Midweek Roundup 5.17.23
On Matty Beniers & the Kraken, Adam Fantilli & Team Canada at Men’s Worlds, and Tempe, the Sun Belt, & the business of hockey fandom
A Carson Soucy shot block set them in motion. First, Soucy’s block, then a Jaden Schwartz breakout pass, and Jordan Eberle and Matty Beniers (linemates for the majority of the latter’s nascent professional career) were off and running—Eberle driving the middle lane, Beniers streaking down the wing to his left.
When Stars defenseman Esa Lindell dropped to a knee to cut off Eberle’s path to goal, the former Islander slipped a pass over to Beniers, who wired a shot past Scott Wedgewood’s outstretched glove. Climate Pledge Arena erupted. ESPN cameras cut to a wincing Yanni Gourde, doubled over in pain on the Seattle bench. The Kraken led 5-2. There would be a Game 7.
Two days later, the Seattle Kraken’s season—their second in the NHL—would come to an end, with Dallas claiming a 2-1 result on home ice. The Kraken could not solve Stars goaltender Jake Oettinger until there were just nineteen seconds left to play. The elation of a Saturday night Game 6 victory dissipated, replaced by the forced acceptance of a summer that arrived earlier than they intended but later than just about anyone else imagined.
Of the four teams eliminated in the NHL’s second round in the last week, two have been cast into an immediate state of existential crisis, while the other two require little convincing that the sting of the season’s end is but a minor setback preceding greater ambitions and postseason adventures in the years to come. (This sentiment shouldn’t need further explanation, but in the name of absolute clarity, the Oilers and Maple Leafs (i.e. the two Canadian teams) are the two in crisis.)
“They didn't expect us to make the playoffs. They didn't expect us to beat Colorado [in the first round]. I'm sure no one had us getting to the seven here," Eberle said to ESPN’s Greg Wyshynski. "As a group, this is the first time we've been through this. You're got to learn how to lose first and then you'll find a way to win."
Eberle, one of the thirty founding Kraken taken at the expansion draft, is correct in his assertion of his team’s underdog status. However, ordinarily, a Cinderella of any degree is not the type of team we envision an enviable future for; instead, underdogs are supposed to be pleasant and mostly harmless until they bow out, at which point we presume we’ve seen the last of them for some time.When it comes to the Kraken, belief that this year’s postseason run is a precursor of more to come rather than a high-water mark stems from organizational alignment.
If nothing else, the Kraken are a team with a crystal clear vision of what they want to be—a stingy defensive outfit that drives play at even strength, takes advantage of its chances, and makes life miserable for the kind of transcendent talents around the league they knew wouldn’t be available in an expansion draft. In a league that prizes scoring, Seattle sensed an inefficiency in building their team around defense.
The Kraken took shape in the summer of 2021—first via the expansion draft that brought them into the league, then via the player draft two days later. At the time, their approach was perplexing. In that expansion draft, Seattle appeared far more concerned with the preservation of cap space than acquiring the most talented players available; unlike their expansion predecessors in Vegas, the Kraken struggled to gouge extra draft picks off its soon-to-be competition in exchange for extra protected players.
The end result of the expansion draft was a roster that looked on paper a great deal like what it was: a collection of bit parts from around the league thrown together into what most around the league perceived to be a stew of mediocrity. The only hope at the postseason seemed to rest on the general ineptitude of the rest of the Pacific Division.
The Kraken had a robust analytics staff, ample salary cap room, and perhaps the sharpest uniforms in the sport. On the ice, though, it was difficult to see cause for excitement, and when the season began, the NHL’s thirty-second team did little to defy those expectations. The comparisons to Vegas’ unlikely run to the 2018 Cup Final in their inaugural season would be inevitable and unfavorable.
In year one, Seattle was an average team in terms of driving play but suffered in either crease—disastrous goaltending and uninspiring finishing left them with just twenty-seven wins and eighth place in the Pacific.
