Dan Bylsma’s long-awaited return to running an NHL bench did not last long. Bylsma has been fired by the Seattle Kraken after only one season as their coach, multiple league sources confirmed to The Athletic on Monday.
The Kraken finished seventh in the Pacific Division with 76 points, 20 points behind the St. Louis Blues for the Western Conference’s final wild-card slot. Only three teams finished with fewer points.
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Bylsma was hired last season by general manager Ron Francis after the Kraken’s inaugural coach, Dave Hakstol, was fired after three seasons. Kraken CEO and president Tod Leiweke said recently that Francis would remain with the Kraken, though he did not specify if that would be in the GM capacity.
“We’re going to look at every doggone thing here,” Leiweke told The Athletic last week when speaking about the franchise’s year-end meetings. “Ron is with us, and I recruited the guy. I’d go to war with him every day of the week.”
Bylsma had coached the Kraken’s AHL affiliate, the Coachella Valley Firebirds, to the Calder Cup finals in their first two seasons. He was allowed to hire two assistants to the coaching staff in Seattle: Jessica Campbell, who was with Bylsma at Coachella Valley, and Bob Woods, who spent a season on Bylsma’s staff with the Buffalo Sabres.
Bylsma had not been a head coach in the NHL since spending two seasons with the Buffalo Sabres (2015-16 and 2016-17). After being fired by the Sabres, Bylsma was an assistant coach with the Detroit Red Wings and the AHL’s Charlotte Checkers.
He took the Checkers’ job intending to work his way to becoming a head coach again after not receiving much interest from NHL teams following his run with the Sabres.
Bylsma was once one of the NHL’s most celebrated coaches, rising to stardom after taking over the Pittsburgh Penguins in February 2009 and leading them to the Stanley Cup. He was the fastest coach in league history to amass 200 victories. He won the 2011 Jack Adams Award and coached Team USA at the 2014 Winter Olympics during his six seasons in Pittsburgh.
The Kraken hoped Bylsma could recreate that magic on his third head NHL job, but Seattle never established consistency this past season. A 2-8-1 stretch beginning in mid-December sank the Kraken’s postseason hopes in the stacked Western Conference, and a 9-8-2 record after the trade deadline was not good enough to save Bylsma’s job.
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The Kraken have qualified for the playoffs only once in four seasons, reaching the second round in 2023. Fair or not, the franchise is compared to the Vegas Golden Knights, another recent expansion franchise, but one that reached the Stanley Cup Final in their inaugural season and won at least one postseason series in three of its first four seasons.
The Kraken and Golden Knights approached their respective expansion drafts differently, with Vegas leveraging favorable rules to load up on future NHL draft capital and also landing a probable Hockey Hall of Fame goalie in Marc-Andre Fleury in 2017.
Whether by choice or because league general managers had learned from the 2017 expansion draft, the Kraken took a more conservative approach to the 2021 expansion draft under Francis.
(Photo: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
This news was originally published on this post .
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