A regular season of NHL hockey is 82 games where a team gets to play every other team between two and four times. There are 32 teams separated into two conferences of 16, which are then split into two divisions of 8. Every time a team wins a game, they get two points. If they make it to overtime (tie game after three twenty-minute periods gives a five-minute overtime period), they get one point, with the winner (if someone scores, or the winner in a shootout) getting a second. If they lose without going to overtime, they get nothing. At the end of the season, the three teams with the most points in each division make the playoffs. The next two teams in points in each conference then make the last four spots. In total, 16 teams make up the playoff bracket. The rest of the teams are out until the next season.
As I am writing this, it is the final day of the regular season. Two games are left. Then we are off to the playoffs on Monday. All the teams in the playoffs are known, though one of today’s games will determine which teams play each other in the playoffs. That’s another important thing about the points. They not only determine which teams make the playoffs. They also determine which teams face each other. It’s a convoluted process that I’m not going to get into. The playoff format isn’t what I’m here to discuss.
Most people who watch hockey, like any sport, have a team they root for. My team is the Seattle Kraken. I’m not from Seattle, so that might seem a little strange. I live in Canada and the closest Canadian team is the poorly grammaticized Toronto Maple Leafs. I fell off them when I went to university in 2009 and never really got reinvested in the team. Then there’s Buffalo, which is closer to me, but has an international border in between. I went to two of their games this season, one being when the Kraken were in town. The Buffalo Sabres might be my number two team right now. Number one is still the Seattle Kraken, and that likely won’t change.
Why am I a fan of the Seattle Kraken? Most people would think it was because they were a new team, and that’s partially it. But that’s not the whole story. You have to go back to 2009 to fully understand. I was a Toronto Maple Leafs fan. Local blackouts were a big reason for that. Unless it was the playoffs, or you were watching national broadcasts, anyone in my area was going to get Toronto games. It was what was accessible. Hockey Night in Canada, the national hockey broadcast on Saturday nights, prioritized Leafs games. The local media was all about the Leafs. It’s what I was inundated with if I wanted to watch hockey. This made me a Leafs fan out of not really being able to see anything else.
I went away to university in 2009. I wasn’t far away. It was maybe an hour and a half between home and school. Toronto Maple Leafs were still the local NHL team. I had a lot of schoolwork, though. For three years, I went to school to become an engineer. I eventually dropped out of the program, but the damage was done. I had stopped watching hockey to focus on schoolwork and just plain have a social life while I was there. By the time I was out of school, the Maple Leafs had overhauled their roster and I didn’t know who anyone was. I had no investment in the team.
It took a few years for me to get back into hockey. I always enjoyed it. If it was on, I would watch a game here or there. I would watch clips of some of the best moments. I didn’t fully dive back in until a few years ago, though. It was around the time when the Toronto Raptors won the NBA championship and I thought, “I like hockey. Why don’t I get back into it the way most of Canada got into basketball for the Raptors’ run?” Since I hadn’t been invested in the NHL in a decade, and since streaming had become such a major part of entertainment, I decided I’d consider teams other than Toronto to follow.
As I was getting back into hockey, Seattle was gearing up to join the league. That wasn’t what got me interested in the Seattle Kraken. I wasn’t going to choose them just because they were a new team. I mean, it’s fitting. Re-introducing myself to the league while the team was being introduced. It was the announcement of their name that got me interested. I’m the kind of person who will do something to follow through on a bit. When I heard about The Cloverfield Paradox possibly being announced during a Super Bowl and dropping on Netflix when that same Super Bowl ended, I said I would eat a hat if it happened. It happened. I made a paper hat and ate it, with video proof. The Seattle thing kind of went like that. I was talking to a friend about the possible names. Seattle Sockeyes, Seattle Whales, Seattle Firebirds (which would later be their AHL affiliate’s name, Coachella Valley Firebirds), and Seattle Totems. The Sockeyes sounded the most likely, but I said that if they went with the Kraken, I would follow them. Kraken is a cool name. And they did. So I did.
I didn’t just dip my toes in the water when I got back into hockey. I went all in. If I was going to root for the Seattle Kraken, I was going to root for the Seattle Kraken. I eagerly awaited the expansion draft, where the management would select the players to join their team. I was excited for free agency to see who the team could pull in. There was also the entry draft where, among others, the Seattle Kraken would select Matty Beniers. Summer 2021 was a busy time for the Seattle Kraken and I was along for the ride.
