Beyond the Sophomore Slump
A closer look at Matty Beniers' game
In a busy week for hockey news, the most interesting one to me was the Seattle Kraken signing Matty Beniers to a 7-year-deal carrying a cap hit of $7.14 mil. per season. On the surface, there isn’t much to this deal. He’s been penciled in as one of their building blocks & was their top line center for the past two seasons. His rookie contract up, so it makes sense to get him under a number you’re comfortable with for a long time. He’s just always been a fascinating player to watch for me because there’s a lot to his game that is well beyond his years. He is one of the most heavily taxed forwards in the league when it comes to retrieving pucks in the defensive zone & starting breakouts. Most forwards struggle with this even when they’ve been in the league for awhile, Beniers was doing this when he was 20 while keeping with some pretty good company to boot.
Some names around him include Connor McDavid, Tomas Hertl, Elias Pettersson, Brayden Point, Jack Hughes & Sasha Barkov. This doesn’t automatically make someone a two-way player, as exits correlate more to offense than defense, but it’s still a valuable tool to have. Beniers is one of those players where it has translated over in terms of impact, as the Kraken do not give up much when he is on the ice. He is one of those centers who plays the position in the most traditional sense of the word.
This part of his game is why I’ve always enjoyed watching him. Really high motor player & he is all over the ice when you watch the Kraken. It’s why most are still optimistic about him reaching the next level even if he had a pretty brutal sophomore slump, not even hitting the 40-point mark after a pretty great rookie season. The offense is the elephant in the room here because there are some lower-end players who also have a high workload in the defensive zone, but they don’t play first line minutes like Beniers does. It’s something worth looking into though because there was a pretty big shift in his play with the puck from Year 1 to Year 2.
2022-23
2023-24
Beniers’ in the neutral & defensive zones was still excellent, so we’re going to focus on the offense tabs here. He was still a pass-first player in his rookie year, but he was getting a lot of quality with decent quantity mixed in. Also getting a good variety of higher percentage shots such as one-timers & deflections. If you look at some of the goals he scored that year, there’s a lot of him finishing off odd-man rushes, jamming in a rebound or finishing a breakaway. Last year, he went from pass-first to “pass-only,” seeing both his chance quantity & quality take a nosedive.
I always look at it as a two-way street when a player’s shot-rate dips like this, especially when you look at the types of goal Beniers scored in his rookie year. He needs to be setup just as much as his teammates need him. Was he not getting that same level of support or was he doing a poor job of getting himself open in the offensive zone. Like his rookie year, he was attached at the hip to Jordan Eberle so he had some continuity with linemates. Where things changed were on the left wing. He still played with sniper Jared McCann, but there was a lot of Tomas Tatar & Tye Kartye mixed in. Still good players, but obviously a step down.
Something that is worth noting in the offense tab is where Beniers was getting his shots. He went from having a balance of rush & forecheck offense to primarily creating off the rush with not much in-zone offense to supplement it. This is where I wonder if the change in linemates hurt him or if it’s a part of his game that’s still growing. Seattle loves to cycle the puck & Hakstol is known for running a point-shot heavy system, but this was an area where the entire team saw a drop-off last year.
The Kraken went from one of the more balanced offenses in the league to a one-trick pony that couldn’t create any shot quality, so Beniers wasn’t alone here. Watching some of their games, there was a little too much predictability with how they created from down low. Here’s what it looked like when it worked.
Most of Seattle’s neutral zone play would look like this. It’s a controlled entry that leads to a cycle rather than a direct attack, which happens more often in the NHL now unless the defending team really screws up. The approach is basic, work the puck low & then to the high forward. Beniers makes a nice pivot along the wall to hit Kartye in the slot for the chance. That’s what it looked like when things were going well. More often than not, it looked more like this.
Basically a lot of retrieving, both with getting the puck back in the neutral zone to reset & on the forecheck. It’s a lot of energy burned by Beniers with chasing pucks down & working to get it back, so he’s probably gassed by the time the Kraken actually get setup. There’s no real opportunity for him to get a shot because the puck has to go through so many layers & he can’t get to the netfront as easily as he did in his rookie year. Putting Kartye on this line kind of forced Beniers to play more of an F1 role because Kartye’s a pure shooter & was the high forward more times than not, probably due to his skating.
The execution is a little better on this one because the Kraken do get a couple of shooting opportunities here, including a pretty good one from McCann after a flub from Beniers. The defensemen getting involved & Kartye joining in on the forecheck helped Beniers roam a little more freely as the third-man high in the zone, which is how he gets a lot of his chances. He gets three opportunities to create a chance by my count. The first one ended up not happening because he was covered & Eberle has to work the play from low-to-high. He then gets a shot from the right circle that misses & Vince Dunn starts a tic-tac-toe play with Eberle that ends up going off Beniers stick. McCann gets a one-timer chance right after because Dunn followed the play & the Devils finally clear the zone after that. Seattle quickly re-enters the zone & the play dies below the goal line after Beniers couldn’t find anything open off the drop-pass & had no real options when he tried to start a cycle, he was also at the end of a pretty long shift.
This was one of the Kraken’s better forecheck looks, but it took awhile for them to set it up and it required a lot of precision to execute with how often they were looking for a one-time or a quick passing play. Those are higher percentage plays but difficult to complete at five-on-five. It’s understandable why their offense might have been feast-or-famine when working off the forecheck & why some players had their offense fall off. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why they changed coaches.
If there’s anything to be encouraged by, it’s that Beniers has a recent track record of creating chances off the forecheck & there’s a high floor to his game with his defensive play. He is also one of the better players in the league at creating chances after zone entries, so he’ll always have that quick-strike ability, which sometimes goes back to shooting or linemates.
In short:
The drop in Beniers’ offense last year is related to the Kraken’s offensive approach just as much as his own game falling off.
Beniers is somewhat of a unique player with how much of a workload he takes on in all three zones & it’s always going to give him value high in the lineup.
There’s a good chance he outperforms this contract unless his issues with creating on the forecheck aren’t fixed by time or the new coaching staff, but his rookie season should make Seattle optimistic that he can work his way out of it.