In the offseason, the Kraken sought to course correct. In came Andre Burakovsky and Oliver Bjorkstrand. At the prior trade deadline, Daniel Sprong came in the return from Washington for Marcus Johansson. In December, Seattle claimed Eeli Tolvanen—once considered the best player outside the NHL in the world—off waivers from Nashville. An 8.9% conversion rate in year one leapt to 11.6% this season, a modest increase but one that, combined with a major improvement in net, helped propel Seattle to its first postseason appearance.
Still, even as the likes of Burakovsky (who missed the entire postseason due to injury) or Sprong (who was also injured by Game 7 in Dallas) arrived to provide an offensive spark, the big idea, the idea on which the Kraken were formed two summers ago, remained in place.
The essence of the Kraken manifests in its two franchise pillars, both acquired in that foundational summer of ‘21 and, in their own ways, embodying the vision of the organization they would soon represent.
The first is Yanni Gourde, a pugnacious Québecois centerman who arrived with his stock at an all-time high from the then back-to-back Stanley Cup champion Tampa Bay Lightning. His career high in points came in his first full season in the NHL (2017-18), when he managed to accrue sixty-four of them in eighty-two games. While Gourde might not have promised much by way of scoring, he did bring an air of championship credibility.
Gourde (and to a lesser extent his linemates at the time, Blake Coleman and Barclay Goodrow) was the breakout star of Tampa’s ‘21 triumph. He was the most obvious manifestation of the Lightning’s shift from high-scoring playoff also-ran to the boa constrictor that won back-to-back Stanley Cups. Gourde was physical, agitating, and, most of all, effective as the centerpiece of a shutdown line that proved Tampa’s ultimate trump card no matter the matchup. Though he still hasn’t topped those sixty-four points as a rookie, Gourde was the best player on his team as it took out defending champion Colorado in the first round and pushed Dallas to seven games in the second.
The second of those pillars is Beniers, the first ever draft pick in franchise history, number two overall in 2021. Having played ninety games in the regular season and fourteen in the postseason, the former Wolverine may well be the best foundational draft pick in American sports since the newly re-located and -branded Baltimore Ravens selected Jonathan Ogden in the first round of the 1996 NFL Draft.
Before he got to the NHL, Beniers profiled as everything you could hope for in a top pick: a two-way, play-driving center; a transcendent skater with a relentless motor; and a player with the kind of scoring instincts you could never hope to secure out of the expansion draft. If Gourde could bring championship pedigree, Beniers provided unbridled potential.
In his ten-game cameo with the Kraken at the end of last season, Beniers brought a spark to a franchise in desperate need of it. Playing dogged defense with minimal scoring and hapless goaltending did little to galvanize a fan base, but Beniers’ nine points offered the promise that brighter days beckoned on the horizon. It wasn’t just that he scored almost a point-per-game but more that his skating and skill provided a source of joy and optimism no other Kraken had drawn forth in the seventy-two games of franchise history preceding him.
A year later, Beniers is a prohibitive favorite to win the Calder Memorial Trophy as the league’s top rookie. His analytical profile reveals a player assuming defensive and puck-moving responsibilities normally reserved for veterans. Perhaps Beniers hasn’t mastered the defensive side of the puck yet, but he appears much closer than the Kraken’s Pacific rivals would hope at just twenty-years old. Meanwhile, Beniers is still in the process of tapping into the offensive potential that made him an All-American at Michigan; this year’s fifty-seven points look much more like a floor than a ceiling.
In tandem, Gourde and Beniers combine to serve as on-ice avatars for the vision, present, and future of a franchise. Two-way play-driving, sound defense, insatiable effort away from the puck: these are the tenets of Kraken hockey. With Beniers’ development still very much in-progress, their combined defensive acumen has already proven sufficient to get this team to the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
So why can the Kraken spare themselves an existential crisis despite a Game 7 defeat? Because they had a plan, followed it despite declarations of their myopia from the outside, and the plan yielded (preliminary) results. They weren’t so arrogant as to avoid adjustments (a player like Sprong, for example, is in many ways the opposite of what they sought at the expansion draft), but they stuck to the script, even if it wasn’t always exciting or popular.
Progress in pro sports is seldom linear, and perhaps the Kraken will suffer next year as increased expectations begin to weigh on them before a crisis of their own next summer. However, what the Kraken do have, beyond all doubt, is a vision of what their franchise is supposed to look and play like after just two seasons. You can imagine much worse foundations upon which to build a franchise.