That was around the same time I got back into collecting hockey cards. Upper Deck, Parkhurst, Allure, Authentic, Skybox Metal… Whatever hockey cards I could find, I started collecting again. I split up the collection into binders that held the base sets. The doubles, triples, etc. went into boxes. There were three other boxes separated out for different reasons. One of them became all the specialty cards from sets. One of the boxes filled up with rookie cards. And the third box became my Seattle Kraken collection. I put cards for every player who had been a part of the organization into that box. They could have been in two games. They could have been drafted and traded before even playing a game. If they were ever a Kraken player, even if only for half an hour, their cards went in that box. I have cards for Matty Beniers, Mark Giordano, and Vitek Vanecek in that box. One of them is still with the team. One of them was traded at the trade deadline of the first season. One of them was drafted in the expansion, then traded as soon as free agency started. They were all Kraken, though, and all got a place in the box. Cards from other teams, cards from Kraken. Doesn’t matter. If they were a Kraken player, I collect them.
Beyond that, I got back into watching hockey on a regular basis. For the first season, I was finding ways on the internet to watch Kraken games. They weren’t the best ways. They probably did more damage to my computer than I need. But I was able to watch the Seattle Kraken play on a regular basis. They didn’t play well. Like most expansion teams outside of Vegas, Seattle had a rough go their first season. Their record was the worst in the Pacific and third worst in the entire league. I want to attribute some of that to having players who didn’t want to be there. There were players, like Nathan Bastian, who went back to New Jersey part way through the season and mentioned how much he missed playing for the Devils. That was just the nature of the expansion draft. Any player that wasn’t protected by their team could be snatched up, whether or not the player wanted it.
If you paid any attention to the Kraken over that first season, you would have noticed they improved after the trade deadline. Many of the players on expiring contracts were shipped off. It was now mostly players who were on multi-year contracts, had signed with the team in free agency, or, in the case of Matty Beniers, were drafted into the league by Seattle. Most of these players seemed to want to be there. Most of the expiring players who remained re-signed with the team. Having players who wanted to be there was a big boost that gave the team a better energy. It was a better energy that continued into the second season.
The Kraken didn’t come out of the gate firing on all cylinders when the second season began. They had made a few changes to the roster. Haydn Fleury was out on the back end. Justin Shultz was in. Andre Burakovsky came in on the forward lines while Joonas Donskoi was placed on the long-term injury reserve. Chris Driedger was recovering from a torn ACL, so Martin Jones was brought in to help tend goal. There were changes and it took a few games for everything to click. But when it did, it really did. The Kraken were the best 5-on-5 team in the league. Their scoring went up. They played better defense, allowing some of the lowest shots against counts in the league. This was a vastly improved team, bolstered by players who wanted to be there. Players who finally found the chemistry they lacked in the first season. Seattle was well on their way to success.
I had already seen the improvement in their play during those final twenty or so games in the first season. When the players who wanted to be elsewhere were elsewhere, it brought the rest of the team together. They weren’t playing for anything but their own pride, and they were doing a decent job of that. They didn’t look nearly as bad as, say, this year’s Anaheim Ducks or Chicago Blackhawks. The second season saw that same sort of play, except the results started to show. The few extra pieces that were added in Shultz and Burakovsky, alongside trade acquisition Oliver Bjorkstrand mid-season waiver pickup Eeli Tolvanen, boosted the team enough that it made them tough competition for many of the teams they faced. Who got the first regulation win over the Boston Bruins at TD Garden this season? The Kraken. In a shutout. It was a huge turnaround for a team at the bottom of the standings last year.
Something I had been saying last year was that the Seattle Kraken were a better team than their record might show. They had most of the pieces they needed for success. It was simply a mixture of the few players who were already thinking about what was next for their career, a captain who didn’t seem to want to be there, a couple injuries to key players, chemistry needing to build, and some bad luck with opposing goalies. Most of those issues are gone, now. The players have bought into the current system of coaching. The chemistry is better. The goalies they play against aren’t having their best game of the season every time they face the Kraken. Everything has gelled that much better, which brings me to now.
