by | Aug 28, 2025 | 3 comments
As the offseason winds down for the Seattle Kraken, they look to the 2025-26 season with hopes for massive improvement in a particular area; because they literally couldn’t have gotten worse in this area last season. The Kraken went winless (and even pointless) in the second leg of back-to-back games in 2024-25, finishing 0-12-0 in that scenario.
Going 0-12 was enough to raise questions, prompting president of hockey operations Ron Francis to address the issue in his end-of-season press conference.
“So [losing all back-to-back games] was a question that we struggled with finding an answer to, and asking the players, there really wasn’t a simple solution to it. We’ve got to find a way to be better in back-to-back games.
“I mean, 0-12, if you go .500, which is probably the norm, that’s 12 points and puts us in a different position at the trade deadline. So that’s something we need to address, especially with the schedule again probably being even more condensed next year. Our mindset right out of the gate has to be much better in that second game of back-to-backs,”
Francis suggested .500 is the norm, but the 2024-25 season league average was .472. A break-even target would actually be better than the league average, which is worth keeping in mind as we look for trends that explain the slide and where improvement could come.
Game-level team data was sourced from MoneyPuck and compared Seattle’s results to the rest of the league. Unless otherwise noted, data reflects the 2024-25 season and is split into buckets based on how much rest the team had between games: zero days of rest (second leg of a back-to-back), one day, and two or more days of rest.
A back-to-back is simple: games on consecutive days. Most NHL games have at least one day of rest between them. Because goalies usually need a day’s rest between starts, teams often start the backup in one of the two legs. Less rest plus a backup frequently leads to lower league-wide performance in the second game.
If you remove those back-to-back games, Seattle would have finished the season 35-29-6. That’s a .543 points percentage — likely still short of the playoffs — but it shows how costly those nights became.
First, the obvious trend: as rest decreases, points percentage drops. The rest of the league follows this curve cleanly. The Kraken are different — they actually posted their best points percentage on one day of rest, with two-plus days still solid but slipping to second-best. The alarming part remains the zero points in the second leg of back-to-backs.
To get a wider view of how rest impacts success across the NHL, we expanded the scope back to 2008-09 and found that the pattern holds. More rest yields more regulation wins across the NHL. Since the Kraken have only been around for four years, their data below covers the lifetime of the franchise.
Through four seasons, Seattle has struggled in the second leg of back-to-backs, going 11-29 overall. The lone bright spot came in 2022-23, when the Kraken went 5-3 in second legs. In the other three seasons they combined for six wins — three in 2021-22, three in 2023-24, and none in 2024-25. They track closer to the rest-of-league (ROL) point percentage averages with one or two days of rest, but the second leg remains a clear weakness.
So what is causing the Kraken to lose so much more frequently in the second of back-to-backs than the rest of the league? Well, if a team loses 12 straight in that situation, then offense is certainly part of it. Seattle averaged just 1.33 goals per game in those second legs.
In the first of two charts above, the Kraken’s expected goals gap is striking. Expected goals being almost double the actual goals scored in the second of back-to-backs suggests more offense was available, yet scoring lagged by 1.25 goals per game — nearly seven times the ROL delta. As with points percentage, goals track along with rest: more rest, more goals. However, Seattle’s drop is sharper than the rest of the league.
Shot quality is part of the puzzle too. In back-to-back games, low-danger shots go up, while medium- and high-danger shots go down. The Kraken got pucks on net, but from easy-to-save areas. Opposing goalies posted a .952 save percentage in those games.
Corsi adds nuance: it measures shot attempts as a percentage and can sometimes be viewed as an indicator of puck possession. Over 50 percent means your team out-attempted the opponent. Oddly, Seattle’s only above-50 Corsi split was back-to-back games at 51.2 percent. With one day of rest it was 47.1 percent, and with two-plus days, it was 49 percent. For the rest of the league, the metric improves with rest (back-to-back = 48.2 percent, one day = 50.1 percent, two-plus = 51.1 percent). So the Kraken pushed volume on tired legs, but the quality of their chances sagged.