A twenty-year-old Matty Beniers and thirty-one-year-old Yanni Gourde might not fit the traditional bill of franchise forwards; if you combine their career highs in points, you would get to 121, two shy of Connor McDavid’s individual total for the ‘21-22 season. But within the context of Seattle’s organizational priorities, Beniers and Gourde represent a two-headed monster to be trifled with at your peril and provide reason to believe the arrow is only pointing up for hockey in the Pacific Northwest.
Adam Fantilli Worldwide
A week ago, as a lottery of ping pong balls determined his professional future, Adam Fantilli lay asleep in Budapest. The results of that lottery (which, we presume, sent him to Anaheim) were announced not long after 2:00 AM local time.
The eighteen-year-old was not in Central Europe to backpack and find himself after his freshman year of college but rather there on business—to represent Team Canada at the senior level for the first time in his young career.
The occasion—the men’s IIHF World Championship—stands in stark contrast to the previous event at which Fantilli wore the maple leaf crest, last December’s World Junior Championship.
It’s not the shift in age level that distinguishes the former from the latter so much as the space in which the two events exist within the Canadian imagination. Men’s Worlds, which annually coincides with the NHL postseason, carries with it a fraction of the spotlight of the holiday WJC. There is an undeniable mania that surrounds the latter, while the former is mostly an afterthought, given that the timing means it is never a true best-on-best tournament. At least for the North American hockey fan, there is no tradition of caring about men’s Worlds.
In that sense, Fantilli has the opportunity to make a final statement before June’s Draft, free from pressure and comparisons to Connor Bedard (who elected not to join the squad Canada sent to Europe). There is however recent precedent to suggest that making draft judgments based on Worlds (or really any sample as small as a single tournament) is silly, but that doesn’t mean Worlds don’t have the potential to swing the discourse around the draft.
By spring of 2019, Jack Hughes had been the presumptive number one pick from the ‘01 birth year for years. He’d posted record-setting numbers at the NTDP, and the highlight tape only accentuated the notion that he was a special prospect. However, a strong season from Kaapo Kakko in the Finnish Liiga, before an impressive showing in a gold-medal-winning Worlds campaign with the Fins, led to a “Is Kakko better than Hughes discourse?” in the immediate run-up to the draft.
In particular, Kakko’s strong performance at Worlds fed the perception that he was better equipped to make an immediate impact at the NHL level than Hughes. Kakko had spent a full season playing in a league with grown men, while Hughes’ slight frame raised questions about whether he was ready to compete in the NHL right away and his long-term durability. Could a player as lean as Hughes actually play center at the NHL level?
The logic wasn’t ridiculous (though it was more than a little short-sighted), but in the end, the New Jersey Devils (that year’s lottery victor) opted for the longstanding consensus and selected Hughes. Four years into their respective NHL careers, it’s hard to imagine New Jersey harbors even the faintest hint of regret thanks to Hughes’ emergence as a superstar.
Still, even if Kakko’s impressive run at Worlds didn’t shift the eventual draft order, it did condition Kakko’s perception as a prospect once he arrived at his new home with the New York Rangers. The Fin was billed as an NHL ready playmaker, whose rugged style would suit the North American game. Never mind the fact that he was a teenager, moving across the world, speaking a new language, and acclimating to a new ice surface. After a rookie season that yielded twenty-three points in sixty-six games, those notions of what Kakko was became difficult to uphold. Three seasons later, the answer as to what Kakko is or can become for the Rangers remains murky; in an organization that seems chronically unable to develop young forwards, Kakko is perhaps the most glaring example of stagnation.
The point of all this is that, even though it shouldn’t, a Worlds cameo like Fantilli’s has the potential to disrupt—for better and for worse—a prospect’s perception and path toward development. No matter how “NHL ready” a player may appear in his pre-draft season, they are going to experience struggles—what Brandon Naurato might call “pain”—when they get to the NHL level. There is always a temptation to steer toward contradictory and novel opinions on prospects in the run-up to the draft, the more bombastic the better.
