Kraken Clip-Art 

There’s no sleeping at the monitors for Kraken video staffers Tim Ohashi and Brady Morgan after the opening faceoff.

It takes mere seconds for video analyst Morgan to call out “Good entry!” over his headset to assistant coach Jessica Campbell on the Kraken bench and goalie coach Steve Briere in the overhead pressbox as a puck is carried over the visiting Chicago Blackhawks’ blue line. Not long after, Morgan says “That’s yucky!” into the headset as a jumble of Chicago players enter the Kraken zone seemingly just ahead of the puck.

But a Kraken defender quickly clears the puck out.

“Doesn’t matter!” Morgan tells his headset audience of his prior offside assessment.

Morgan, seated alongside video coach Ohashi at a coaching room table adjacent to the Kraken dressing room at Climate Pledge Arena, renders blue-line opinions throughout the Thursday night game. The duo stares at a bank of six television screens – two with “coach’s camera” overhead angles, two of the Kraken Hockey Network (KHN) broadcast, another of the video scoreboard feed, and a “hawk eye” screen in which eight different angles can be toggled through – along with additional laptops and tablets at their fingertips. They’ll hit a keyboard stroke for an instant rewind if something at the blue line immediately doesn’t look quite right.

Zone entries are critical, representing the most frequent cause of the coach’s challenges and overturning of goals. Other times, challenges are usually for goaltender interference and occasionally a missed play stoppage.

“If you’re going to tell them to challenge a goal, you’ve got to be right,” Morgan said. “If you’re wrong, it’s going to be a bad night.”

Ohashi, who spends most of the game live coding video clips from the entirety of the game, won’t hesitate to chime in if he has a better look.

Watching the lines isn’t all the pair do. By night’s end, they’ll have cut 1,569 different clips and grouped them into specific buckets – faceoffs, shot attempts, blocked shots, zone entries and breakouts, forechecks and goalie saves among them. They’ll deliver a portable hard drive of clips to each individual coach as they come into the room between periods.

Morgan’s headset links to Campbell and Briere are for more than suggesting challenges. He and Ohashi provide updates on things such as which player is winning faceoffs from a particular side or help coaches review footage of plays they missed in real-time.

The coaches on the bench carry league-issued iPads to access clips Ohashi and Morgan send them.

With under eight minutes remaining in the period, the Blackhawks have a rapid flurry of scoring chances -- with defenseman Ryker Evans deflecting a dangerous Nick Foligno shot wide of the net.

“You want me to grab that as a highlight?” Ohashi asks Morgan about the shot block.

“I didn’t see it,” Morgan replies.

“OK, I’ll put it in,” Ohashi tells him.

Just over a minute later, Kraken center Shane Wright nearly deflects a shot into Chicago’s net. Morgan rewinds to see exactly what happened.

“Yeah, that’s tipped,” he tells coaches via his headset. “That’s a Grade-A chance by Shane.”

As the horn sounds to end the period, Ohashi and Morgan place portable drives at each coach’s desk. Players trudge to locker stalls down the hall and the coaches enter the room, with head coach Dan Bylsma having a quick word about a video he’d like to see.

“Honestly, with Dan, it’s probably the most variable of any coach I’ve ever worked with,” said Ohashi, who spent five seasons as a video analyst with his boyhood favorite Washington Capitals prior to joining the Kraken their expansion campaign. “With most coaches, I’d say the tendency is to watch scoring chances. With Dan, it’s more about whatever area of the game he feels he needs.”

Campbell uses her portable drive to study Kraken's performance during the period’s lone power play, while assistant Bob Woods examines specific zone breakouts by defensemen. Briere views footage of goalie Joey Daccord.

The second period begins with Jared McCann helping snap a scoreless tie by taking a pass right at the blue line ahead of feeding Matty Beniers for a one-timed goal.

“We’ve got a good goal!” Morgan shouts into his headset above the crowd’s roar, indicating McCann is onside at the line. “Good goal!”

From there, the period’s biggest video highlight has nothing to do with zone entries.

Evans breaks his stick as the period winds down and gets handed a clean one on-ice by winger Eeli Tolvanen – defensemen needing sticks more than forwards to prevent goals -- who then skates to the bench and has a seated McCann hand him his stick to use while play continues.

The Kraken are then called for icing and aren’t allowed to make a line change, so Evans skates by the bench to retrieve his backup stick from equipment managers who have it ready for a quick handoff to him. Evans then hands Tolvanen back the original stick he’d lent him while Tolvanen -- also skating by the bench -- hands McCann back his loaner stick all within seconds of each other as an ensuing faceoff is about to take place.

“Watch overhead,” Morgan says to Ohashi while rewinding. “There’s a three-man stick handoff coming up here.”

Sure enough, the overhead replay has an impressive sequence.

“That’s quite the handoff and choreographed expertise by the guys out there,” Morgan said, referencing equipment managers Jeff Camelio, Kris Stierwalt, and James Stucky as well as athletic trainers Cole Harding and Phil Varney. “Quite honestly, that goes into our highlight reel. We do like to give shout-outs to the guys being quick.”

