The offseason has arrived for half of the league’s teams that aren’t taking part in the playoffs.  Accordingly, it’s now time to examine what they will need to accomplish over the coming months.  Next up is a look at Seattle.

After another coaching change last year, the Kraken were hoping that they’d turn things around this season.  While they were technically in the race for a playoff spot in the final few games, they wound up on the outside looking in once again, resulting in the departure of Ron Francis and an organization-wide audit of their processes.  While a rebuild or roster retooling might be the more prudent move for the team, it doesn’t appear they’ll be going in that direction.  With that in mind, their checklist focuses on moves to help the team now.

Take Care Of Pending Free Agent Forwards

Since Seattle was still within striking distance of a playoff spot, they went from being likely sellers at the trade deadline to improbable buyers.  As a result, instead of moving some core rental veterans for future help, they held onto those and added another one for good measure.  Now, it’s time to figure out which ones they want to keep.

We’ll start with the newcomer Bobby McMann.  The 29-year-old was in the middle of a breakout performance with Toronto before finding a new gear following his acquisition by the Kraken.  McMann potted 10 goals in 18 games with his new team, bringing him to 29 on the season.  That puts him fourth in tallies among all pending UFAs, putting him in a position to command a long-term deal at possibly four (or more) times his current AAV of $1.35MM.  With the team carrying over $28MM in cap room for next season per PuckPedia, it certainly stands to reason that GM Jason Botterill will be trying to keep him around.

Meanwhile, decisions need to be made on two more wingers, Jaden Schwartz and Eeli Tolvanen.  Schwartz has been with Seattle for all of its five NHL seasons and sits fifth in franchise scoring despite a long list of injuries, including this season.  He has shown flashes of top-six performance but his injury history makes him a little less likely to return, meaning he’ll need to be replaced.  Tolvanen’s case is a little less certain.  He has 35 goals and 71 points over the last two seasons but saw his role be reduced down the stretch.  Still, for a team with minimal firepower, letting a decent scorer walk would be risky.  Also up front, though Jared McCann isn’t a pending unrestricted free agent, he becomes extension-eligible in July and is someone the team should be looking to lock up to a long-term deal.

Make A Decision On Wright

When the Kraken selected Shane Wright with the fourth overall selection in 2022, they hoped that he could be their future top center or at least a core second liner.  Four years later, that outcome doesn’t seem quite as certain.  The team evidently felt the same way as back in January, they reportedly made the youngster available if they were going to land the impactful forward they were seeking.

Unfortunately for Seattle, that move didn’t materialize and Wright’s value has likely dipped since then.  After putting up a very respectable 19 goals and 25 assists in 79 games in his first full season in 2024-25, his sophomore numbers took a turn in the wrong direction.  Wright managed just 12 goals and 15 helpers in 74 appearances last season and struggled considerably after the Olympic break, notching just one goal and four assists in 18 outings.

On the one hand, it seems as if he’s trending in the wrong direction.  On the other, he’s a young center who is signed for one more year on his entry-level deal at a cap charge not far above the minimum salary.  He still has five seasons of team control remaining, too.  Even if his value isn’t as high as it once was, there would still be plenty of suitors for his services.

On top of that, the Kraken are well-stocked down the middle.  Matty Beniers is entrenched as one of their top two middlemen while Berkly Catton, an eighth-overall selection, is a natural center, as is prospect Jake O’Brien, a number pick himself.  Meanwhile, veteran Chandler Stephenson is still signed long-term and bottom-sixer Frederick Gaudreau has a couple of years left as well.  While there is no elite piece (at least at the moment), they’re not in bad shape depth-wise and could afford to part with Wright.

Botterill will need to decide if he’s better off giving Wright another look in the hopes of him rebounding or at least helping his trade value at the risk of a slow start further lowering his value.  But if the team is still open to moving him, Wright is one of their better trade chips.

