The Seattle Kraken are betting their 2026-27 season on one of hockey’s most familiar ideas: scoring by committee.
It makes sense when you look at the roster. Seattle doesn’t have a conventional offensive superstar, but it has a lot of forwards who can score. Bobby McMann scored 10 goals in 18 games after arriving from Toronto last season. Mackie Samoskevich was acquired from Florida after producing 32 points in a smaller role. Matty Beniers, Shane Wright and Berkly Catton are all young enough to reasonably expect more from, and the organization believes another year in Lane Lambert’s system should help.
It's very easy for Seattle to claim they do not need one 90-point player if they can get enough offence from everybody else.
That may be true.
Seattle has already shown that a team without a top-end scorer can win this way. In 2022-23, the Kraken scored 289 goals, finished sixth in the NHL, reached 100 points and eliminated the defending Stanley Cup champion Colorado Avalanche.
Jared McCann led the team with 70 points, but 13 Seattle skaters reached double figures in goals and six scored at least 20.
The offence kept coming over the boards.
That season is the obvious reason to believe Seattle can do it again, but it's also the season that shows how high the standard actually is.
A committee still needs to produce an elite result
I reviewed 613 NHL team-seasons across 20 normal-format seasons from 2005-06 through 2025-26 and classified each one by whether it had a player among the league’s top 30 scorers. The pandemic-altered 2019-20 playoff field was excluded.
The difference between teams that did and teams that did not was substantial.
Teams with a top-30 scorer reached the playoffs in 241 of 365 team-seasons, or 66.0 percent. Teams without one qualified in only 79 of 248, a 31.9 percent rate.
Changing the cutoff didn't exactly make the gap disappear either. Teams with a top-20 scorer made the playoffs 71.0 percent of the time, compared with 36.5 percent without one. At the top-40 threshold, the split was 63.3 percent to 25.8 percent. At top 50, it was 60.7 percent to 21.2 percent.
Where the study became useful was evaluating the successful teams without one of the league's top scorers.
The exceptions were usually elite somewhere else
There were 79 playoff teams in the sample that qualified without a top-30 scorer.
Seventy finished in the top half of the NHL in goals against. Forty-eight ranked in the top 10 in goals against. Eighteen ranked in the top 10 in goals scored. Fifty-seven had at least one of those two top-10 team-level results.
Among teams without a top-30 scorer that ranked outside the top 10 in both goals scored and goals against, the playoff rate collapsed to 12.7 percent.
That's where the phrase “scoring by committee” can become misleading.
It describes how a team divides its offence, but it doesn't tell us whether the offence is any good.
A team can have three respectable lines, eight forwards capable of scoring 15 goals and a very balanced-looking stat sheet while still finishing 22nd in team scoring. The goals being distributed evenly doesn't help when the team is being outscored every night.
Balance is a roster characteristic. It still has to become an advantage.
Seattle’s 2022-23 team did exactly that. McCann ranked 59th in league scoring, so the Kraken were nowhere near the top-30 group. They still finished sixth in goals.
Sixteen skaters scored at least eight times. Eight reached 40 points. In the first round against Colorado, 15 different Kraken scored a goal.
Seattle's past success under the same plan explains why the idea remains attractive. An opponent could not shut Seattle down by winning one matchup. The Kraken could get offence from the next line and the next pair, and over an 82-game season that added up to one of the league’s best offensive totals.
The three seasons since show the other side of the model.
Seattle fell to 29th in goals in 2023-24, improved to 16th in 2024-25 and finished 28th last season. The Kraken missed the playoffs all three years.
The roster could still be described as deep during portions of that stretch. The collective result simply stopped being good enough to overcome the absence of one of the league's most productive forwards.
Seattle is betting on several gains at once
This is what makes the current plan more interesting than a normal offseason projection.
General manager Jason Botterill did not respond to a third straight playoff miss by chasing one established offensive star. Seattle re-signed McMann for six years after his strong finish and traded a first-round pick and a future second-rounder for Samoskevich, then signed him for three years.
