The Kraken are a true NHL expansion franchise
The Kraken are a true NHL expansion franchise
In a lot of ways, the difference between the first-year Kraken and Golden Knights was luck. And it turns out this is going to be a slow build after all
The Seattle Kraken re-signed their first player in franchise history Tuesday. And in doing so, they got their best player, top scorer and No. 1 center – for now, at least – under contract at a reasonable yearly cap hit of $5 million for each of the next five seasons. It’s a move that screams, “Steady as she goes,” which has been the approach the Kraken have taken since the expansion draft.
Jared McCann is a good player who does a lot of good things and, on a team where he’s been able to fill a top-line role, could end up being a 30-goal scorer this season. And he’s done that with a lot less help than his old junior teammate, Toronto Maple Leafs rookie Michael Bunting, the flavor of the week after hitting the 20-goal mark himself. Believe it or not, McCann, who’s in his seventh NHL season, is almost eight months younger than Bunting, who could win the Calder Trophy in 2021-22.
Unlike the Vegas Golden Knights, this will not be a short process. The Kraken will be forever compared to the Golden Knights, and they understandably really hate that. It’s been a millstone since the moment the Kraken became a reality. If Vegas could do it, why not Seattle?
Well, there are a lot of reasons for that, not the least of which is when it comes to the actual opening-season rosters the two teams put on the ice, Vegas got much luckier than Seattle. It turns out Yanni Gourde is not the second coming of Jonathan Marchessault. Calle Jarnkrok could not become William Karlsson and Vince Dunn is not going to duplicate Shea Theodore. And perhaps most importantly, Philipp Grubauer was not able to channel his inner Marc-Andre Fleury. Who is Seattle’s Reilly Smith? David Perron? Erik Haula? Colin Miller?
But no one, either in the Seattle hockey operations department or outside, could have predicted this. The Kraken were never going to be the Golden Knights, but they were supposed to be an above-.500 team that was going to compete for a playoff spot in the weakest division in the NHL. Nobody thought they would be out of the playoff picture so early. And nobody thought there would be empty seats at Kraken home games in their first season. But it turns out a building, even one as impressive as the Climate Pledge Arena, is just a building. And that’s not enough to keep a honeymoon going very long. Season-ticket holders, who had to make a three-year commitment to the team, may feel as though they’ve been sold a bill of goods. And maybe they were. The Kraken were supposed to be a lot better than this. But this is actually how it’s supposed to be.
“I haven’t made that comparison,” Kraken coach Dave Hakstol said about living up to the Golden Knights’ first season. “All year long, I’ve stayed away from that comparison. We’ll make an evaluation on that at the end of the year. But for now, the most important thing to work through for the next 24 games, is continuing to learn about who is truly part of the growth of our team.”
To be sure, there have been better expansion teams than the Kraken, 14 of them since the 1967 expansion. If you remove the ’67 expansion teams, who played 50 of their 74 games that season against each other, the Kraken are 10th among 17 teams, about the middle of the pack. Again, it’s not what you’d expect in exchange for a $650 million expansion fee and favorable draft expansion rules. Even taking inflation into account, the Kraken paid five times what the Columbus Blue Jackets and Minnesota Wild paid when they came into the league in 2000.
The New York Islanders won 12 games their first season and are the third-worst expansion team since 1967, but won their first of four Stanley Cups by their eighth season. The Golden Knights were the best expansion team in professional sports history. That success, and the expectations that it created, have prompted them to perpetually chase the shiniest new thing. They have used the assets they piled up in the expansion dreaft to build one of the most star-studded, and cap-heavy, teams in the NHL. Vegas has become a preferred destination for star players and while it has turned a team in the desert into one of the NHL’s hottest commodities, the Golden Knights might not be any closer to the Stanley Cup now than they were when they were the Golden Misfits.
Where the Kraken are way behind the Golden Knights off the ice is in building up assets, something GM Ron Francis wasn’t able to do the way George McPhee did in Vegas. That, as much as anything, has clearly put Vegas on the fast track, while the Kraken are going the more conventional route. They could very well end up finishing last overall, which would give them the best opportunity to land the No. 1 overall pick. They’ve lost 14 games this season by one goal and they’ve given up 59 more goals than they’ve scored over 58 games. So the difference between winning games and losing them this season has often been one goal. And that’s far more on brand for an expansion team.
“There’s a foundation to be built, and that’s what this year in large part is about,” Hakstol said. “We’ve been extremely competitive and we’ve lost a lot of close games. What we’ve really valued, especially in the past two weeks, is how consistent we’ve been, how determined we’ve been in every area of the game. On any given night, we know we’re going to be in a tight, hard-fought battle.”
Fans who were expecting much more success in Seattle will have to be content with that, for now and the foreseeable future. Sometimes you get lucky. More often, though, you muddle your way along and keep building. This is going to take a while.