By Geoff Baker / The Seattle Times
SEATTLE — Exactly three years ago this week, a pandemic-generated holding pattern was keeping the entity that eventually became the Seattle Kraken from having a team name, logo, home arena and season ticket holders to fill it with.
Now, 36 months later, the Kraken are playing at $1.2 billion Climate Pledge Arena and on Thursday clinched their first NHL playoff spot with a 4-2 win over the Arizona Coyotes in front of those very season ticket holders that waited years for a chance to buy. Given all the Kraken endured to launch, including a KeyArena rebuild few believed possible and an initial season mired by continued pandemic difficulties, the coming playoff clinch was seen as cause for an organization-wide celebration.
“I’ll be so happy for so many people,” Kraken CEO Tod Leiweke said Thursday afternoon. “If you give one person credit it’s just so unfair because there are so many people who have actually weighed in on this.”
The story of the Kraken and how they’ve arrived at this point began long before this season. It took years to settle on an arena location, then get a deal worked out between the city and Oak View Group private developers to overhaul KeyArena for a $600 million price tag that doubled by the time of the project’s completion.
The NHL finally awarded a Seattle ownership group fronted by David Bonderman and Jerry Bruckheimer an expansion franchise in December 2018. At this time four years ago, Ron Francis was put on a shortlist by NHL Seattle senior adviser Dave Tippett that saw Francis named the still-unnamed team’s general manager three months later. But just as everything appeared to finally be coming together, the franchise’s darkest days struck and were still being experienced three years ago this week.
Lewieke said he’ll be very happy for general manager Ron Francis if a playoff berth is achieved Thursday, adding that “this has been a very arduous journey getting us up and running.”
The pandemic limited the ability of Francis, his scouts and analytics specialists to gather comprehensive information on players to build a roster from. It also prevented the team with no name from forging ahead with plans to connect meaningfully with a sports market lacking familiarity with the NHL product.
It was on April 4, 2020, during a virtual “Happy Hour” meeting with fans online that Francis first broke the news NHL Seattle was holding off indefinitely on announcing a team name to “be very respectful and sensitive” to those going through the initial pandemic chaos. A planned rollout of general season ticket sales remained on-hold as well while that week saw the implementation of a pandemic safety plan for KeyArena, where work had ground to a halt amid statewide construction shutdowns.
Uncertainty and fear loomed not only for the NHL team’s immediate path, but the future of all sports and how they’d be watched. Hundreds of people nationwide would start dying daily from COVID-19 complications as local NHL leaders spent that fitful spring pondering their place in a world where people feared leaving their homes.
Announcements about sports seemed trivial. Yet, for the NHL team — just more than a year away from a planned expansion draft — all of these elements were critical to launching and marketing a billion-dollar business. The personal stress of the pandemic was already tough enough before the professional concerns added to sleepless nights for all.
It was several more months before the Kraken team name was finally announced that summer, while appointments for general season ticket sales began being booked by fall and ran through the winter.
But much of the Kraken’s sluggish October 2021 debut can be traced back to those early spring 2020 pandemic construction delays, which eventually caused the Climate Pledge reopening to be pushed back months to the very last minute. The expansion Kraken wound up playing preseason games on the road or at various Washington junior hockey rinks, then needed weeks to adjust to their home venue — where pandemic restrictions kept some fans away and lessened the experience inside for those that did attend.
A majority had first made their initial season ticket deposits five years ago last month. They’d waited 21/2 additional years to begin choosing their seats — six months longer than expected because of pandemic delays — and 31/2 years to attend an actual game.
“Ultimately, my happiness would be for the fans who bought into this thing five years ago,” Leiweke said. “They didn’t know a lot. They didn’t know what the arena was going to be like. They probably didn’t understand that the first year was going to be hard. They didn’t know COVID was coming.
“But they kept the faith,” he added. “And it’s really a wonderful thing to see them get rewarded here.”
That initial Kraken season was tougher than anybody in the organization truly expected, a record of 27-49-6 and meager 60-point total that was the NHL’s third worst. Players newly arrived in Seattle needed weeks to adapt to their delayed home arena in-season, never mind the city around them. They struggled because of pandemic shipping restrictions to even have furniture for their apartments and had a hard time getting to know teammates and their families because of strict off-ice protocols that included social distancing, mask-wearing and restrictions to off-ice social time together.
Things have since changed for the better.
“The spirit in this dressing room is very tight,” Kraken defenseman Vince Dunn said Thursday morning. “Everyone’s really close and very personal with each other.”
They exited Thursday having already surpassed last season’s point total by 36, a record second-year NHL franchise jump badly needed by one hoping for a do-over in connecting with local fans. That’s why the opportunity to clinch a playoff berth in front of those fans had been shaping up as a genuine feel-good moment for a fledgling franchise still finding its way.
Kraken coach Dave Hakstol, never one to get ahead of things, said Thursday morning he had no problem with his players embracing the night’s moment for what it is.
“Do we want our guys to embrace it? Absolutely,” Hakstol said. “They’ve worked their butts off to be in this situation. Now you have a great opportunity in front of you and we can talk about it all we want. But you’ve got to go out and do it.”
And they did.
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