While I would caution against feeding the draft machine or speculating about how his performance might condition his choice to return to school or head to the pros, that doesn’t mean Fantilli’s latest stint with Team Canada is either uninteresting or uninformative. This is a chance to see Fantilli ply his craft against professional competition for the first time.
Within that context, it’s impossible not to be impressed with the way the Nobleton, Ontario native fits in. In the tournament opener against Latvia, Fantilli played as a left winger alongside Jack McBain and Michael Carcone. From that position, he showed an impressive ability to assert himself offensively to earn high-leverage puck touches and create chances from within the offensive zone. He showed sound defensive instincts and an ability to remain engaged in all three zones.
Among the most impressive plays from that debut was a simple chip into the offensive zone to set up a change. I realize this sounds unspectacular, but I liked the maturity to manage his shift effectively. Fantilli had been on the ice for close to a minute; even though he had an outside chance at an odd-man rush, the most advantageous play for his team was just to dump and change, so that’s what Fantilli did. It’s a small play, but it shows a certain maturity at the level of minute habits that will serve Fantilli well whenever he does arrive in professional hockey.
Later in that game, Fantilli notched his first point of the tournament by battling through a check along the boards to send a centering feed in for McBain, who eventually converted.
Adam Fantilli assist vs. Latvia
Fantilli picked up another assist in a rout of Slovenia in his second game, before being held scoreless against the Slovaks the next day. As of this writing, Canada is a few hours away from playing its fourth game of the group stage, against Kazakhstan in the early afternoon stateside.
Tempe Says No, a Sun Belted Final Four, and the Business of Hockey Fandom
We wrap this week with a word on two distinct but interrelated stories from the last week in the NHL.
To begin with the most recent, last night, voters in Tempe shot down the three propositions that would’ve been necessary to allow the Arizona Coyotes to move forward with a proposed new arena and entertainment district in the Valley of the Sun.
Insisting on the Coyotes’ continuity in the Phoenix metro area has been a pet project of commissioner Gary Bettman for the better part of the 21st century. As a Gen Z NHL fan, I cannot recall a time in which the viability of keeping the Coyotes in Arizona was not under serious doubt, yet this latest revelation is by far the most extreme. Already playing in Arizona State’s rink in the short-term (itself perhaps the best example among many to choose from of the NHL’s unseriousness), the Coyotes now appear without a legitimate option for a permanent home in Arizona.
Per SportsNet’s NHL insider Elliotte Friedman on his 32 Thoughts: The Podcast, “I don’t think the NHL wants to abandon the Arizona market unless it absolutely has to, it’s too big, it’s one of the largest metro markets in the United States, I think they will not leave until they go down every path.”
That the Coyotes currently play at ASU would seem to suggest that the league has already gone down just about every conceivable path in metro Phoenix. The one option still on the table appears to be attempting to convince new Phoenix Suns owner Mat Ishbia to renovate his team’s arena (the Footprint Center in downtown Phoenix) to accommodate an ice sheet. Without any inside information on the situation, I struggle to see a scenario in which this appeals to Ishbia. More than likely, this news is a death sentence to the Arizona (né Phoenix) Coyotes.
Let’s put a pin in that for a moment to consider our second story of the week: the (over-)representation of the Sun Belt in this year’s final four combatants for the Stanley Cup. With Edmonton and Toronto dispensed to the golf course, Canada’s Cup-less streak will continue at least another year. Instead, the hockey hotbeds of Sunrise, Florida; Raleigh, North Carolina; Las Vegas, Nevada; and Dallas, Texas will duel to determine this year’s Stanley Cup champion.
Retired goaltender Andrew Raycroft summated a common reaction to this development, expressing skepticism at how healthy a sunny and Southern field is for the league:
I bring up these two stories (one of Arizona’s woe, the other of the Sun Belt’s sudden hockey might) in tandem because I believe they help illustrate the difference between rooting for the financial success of the National Hockey League and rooting for the health of the sport of hockey.