Add More Firepower

Over the years, the Kraken have tried more of a by-committee approach with their offense.  Several of the players from that approach are still around but more often than not, that hasn’t worked out well.  In three of their five seasons, they have been in the bottom five of the league in terms of goals scored, including 2025-26 when they were 28th.  (They were fourth and 16th the other two seasons.)

This is why they were willing to pay a significant premium in terms of salary to try to land Artemi Panarin from the Rangers in the hopes of making him the centerpiece of their offense.  They’re believed to have tried to make some big offers in the past to free agents as well but haven’t had a ton of success on that front and the market this year isn’t likely to bring significant improvements up front.

That’s where the idea of moving Wright makes some sense.  With Brandon Montour in the fold, perhaps Vince Dunn could be a trade chip to add a core forward.  They could also pull from their prospect pool (though that’s risky for a non-playoff team).  But with three subpar offensive seasons from this core group, Botterill needs to find a way to add at least one if not two more threats up front.

Upgrade Defensive Depth

Seattle has one other unrestricted free agent of consequence this summer in veteran Jamie Oleksiak.  However, with Dunn, Ryan Lindgren, and Ryker Evans in the fold, they should be able to fill his spot without too much difficulty so they don’t necessarily need to get into a bidding war to try to keep him.

However, they could stand to upgrade on their depth options.  If they want to give their prospects a bit more time in the minors with Coachella Valley, their internal replacements for Oleksiak are Josh Mahura and Cale Fleury.  Both players have been around the NHL for a few years now but are better seventh options than a full-time sixth.

Fortunately, there will be better options available on the open market.  While there aren’t a ton of top-four players set to reach free agency, there are a lot of third-pairing pieces who have had more success than Mahura and Fleury.  Ideally, the addition would be a right-shot option to balance out the pairings but an upgrade is an upgrade.  They likely only need a short-term player with Ty Nelson, Tyson Jugnauth, Caden Price, and Ville Ottavainen having some success in the minors with the Firebirds and presumably, one of them could break through to full NHL readiness within a year.

But while that prospect depth is promising, a short-term veteran addition to replace Oleksiak and be an improvement on Mahura and Fleury would be worthwhile.  More importantly, it’s one that should be realistic to achieve, unlike their forward needs which will be much harder to accomplish.

Photo courtesy of Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images.

SAN DIEGO (FOX 5/KUSI) — If home is truly where the heart is, then Rocio Delgado’s home is in Puerto Rico.

“I grew up in Ciales. It’s a town in the middle of the island, green, full of mountains. It’s a very pretty town that I invite everybody to have the opportunity to go visit,” Delgado said.

Everything in her house, from the sugar cane painting to the cafecito, reminds her of the island.

“The best way to drink the coffee,” she said as she warmed milk on the stove.

But, she doesn’t live in Puerto Rico anymore.

“Especially in the beginning, it was super hard because my family is there, my friends as well,” Delgado said.

She moved to San Diego more than 20 years ago to continue her education. “That was a hard transition.”

Through her time in her art studio, you can see the longing to connect with her homeland in each brush stroke. “Painting was a way to heal,” she said. “I feel like it was a therapy.”

That feeling produced her painting: “Corazon Boricua.”

“I let myself go in a way,” Delgado said.

She painted the blue, white, and red heart with oil on a large canvas.

“I feel that the heart is not broken. It’s just expanding,” she said, adding it symbolizes the resilience of Latinos.

That’s what caught the attention of the San Diego Padres.

“They sent us a deck with several different design options, things that are important to the culture,” said Emily Wittig, the Vice President of Marketing with the San Diego Padres.

In collaboration with the award-winning artist, the Padres will feature her artwork on the limited-edition game hat during their fourth Puerto Rican Heritage Game.

“I was finishing my heart, and that’s the one that they chose,” Delgado said.

What started as a painting on her wall became a digital graphic design she shared with the Padres.

