Avalanche trade struggling winger to Kraken

Per a team announcement, the Seattle Kraken have acquired forward Tomas Tatar from the Colorado Avalanche in exchange for a fifth-round selection in the 2024 NHL Draft. After signing with the Avalanche on a one-year, $1.5M contract this past summer, Tatar will end his tenure with Colorado after having played only 27 games.

In what will now become a very brief experiment with the Avalanche, Tatar struggled to fit into the team system in Colorado, only scoring one goal and nine points overall. Only averaging a touch over 11 minutes of ice time per night, it was Tatar’s lowest usage rate since his sophomore campaign back in the 2012-13 NHL season.

With a relatively cheap contract, and brought in late in the summer to serve as increased offensive depth for the Avalanche, Tatar became an easy contract to move out, allowing Colorado to replenish a separate fifth-round selection, after having moved out their own two years ago in a trade for Andrew Cogliano.

Moving forward, the Avalanche will likely utilize either Ross Colton or Miles Wood in their top six, replacing Tatar on the wing. Also brought in as offensive depth over the offseason, Colton and Wood have translated much better to the system in Colorado, outperforming Tatar in almost every metric.

Similar to the reasoning that brought him to Colorado in the first place, the Kraken are dealing with their own injuries up front, as both Andre Burakovsky and Jaden Schwartz find themselves on the team’s injured reserve and long-term injured reserve, respectively. Upon the eventual return of both forwards, Tatar should still have a relatively safe spot in the Kraken’s middle-six forward group.

Being a change-of-scenery candidate, Tatar can only benefit from this move to the West Coast, as he is in the midst of one of the worst seasons of his 13-year career. Sporting career lows in shooting percentage, points per game and Corsi-For%, Tatar can only improve his game from here on out.

Unfortunately, with both the Calgary Flames and Edmonton Oilers passing them in the standings over the last few weeks, Seattle has an uphill climb to return to the playoffs this season. Being only one of three teams to pass the 30-game mark up to this point, the Kraken are sporting a 10-17-4 record, Seattle sits two points back of the final wild-card spot in the Western Conference with two more games played.