season was Vladimir Tarasenko with 33, which is seven fewer than winger McCann had during the Kraken’s playoff campaign.

Dallas made the Cup Final in 2020 with Dennis Gurianov as their leading goal man with 20 in a 64-game schedule shortened by COVID-19 – which translates to a mere 25-goal season over a full 82-games.

Top-end talent can take you far, but not always to the promised land. Roster depth matters. And how hard that depth works matters even more. It will matter greatly this coming season when a condensed schedule sees most of 82 games packed into five months instead of six due to February being taken mainly off for the Olympic Winter Games in Milan, Italy.

So, getting that depth as competitive as can be as early as possible will matter as well.

For the Kraken, it will start in camp with competition for multiple spots and hopefully carry over into the regular season right away. How far they take things from there will depend largely on them making that early momentum last.

But having that hunger surface early should give them a jump on better things to come.