This hat became a reality after several drafts — a tangible way to share her culture at the Puerto Rican Heritage Game.

“We want it to be authentic,” Wittig said. “We want it to be true to the culture, so it’s important for us to work with these local community groups to see what’s important to them.”

The team designed every part of the hat with intention.

“Our Puerto Rican celebration hat is the colors of the Puerto Rican flag,” Wittig said.

It includes authentic details in even unexpected ways.

“The fun thing that people might not notice right away, but on the inside we have the coqui, the tiny frogs, which are so cute, so it’s a really fun nod to Puerto Rico while also still celebrating and showing your Padres pride,” Wittig said, showing the details of the hat.

The Padres donate $5 from every ticket sold to the House of Puerto Rico, which Carmen Acevedo says keeps the cottage operating.

“It’s also going to keep the international cottages alive for the rest of the generations,” Acevedo said.

Acevedo says the cultural museum relies solely on donations, receiving more than $4,000 from the game last year.

“This one is a fundraiser with a lot of fun,” Acevedo said.
Delgado is one of thousands of Puerto Ricans who left the island in recent years.

“I was thinking it was going to be a short transition, just come study, having an opportunity to do that, and come back, but things change,” Delgado said.

According to the Pew Research Center, since 2004, more than 600,000 Puerto Ricans have left the island to live in the mainland United States, so events like this offer a chance to reconnect with other Puerto Ricans.

“We want people to feel included and welcomed here,” Wittig said.

While Delgado no longer calls Puerto Rico her physical home, you can see the home in her heart through the ‘Corazon Boricua.’

“The Padres are doing something so nice to recognize the Puerto Rican community in San Diego, and not too many teams do that,” Delgado said.

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• A megatsunami is an incredibly large wave of about 100 meters (328 ft) or more. These huge waves are often triggered by events such as landslides.
• In August 2025, a megatsunami in Alaska happened when a landslide entered a fjord next to South Sawyer Glacier. The event generated a wave 1,580 feet (481 meters) high.
• Scientists believe a warning system could help alert any people in the area. It would be based on seismic activity in the area.

By Michael E. West, University of Alaska Fairbanks and Ezgi Karasözen, University of Alaska Fairbanks

2025 Alaska megatsunami shows need for warning system

On the evening of August 9, 2025, passengers on the Hanse Explorer yacht finished taking selfies and videos of Alaska’s South Sawyer Glacier, and the ship headed back down the fjord. Twelve hours later, a landslide from the adjacent mountain unexpectedly collapsed into the fjord, initiating the second-highest tsunami in recorded history.

We conduct research on earthquakes and tsunamis at the Alaska Earthquake Center. And one of us serves as Alaska state seismologist. In a new study with colleagues, we detail how that landslide sent water and debris 1,580 feet (481 meters) up the other side of the fjord. That’s higher than the top floor of the Taipei 101 skyscraper. And then the tsunami continued down Tracy Arm. The force of the water stripped the fjord’s walls down to bare rock.

The 2025 Alaska megatsunami

It was just after 5 o’clock in the morning on a dreary day. And fortunately, no ships were nearby. In the months after, some cruise lines started avoiding Tracy Arm. However, the conditions that led to this event are not at all unique to this fjord.

Landslides are common in the coastal mountains of Alaska. In these areas, rapid uplift – caused by tectonic forces and long-term ice loss – converges with the erosive forces of precipitation and moving glaciers. But a curious pattern has emerged in recent years: Multiple major landslides have occurred precisely at the terminus (end point) of a retreating glacier.

Though the mechanics are still poorly understood, these mountains appear to become unstable when the ice disappears. When the landslide hits the water, the momentum of millions of tons of rock is transferred into tsunami waves.

This same phenomenon is playing out from Alaska to Greenland and Norway, sometimes with deadly consequences. Across the Arctic, countries are trying to come to terms with this growing hazard. The options are not attractive: avoid vast swaths of coastline, or live with a poorly understood risk. We believe there is an obvious role for alert systems. But only if scientists have a better understanding of where and when landslides are likely to occur.