The Seattle Kraken locked up a spot for the playoffs. When I started this post, it was the last day of the regular season. As I’m writing this portion, it’s the first day of the playoffs. The Kraken don’t play until tomorrow night, so I still have some time to finish writing. This is the first time in franchise history that the team will play in the playoffs. The journey to get to the playoffs included some record-breaking on the Kraken’s part. There was a road trip in January where they went undefeated, marking the longest undefeated road trip in NHL history. The Kraken also saw the biggest points improvement between a first and second season for an expansion franchise, breaking that record, too. They made it to 100 points in the regular season, and Jared McCann got to forty goals for the first time in Kraken history as well as his career.
As a fan of the Kraken, this was exactly what I wanted out of the season. I didn’t need them to contend for the Stanley Cup. They’re only a second season team. People keep comparing them to the Vegas Golden Knights, but that team was the exception to the expansion standard. Most expansion teams suck when they first join the league because they’re given the leftover players that teams didn’t save or want. But, based on the improvement they showed after the trade deadline in the first season, and based on the players they had from the start, it didn’t seem out of the realm for the Kraken to sneak into a wild card spot. For most of this second season, it looked like they might make it out of the wild card and into the divisional spots. They almost did at the end. But they landed right where I hoped they would at the beginning of the season. They landed where they probably deserved to land.
When I was a kid, I grew up watching the Toronto Maple Leafs. I watched them when they had playoff success. I remember Toronto beating both the Islanders and the Senators in 2002 to move onto the Eastern Conference finals. I remember bits and pieces of when I watched hockey back then. I know the feeling of watching a team I’m invested in play through the playoffs. I’m about to get more of the same. I watched the playoffs last season. There were teams I wanted to win and teams I didn’t. But this year will be more like those younger seasons for me, where the team I root for will be the one fighting for the Stanley Cup. The players I know. It will be more stressful, but in a good way.
I’m excited to see what will happen when the playoffs begin tomorrow. The Seattle Kraken will face off against the defending champions, the Colorado Avalanche. Having watched this season, I know the Kraken have a chance to pull off an upset. I don’t think they’ll do it. They will, for sure, put up a fight along the way. I can’t imagine they get swept. This will be a lot of fun. Let the playoffs begin!
I have to cut in here with just a little bit more because this post is going up late. A lot of life things came up this past week that I had to prioritize over getting this post out, as much as I wanted to. It is now Saturday as I’m writing this and as I release this post. It’s a night of game threes for the Stanley Cup Playoffs. In fact, it’s a night where the Seattle Kraken are playing their third playoff game, the first in their home arena. So far, the series has been split. The Kraken took the first game in an upset win. They were winning the second game until a mid-second period push by the Colorado Avalanche tied it up. The Kraken never really recovered and ended up losing the second game.
Very few people took the Seattle Kraken seriously. Whether it was the first season in which they stunk, or the second season where they turned things around. Only the Seattle fans believed in the team during the second season. Everyone else placed that first season’s team’s lack of success on the second season team. Time and time again, the Kraken proved them wrong. They started winning games when people expected the same team. They won all seven games in a seven-game road trip, breaking an NHL record. They took down Boston, the fastest team in NHL history to 100 points. For a few days, the Seattle Kraken had the best record in the Pacific Division. They even took the record for the biggest improvement in points between a first and second season for an expansion team. Yet people still didn’t give them the credit for it.
Going into the playoffs, many of the prognosticators thought that the Colorado Avalanche would run away with the first-round matchup against the Seattle Kraken. I thought otherwise. I thought Colorado would win, and I still think Colorado will win, but I knew the Seattle Kraken could put up a fight. In the regular season, Seattle put up a fight against Colorado every time they faced each other. Seattle won two of the regular season games by a goal, while the third went to the shootout. Yeah, Colorado might be the defending Stanley Cup champions, but sometimes a team can just play well against another team. The Kraken just play well against Colorado. So far, the playoffs seem to be showing just that.
Game three is tonight. It’s the first playoff game at Climate Pledge Arena. I’m excited to hear the crowd. They always sound so invested in the arena. It should be a good time. Maybe I’ll have more to write about the Seattle Kraken once the series is over. Whether they win or lose, I’m happy they made it this far. I’m proud of what the team had been able to do this season.
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