Both players fit what the Kraken want to become. McMann brings speed, a heavy shot and direct scoring. Samoskevich adds more pace and skill to a forward group that already wants to attack quickly. Neither requires Seattle to reorganize the entire offence around him.
Then there is the internal growth.
Catton had 17 points in 66 games as a 19-year-old rookie. Wright has 78 points through 169 NHL games. Beniers produced 50 points last season and is still only 23.
Seattle does not need all of them to suddenly become stars. It probably needs at least one to raise the ceiling of a scoring line while enough of the others raise the floor everywhere else.
This is the largest risk with this approach. A team built around one elite scorer concentrates a huge amount of its offence in one player. Seattle has done the opposite, which means its bet is spread across several players who all need to give the Kraken something. Seattle needs McMann’s finishing to hold, Samoskevich to produce more with a larger role, some combination of Beniers, Wright and Catton to improve, and the rest of the lineup to continue supplying enough secondary offence.
None of those outcomes is unreasonable on its own.
The Kraken just need several of them to click together in order to reach the playoffs once again.
Defence can provide the other route
The historical exceptions also give Seattle another way to win.
A team without elite individual scoring does not necessarily have to manufacture a top-10 offence if it can become exceptional defensively.
Seattle was nowhere near that standard last season either.
The Kraken ranked 23rd in goals against and 31st on the penalty kill at 72.2 percent. Their five-on-five defensive environment was better than the overall goals-against total suggests, but a team trying to win without high-end scoring cannot give that much away while shorthanded.
The penalty kill therefore matters to this roster-building question more than it would for a team capable of simply outscoring mistakes.
If Seattle’s even-strength structure improves and the penalty kill climbs from the bottom of the league toward the top, the Kraken can lower the amount of offence the committee actually has to replace. If the defensive results stay ordinary, the scoring burden gets much harder for Seattle's depth to provide consistently.
The Stanley Cup results make the same point.
Seventeen of the 21 champions from 2005-06 through 2025-26 had a top-30 regular-season scorer. Twenty had somebody in the top 40.
The four top-30 exceptions were Boston in 2010-11, St. Louis in 2018-19, Tampa Bay in 2020-21 and Vegas in 2022-23.
Even those examples require context. Boston had Zdeno Chara and Tim Thomas. Tampa played the entire regular season without Nikita Kucherov before getting him back for the playoffs. Vegas had Jack Eichel for only 67 games and Mark Stone for 43, with another major advantage coming from its blue line.
St. Louis is probably the cleanest scoring-by-committee champion of the group, and the Blues still tied for the sixth-fewest goals against while receiving elite goaltending from Jordan Binnington after his arrival.
That is the actual challenge in front of Seattle.
The Kraken do not necessarily need to find a superstar for this roster to work. Their 2022-23 season already proved that. What they cannot do is use scoring by committee as an excuse for not producing enough offence.
Seattle’s only playoff team did not succeed because spreading the scoring around somehow made up for having less of it. The Kraken finished sixth in the NHL in goals. Their depth collectively produced the type of offensive advantage another team might get from one or two elite scorers.
That is the standard this version of the Kraken has to get back to.
McMann, Samoskevich, Beniers, Wright and Catton do not all need career years. Seattle probably doesn't even need one of them to become an 80-point player. But enough of those bets have to hit at the same time for the Kraken to once again turn depth into something opponents actually struggle to contain.
The other route is becoming exceptional defensively. The study showed teams without a top-30 scorer could still consistently make the playoffs when they created a major advantage somewhere else. Seattle finishing 23rd in goals against and 31st on the penalty kill last season obviously doesn't suggest that advantage already exists.
That leaves the Kraken with a pretty straightforward test this season.
Either the committee has to become one of the NHL’s better offences again, or Seattle has to become one of its better defensive teams.
If neither happens, the problem will not be that scoring by committee does not work.
It will be that Seattle’s committee simply was not good enough.