Like many hockey fans, I find myself a lover of the sport despite the best efforts of a league that specializes in incompetence. Of course, maintaining a certain minimum standard of financial wellbeing is essential to the NHL continuing to provide us with the hockey we crave, yet I am continually amazed by how many fans feel it is their obligation to stand up and cheer for Hockey Related Revenue. I want the players I enjoy watching to make as much money as they can during their careers, but my interest in hockey extends far beyond the NHL and I am more concerned with the sport’s long-term health than the league’s.
From an economic perspective, the NHL clearly believes that its best bet is trying to force its way into the biggest possible American markets, regardless of their appetite for the game; this logic is how Bettman has found himself entangled in a decade-plus crusade to keep the Coyotes in Phoenix to begin with. If he is forced to abandon his Arizona dream, Bettman will presumably turn to cities like Houston or Atlanta for the same reasons.
However, for the health of hockey (and again, we are talking about the sport of hockey not the National Hockey League), I struggle to see why returning to Québec City would not be the optimal solution. The argument I have heard most often used against a return of hockey in Québec is that the requisite corporate sponsorship dollars aren’t there. As a hockey fan, I have no concern with the presence or absence of sponsors; instead, I want to see hockey games play out in front of a rabid fan base, desperate for the chance to once again deride an opposing goaltender or insist a member of the home team pull the trigger on a shooting opportunity.
Returning to Québec would be an olive branch to a spurned fan base, much like the one the league provided Winnipeg when the Jets (in new form) arrived from Atlanta. I have never been to Winnipeg. I’d like to go, but I’m not sure I will ever make it there; it’s quite a drive. Still, when it comes to the postseason, I delight at seeing the small but vociferous crowd dressed in white and packed tight into a sold out Canada Life Center. I love the idea of the arena as its own kind of oasis in a frigid city that shouldn’t be big enough for professional sports; to me, there are few things that could be better for the sport than promoting that sense of community around the game. Moving to Québec would provide a similar opportunity to a different group of doubtlessly impassioned fans.
However, that doesn’t mean Canadian hockey and Canadian hockey teams are the only ones I want to support. Instead, I also appreciate the fact that the four teams left in the running are from the Sun Belt. I have no interest in bemoaning the supposed lost revenue at the preponderance of non-traditional hockey markets in the two Conference Finals.
To be blunt, I find it baffling that anyone would be determining who to root for in the playoffs based on the NHL’s revenue. I assure you that even if you express the utmost fielty to the leauge’s financial health, Gary Bettman will not be sending a cheque to your door with a share of its profits.
Instead, despite what some north of the border might believe, the NHL’s Southern expansion from the 90s into the present has been a legitimate if slow-burning triumph for the sport of hockey. It is perhaps an over-repeated talking point, but the existence of the Coyotes is what brought the NHL Auston Matthews, whose passion for the game he now excels at began somehow by watching the dreadful Coyote teams of his Arizonan boyhood. It helped pave the way for Michigan to deploy a pair of Floridians this year.
Hockey is a niche and exclusive sport and should never turn down an opportunity to expand its net or embrace those on the net’s periphery. I realize I advocated for moving those Coyotes to Québec just a few paragraphs ago, but that was based on the immediate reality that the team does not have a professional-caliber arena to call home. In the abstract, hockey should be desperate to pull more new fans into the sport by making it accessible at every possible turn.
Canadian fans might scoff at the abundance of empty seats at regular season home games at the Panthers’ FLALive Arena, but those empties will be nowhere to be found when the Eastern Conference Final arrives in Sunrise for Game 3. There is no reason to deride fairweather fans (in this particular case, the term can even serve a double meaning) who aren’t interested in an eighty-two game regular season slog.
Instead, bringing more new hockey fans to South Florida via the Panthers’ success is a rare example of the NHL succeeding at attracting new eyeballs. Hockey is better on the ice for the presence of the continued proliferation of the game in the South, so why not push for more? Why not dream of prospects from Louisiana or UCLA and Ole Miss appearing in the NCAA Hockey Tournament?
As the Coyotes’ debacle progresses and in a few weeks when a Cup parade rambles through stifling humidity in a Southern city where summer arrives well before mid-June, I’d urge you to think not of Gary Bettman, dollars, or cents, but rather of hockey, which I remind you one last time is a game and not a business.
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