Signs that a landslide might be coming

The Tracy Arm landslide is a powerful example.

The landslide occurred in August, when warm ocean waters and heavier precipitation favor both glacier retreat and slope failure. The glacier below the landslide area had experienced rapid calving: large chunks of ice breaking off and falling into the water. And it had retreated more than a third of a mile in the two months prior. Heavy rain had been falling. Rain enters fractures in the mountain and pushes them closer to failure by increasing the water pressure in cracks.

Most provocative are the thousands of small seismic tremors that emanated from the area of the slide in the days prior to the mountainside collapsing.

We believe that this combination of signs would have been sufficient to issue progressive alerts to any ships in the vicinity and homes and businesses that could have been harmed by a tsunami at least a day prior to the failure … had a monitoring program existed.

Escalating alerts are used for everything from terrorism and nuclear plant safety to avalanches and volcanic unrest. They don’t remove the risk. But they do make it easier for people to safely coexist with hazards.

For example, though people are still killed in avalanches, alert systems have played an essential role in making winter backcountry travel safer for more people. The collapse at Tracy Arm demonstrates what could be possible for landslides.

What an alert system could look like

We believe that the combination of weather and rapid glacier retreat in early August 2025 was likely sufficient to issue an alert notifying people that the hazard may be temporarily elevated in a general area. On a yellow-orange-red scale, this would be a yellow alert.

In the hours prior to the landslide, the exponential increase in seismic events and telltale transition to what is known as seismic tremor – a continuous “hum” of seismic energy – were sufficient to communicate a time-sensitive warning for a specific region.

These observations, recorded as a byproduct of regional earthquake monitoring, warranted an “orange” alert noting immediate concern. The signs were arguably sufficient to recommend keeping boats and ships out of the fjord.

Alerts are possible

Our research over the past few years has demonstrated that once a large landslide has started, it is possible to detect and measure the event within a couple of minutes. In this amount of time, seismic waves in the surrounding area can indicate the rough size of the landslide and whether it occurred near open water.

A monitoring program that could quickly communicate this would be able to issue a red alert, signaling an event in progress.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s tsunami warning program has spent decades fine-tuning rapid message dissemination. A warning system would have offered little help for ships in the immediate vicinity, but it could have provided perhaps 10 minutes of warning for those who rode out the harrowing tsunami farther away.

There is no landslide monitoring system operating yet at this scale in the U.S. Building one will require cooperation across state and federal agencies, and strengthened monitoring and communication networks. Even then, it will not be fail-proof.

Understanding risk, not removing it

Alert systems do not remove the risk entirely, but they are a better option than no warning at all. Over time, they also build awareness as communities and visitors get used to thinking about these hazards.

Many of the most alluring places on Earth come with significant hazards. Arctic fjords are among them. The same processes that create this hazard – glacier retreat, steep terrain, dynamic geology – are also what make these landscapes so compelling. The mix of glaciers, ice-choked waters and steep mountains is exactly what draws people to these places. People will continue to visit and experience them.

The question is not whether these places should be avoided altogether, but how to help people make more informed decisions. We believe that stronger geophysical and meteorological monitoring, coupled with new research and communication channels, is the first step.

On August 9, visitors unknowingly passed through a landscape on the cusp of failure. An alert system might have given tour companies and people in the area the information they needed to make more informed choices and avoid being caught by surprise.

Michael E. West, Director of the Alaska Earthquake Center and State Seismologist, University of Alaska Fairbanks and Ezgi Karasözen, Research Seismologist, Alaska Earthquake Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Bottom line: A 2025 Alaska megatsunami sent a 1,580-foot wave of water up the Tracy Arm fjord. It revealed the need for a landslide-triggered tsunami warning system.

Read more: Landslide-triggered tsunamis becoming more common