Seattle Kraken’s Matty Beniers Finally Delivering On Potential

Welcome back to Seattle Kraken hockey! In my first column of the season, I offered up several Kraken-related predictions for the 2025-26 campaign. One of those predictions was that the Kraken would (spoiler) miss the playoffs for the third consecutive season, and for the fourth time in five years since joining the league as an expansion franchise in 2021-22. They’ve started the year with a 2-0-2 record in four games, but it remains to be seen if they can maintain the second-best points percentage (PTS%) in the Pacific Division.

One of the biggest roadblocks to the Kraken making the playoffs and ultimately becoming legitimate Stanley Cup contenders is their lack of an elite forward. Very few of the teams in the league’s upper echelon have found success without boasting some of the sport’s best attacking threats. Looking at last season’s conference finalists, the Florida Panthers (Aleksandr Barkov and Matthew Tkachuk), Edmonton Oilers (Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl), and the Dallas Stars (Mikko Rantanen and Jason Robertson) all have at least two players who would be the best forwards on almost every team in the league.

The Kraken simply do not have anyone of that caliber currently in the lineup. Jared McCann’s 54 goals since the start of the 2023-24 season lead the franchise in scoring, a mark which comes well outside the top 50 of all skaters leaguewide in that time. Shane Wright (fourth-overall in 2022), Berkly Catton (eighth-overall in 2024), and Jake O’Brien (eighth-overall in 2025) were all drafted by the Kraken in the top 10 with that trajectory in mind, but all three are 21 years of age or younger and are looking at multiple years of continued development before they reach that level.

The Kraken’s best hope of securing such a talent in the next year or two is center Matty Beniers, whom Seattle selected second overall in 2021 as the organization’s first-ever draft pick. The American pivot turns 23 in November and appears to have taken a step forward at both ends of the ice, which was expected of him as a high lottery pick. The Kraken 

Beniers Impactful At Both Ends of the Ice

The quickest and most shallow way to evaluate any player is to look at their boxscore totals. After tallying 66 points in his first 90 NHL games and winning the 2022-23 Calder Trophy as the rookie of the year, Beniers posted meager point totals of 37 and 43 in the two seasons since.

The sheen has worn off as Beniers has been outproduced by other members of his draft class with his defensive impact failing to make up the difference. Of the 11 forwards from the 2021 draft class to have played in 100 or more NHL games in their career, Beniers ranks sixth in points per game despite being the first one taken that year. Some teams never get the chance to draft so high in the lottery, so missing out on a prospect when they are in that position can be a catastrophic event.

For all of the rightful consternation surrounding Beniers’ post-draft development, all is not lost. It has only been four games into the season, but Beniers has already scored one goal and three points while posting personal bests in individual shot and scoring chance generation. He’s done this while ranking fourth among Kraken forwards in five-on-five ice time and second in all situations, the latter of which comes in at a career-high 19:31 minutes per game. 

More impressive with regard to Beniers’ improvement is how the Kraken are dictating play with him on the ice at five-on-five. The center is posting the highest on-ice shares of shots, expected goals, scoring chances, and high-danger chances of his career by a wide margin, small sample size notwithstanding.

While the Kraken’s ledger for actual five-on-five goals only reads 3-3 with Beniers on the ice, it’s clear that he’s pushing results in a positive direction. His relative numbers (how the team fares when he is on the ice compared to not) are eye-popping, with the Kraken accounting for an extra 15% or more in the aforementioned categories with Beniers skating around. The percentages usually don’t lie over the course of an entire season, so expect Beniers to get better puck luck in due time.

Beniers was drafted with the goal of fashioning him into a two-way center capable of impacting play in both the offensive and defensive zones. He initially showed flashes of that potential, but until the start of this season, his results cratered all the way down the line. If he can maintain these numbers while continuing to log a career-high in ice time, the Kraken will have a much greater margin of error with their other forward prospects going forward and augment their roster flexibility around him.

Beniers On Track for Stardom

While there is a long way to go before Beniers is spoken about like the McDavids and Draisaitls of the world (if ever), he appears to have overcome the circumstances of his draft year and beyond.

The junior and minor league landscape was turned upside down during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, significantly affecting the development of players taken in the 2020 and 2021 drafts. Beniers has also taken on a bigger workload on a generally weak team while only turning 23 next month and already counting over 250 career games to his name (only Cole Sillinger and J.J. Moser have more from his draft class).

Beniers’ career penalty minutes are the lowest among the 11 skaters from the 2021 draft to have played in at least 150 games, and the third-lowest of the 18 to have played in at least 100 games. That’s despite ranking third in the class by games played and regularly being used in a top-six role thus far in his career.

Beniers also clocks in within the top 20 among all forwards in penalty differential (penalties drawn minus taken) since 2021, and 10th since his full rookie season (he only played 10 games in 2021-22). It’s an underappreciated skill among the general viewing public since it doesn’t directly show up on the box score, but earning your team more power plays than your opponent is very valuable.

Beniers has yet to achieve the heights of the typical second-overall pick, but the early returns on the season suggest a switch has been flipped. For the Kraken’s sake, let’s hope that the change is permanent.

Data courtesy of Evolving Hockey, Natural Stat Trick, and the NHL.