Seattle’s First Season: Taking A Kraken At Some Predictions
Say hello to the NHL’s newest team — the Seattle Kraken.
The Kraken will play their first-ever NHL game on Tuesday night against the league’s second-newest team, the Golden Knights, in Vegas. They’ll make their debut in Seattle on Oct. 23 when they host their Pacific Northwest rivals, the Vancouver Canucks.
It’s been quite a while since there was professional hockey in Seattle.
You have to go back to the 1970s when the city had the Totems in the Western Hockey League (no, not the same major-junior WHL that exists today) to find the last professional Seattle hockey team. You have to go all the way back to the 1920s to find the last Seattle team who competed for the Stanley Cup. That was the Metropolitans, who beat the Montreal Canadiens to become the first American team to capture Lord Stanley’s prize in 1917.
Could the Kraken bring the Cup to Seattle in 2022 and end the city’s over-100-year-long drought? I mean, the Golden Knights nearly did in their first season, so you never know.
Let’s get to know this new team and make some predictions for their inaugural season.
Seattle’s Expansion Draft and Offseason
A lot of teams don’t look back fondly on the 2017 Expansion Draft.
Take the Columbus Blue Jackets, for example. They gave Vegas a first-round pick in order to take David Clarkson’s contract and William Karlsson. What did Karlsson do? Score 43 goals in the Golden Knights’ first season in the league. Oof.
And then there’s the Florida Panthers, who gave Vegas Jonathan Marchessault and Reilly Smith in order to protect defenders such as Alex Petrovic. That’s two-thirds of a good second line. The two of them combined to score 49 goals in 2017-18. Yikes!
Anyways, teams wised up the second time around as nobody made a side deal with the Kraken. Teams just said ‘okay, go ahead and take somebody, but you aren’t getting a draft pick or anything else and making me look bad.’
Seattle went ahead and chose 30 players and called it a day.
Some of them were head-scratching decisions. Seattle opted to select a career AHLer, Gavin Bayreuther, from Columbus rather than Max Domi, and then they let him walk right back to the Blue Jackets in free agency.
But the majority of Seattle’s decisions made sense and they’ve put together a quality roster with solid veterans right off the hop. The Kraken landed names such as Jordan Eberle, Adam Larsson, Yanni Gourde and Mark Giordano, giving them a nice foundation to start with.
In free agency, Seattle’s decisions to leave names like Domi on the table started to make more sense. With their hoards of salary cap room, the Kraken inked 2021 Vezina Trophy finalist Philipp Grubauer to a multi-year deal and they added a pair of good forwards in Jaden Schwartz and Alexander Wennberg.
The Kraken boast a very, very solid blue line and an excellent goaltending tandem. They don’t have the depth up front that Vegas did in 2017, but this is going to be a difficult team to score goals on.
Predictions for Seattle’s Inaugural Season
Okay, the question now is whether the Kraken can capture the same magic, or, well, anything close to the magic that the Golden Knights had in their inaugural season back in 2017-18. Vegas has made expectations very, very high with the success they’ve had right off the bat.
Seattle will be an elite team at keeping the puck out of their net. The combination of the Kraken’s strong veteran blue line coupled with their goalie tandem of Grubauer and Chris Driedger will be incredibly tough to score on. Seattle will finish in the top third of the league in expected goals against and the top five in actual goals against.
Nobody on the Kraken will score more than 21 goals. While Seattle is an elite team at keeping the puck out of the net, they won’t boast the same high-flying offense that Vegas did in its first season.
Seattle’s scoring leader will be somebody out of the blue. Just like with William Karlsson, the Kraken’s leader in both goal-scoring and points will be an under-the-radar player. You might expect Eberle or Schwartz to lead the way, but, instead, it’ll be Alex Barre-Boulet, a small-but-skilled forward Seattle grabbed off waivers from the Lightning who has had great numbers in the AHL.
Adam Larsson will receive Norris Trophy votes. He’s been underrated for quite some time because he’s the pit of the “The Trade Is One For One” joke, but Larsson had an excellent season last year for the Oilers and he’ll be even better with the Kraken. Larsson will be Seattle’s rock, people will finally realize how good of a defender he is and he’ll be rewarded with a handful of Norris Trophy votes.
The Kraken will make the playoffs. They won’t go on a run to the Cup Final as Vegas did, but playing in a weak Pacific Division will help propel this defensive juggernaut to the playoffs. They’ll edge out their Pacific Northwest rivals, the Canucks and get into the dance as the fourth-seeded team in the division.
No. 2 overall pick Matty Beniers will wow in the playoffs. This spring’s star during the Habs’ playoff run was Cole Caufield, a rookie out of the NCAA who popped off for 12 points in 20 games despite only having 10 games of NHL experience in the regular season. Beniers, who will put together a huge sophomore season at the University of Michigan, will be a key player for Seattle once his NCAA campaign is over.
Red Wings fans will get upset when somebody throws a squid on the ice in Seattle. The octopus became a tradition in Hockeytown, but fans in Seattle will lean into the Kraken name and somebody will throw a squid on the ice at Climate Pledge Arena, starting a new, bizarre hockey tradition.
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