Where do opponents’ chances and goals come from against Seattle in back-to-back games?
Goaltending likely plays into the low- and medium-danger spikes. We’ll get to that next. The high-danger dip suggests the structure isn’t broken, but the trade-offs are costly.
Kraken goalies posted an .879 save percentage in second legs. That’s rough, and it highlights a weakness the team must address if they want those games to turn into wins. Philipp Grubauer started six of the games, Joey Daccord five, and Ales Stezka one. Grubauer had the strongest numbers, posting the best save percentage and allowing fewer low-danger goals per game — closer to the ROL average of 1.15. Daccord, meanwhile, struggled more in that area, giving up 2.6 low-danger goals per game.
Allowing low‑danger goals can sap a team’s momentum, and when combined with rising medium‑danger chances against, it’s easy to see how a team with limited scoring punch ended up losing all 12 of its back‑to‑backs.
When starting this research, I expected travel to be a driver. The Kraken did travel more than league average, but not by much. A roughly 50-mile gap in average trip length isn’t decisive. They had nine road back-to-back games and three at home. The average trip was actually longer before the home back-to-back games (about 424.9 miles) than before the road back-to-back games (about 359.7), when NHL schedulers try to lump road games in cities that are close to each other.
Penalties, blocked shots, and hits all climbed in back-to-back games. With rest days, Seattle typically stayed below the ROL average in penalties taken — a positive trend. In back-to-back games, though, they took nearly a full extra minor penalty. That puts opponents on the power play more often, giving them another edge on nights when 5‑on‑5 play is already a challenge.
Scoring first matters, too. Seattle allowed the first goal in 10 of 12 second legs (83.3 percent). The rest of the league gets scored on first in 52.6 percent of back-to-back games. That early hole forces chase mode and feeds more penalties.
Seattle did manage an 8-4 record in the first leg of back-to-backs, showing they can handle the front half of the challenge. The issue is carrying that level of play into the second leg, where cleanup is needed on both sides of the puck.
Overall, the keys to winning back-to-back games are no different than on any other game night; they need to get the puck into the high-danger scoring areas and generate chances while the defense limits the opposing team’s chances in those dangerous areas. Being more disciplined with the penalties could be an easily implemented improvement. Starting on time and getting a higher percentage of first goals will also help. The Kraken can’t ease into the game and hope it goes their way.
Goalies all took a step back in the second leg of back-to-back games, and the team will need to figure out if this is due to a strategy change or tired players. While the team has played on back-to-back nights, the goalie is coming off a rest day and should be good to go.
Back-to-backs won’t vanish — Seattle has 13 on the schedule this upcoming season. The focus now must be on turning that zero‑point bucket into a break‑even one. For a bubble team, that could be the difference between April tee times and playoff gates.
Blaiz Grubic is a contributor at Sound Of Hockey. A passionate hockey fan and player for over 30 years, Blaiz grew up in the Pacific Northwest and is an alumni of Washington State University (Go Cougs!). When he’s not playing, watching, or writing about hockey, he enjoys quality time with his wife and daughter or getting out on a golf course for a quick round. Follow @blaizg on BlueSky or X.
Nice work Blaiz.
I am wondering what the goalie performance would look like at a rate level based on time-on-ice because I am painfully aware of a back-to-back game where Grubauer was pulled 6 minutes into the first period after allowing 3 goals on 4 shots. (@ Detroit 1/12. I was there)
I also give Joey a pass for the game at Utah (4/8) where he started both games of a back-to-back, Utah being the second game, when Grubauer came down with the flu. Ostman eventually would make it into that game but only after Joey gave up 7 goals. It was brutal, I was at that game as well. 😐
So maybe it’s as simple as banning John Barr from the second game of back-to-backs? 😆
Sounds like you need to take a pause on traveling to games… You might be the reason they are losing b2b games.
In this instance I did not factor in time on ice, but will see if I can pull something together.
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