Several moments later, as the KHN broadcast feed comes back on from a commercial break, analyst Eddie Olczyk also mentions on-air having also spotted the triple switch. Ohashi and Morgan smile at one another.

“Brady doesn’t miss much in real-time,” Ohashi said.

By the second intermission, the computer drives are again at each coach’s desk. This time, assistant Dave Lowry has a lone penalty kill to review while Campbell has a couple of power plays.

It’s a lower-key night for Ohashi and Morgan than the previous week’s road trip.

They got a goal overturned in Boston on a missed zone entry offside, then replicated that in Colorado just two days later. It was nearly a rare back-to-back triumph worthy of inclusion on any video coaching resume.

But once the Kraken challenge in Colorado was upheld, the Avalanche immediately protested the “offside” came on a puck Yanni Gourde initially dumped towards Colorado’s net and that slid all the way around the boards and back down the ice again.

Only then did the Colorado forward Artturi Lehkonen cross the Kraken’s blue line a full stride ahead of the puck. According to NHL rules, a player isn’t offside if the opposing team intentionally directs the puck over their own blue line.

It took several confusing minutes before everything was settled. The goal stood and the Kraken were assessed a minor penalty for technically losing the challenge despite the initial ruling in their favor.

Ohashi and Morgan had never seen anything like it. They began to get worried when, after officials announced to the crowd that the goal was no good, they didn’t immediately drop the puck again.

“I thought maybe they were arguing the faceoff location,” Ohashi said.

But they could see the referee hovering around the penalty box with the headset still on -- which suggested they were reviewing additional footage.

“We warned the bench probably a couple of minutes before they ruled that ‘Hey, there’s a chance that they’re going to amend this ruling,’” Ohashi said.

Ohashi and Morgan quickly checked the NHL rulebook and correctly guessed Colorado was arguing Rule 83.1 stating: “If a player legally carries, passes or plays the puck back into his own defending zone while a player of the opposing team is in such defending zone” the offside is nullified.

They immediately communicated with Campbell and suggested counterarguments – that Gourde hadn’t intentionally played or directed the puck towards his own end and that Lehkonen wasn’t already in the Kraken’s zone but had skated into it just ahead of the puck.

But those arguments didn’t prevail. And despite getting the initial offside part right, seeing the goal upheld and a penalty called against the Kraken wasn’t fun.

“You definitely don’t feel good about that,” Ohashi said. “I mean, you’re happy they didn’t score on the ensuing power play and that nobody blocked a shot and broke a foot or anything like that.

“But obviously, in a perfect world, if we knew they were going to rule that way then we wouldn’t have challenged.”

Interestingly, the duo’s greatest triumph also came in the very same Ball Arena two springs ago in Game 7 of the opening playoff round. Nathan MacKinnon had just scored a tying third-period goal for Colorado but Ohashi and Morgan knew right away the initial zone entry was offside.

“We call that a ‘tap-in’,” Morgan said of the relatively easy call.

Initially, the Ball Arena crowd’s reaction to the goal was so loud they couldn’t tell whether coaches had heard them over the headset. So, as a backup, they sent a red banner alert with the word “Offside” to a bench-side video monitor and got the goal negated. The 2-1 score stood the rest of the way as the Kraken clinched the series.

The prior game, they’d gotten a far closer offside called in their favor to eliminate an opening Game 6 goal by Bowen Byram of the Avalanche. They’d hastily reviewed several angles – all within the 20-to-30 seconds teams typically have to challenge goals – before finding supportive overhead footage.

The Kraken has had 13 of 18 challenges (74%) upheld in three-plus seasons, which is above the NHL average for that period of 68%.

And though they help initiate merely a handful of challenges a season, it’s often the only time Kraken fans hear about Ohashi and Morgan. Against the Blackhawks this time, their work will remain anonymous. The only challenges seen come on a coaches’ room television set showing a New York Islanders game against the Vancouver Canucks.

“You should have gone up to Vancouver to do a story on them,” Morgan quips to a visitor.

The Kraken start the third period by taking a 2-0 lead on the 200th goal of Jaden Schwartz’s career.

“I’ll text Jeff,” Ohashi said, indicating he’d let equipment manager Camelio know to keep the puck.

But Chicago soon cuts the lead in half.

Things get far more serious as the tight game heads into the final 10 minutes. Morgan tells Campbell via his headset: “Faceoffs are ready if you need them, Jess. Wright is 8-for-11 from the right dot.”

Indeed, Wright is enjoying one of his best faceoff nights. The information could prove critical in a one-goal game if the Kraken need a right-handed faceoff win.

“That’s what we have here,” Morgan said, holding out a customized Stream Deck control panel where he charts faceoffs that are relayed automatically into the duo’s computers to pair with matching video. “And if Dan (Bylsma) just wants to see all of our (video) views on (faceoff) wins, then Tim (Ohashi) can just rifle that off for him.”

It turns out Wright won’t be needed for any critical faceoffs as Brandon Tanev scores into an empty net to clinch a 3-1 victory.

“We have a good goal!” Morgan shouts into his headset. “A good goal!”

And a good night for the video staff that no fans outside of the room will need to hear about.