Brandon Montour steps away from his team on Saturday.

The Seattle Kraken will be without one of their top defensemen for the foreseeable future.

In a surprise announcement on Saturday morning, the Kraken revealed that defenseman Brandon Montour would be stepping away from the team for an undetermined period of time. Montour, who has spent the last two seasons as a member of the Kraken, is taking a personal leave of absence to deal with a family matter, no further details have been shared.

The Kraken did mentioned that this leave of absence is only temporary, indicating that they expect Montour back at some point this season.

Montour was already off to a tough start to the season after missing a significant portion of training camp following surgery to remove a bursa on his ankle. Montour missed roughly two weeks of time recovering from the surgery earlier this year and had a slower start to his preparations for the season than anyone would have liked.

That being said he did appear in the Kraken's first four games of the regular season and has looked very good to start the campaign with 0 goals and 4 assists for a total of 4 points over those 4 games.

Montour has been averaging well over 22 minutes a night (22:48) to kick off the regular season which means it will be extremely difficult, if not downright impossible, for the Kraken to adequetly replace him on the blue line during his absence.

Of course the main concern right now is with the Montour family, and I can only hope that whatever issue has forced Montour to step away will have a happy resolution for both player and his family.

Stay tuned for more on this developing story.