But the way the Kraken and Golden Knights began their initial seasons could hardly be more different: While the Kraken could have taken bigger names in the draft, and their free-agency strategy had its share of critics, Seattle still appeared positioned to be more like Vegas than, say, the Atlanta Thrashers. In theory, that group gave Seattle several solid forward lines and D-pairings, plus a capable group in net - a better talent base than most historical expansion teams were ever privy to at their first face-off. Seattle also solidified its goaltending with Philipp Grubauer and Chris Driedger, both of whom had been stellar in their own way last season: Grubauer as a Vezina Trophy finalist, backstopping the Colorado Avalanche to the league’s best record, and Driedger as the understudy who stabilized the improving Florida Panthers’ situation in net as highly paid starter Sergei Bobrovsky faltered.
The team’s Ron Francis-led brain trust used its expansion draft picks and free agency budget to acquire a number of skaters who had been above-average producers (according to Game Score per game relative to position average) 1 in 2020-21, including forwards Jordan Eberle, Jared McCann, Yanni Gourde, Jaden Schwartz, Joonas Donskoi, Calle Järnkrok, Alexander Wennberg and Brandon Tanev, and defensemen Mark Giordano, Vince Dunn and Jamie Oleksiak. The founding members of the Kraken didn’t look this bad on paper. With a mere 7 percent chance to make the playoffs (much less the Stanley Cup final), it’s clear these expansion Kraken are not exactly following in the Golden Knights’ skate grooves yet. That brought Seattle’s record on the season to 5-13 - better than only the 4-12 Ottawa Senators, the 5-15 Montreal Canadiens and the 4-15 Arizona Coyotes. After starting out a mediocre 3-5, the team lost eight of nine games before finally winning again Sunday against the Washington Capitals. In reality, though, things have proven more difficult than that for the Kraken so far.
Not only was Vegas better than the typical expansion team, it was the best expansion team in any major pro sport ever - which in turn totally reset the expectations for any and all future first-year clubs.įor Seattle’s projection, we ended up basically splitting the difference between the typically dreadful expansion efforts of the past and Vegas’s spectacular debut - expecting the Kraken to be competent, if not exactly Stanley Cup contenders. While the history of expansion teams is generally ugly, littered with some of the worst performances in professional league histories, that appeared to change forever (in the NHL at least) with the Vegas Golden Knights in 2017-18. When we launched our NHL prediction model going into this season, one of the big questions we had to answer was what to do with the expansion Seattle Kraken.
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