Kraken giving Seattle taste of Stanley Cup Playoff fever in 2nd season
Team, city, business community eager for 'pretty crazy' experience
It's a Saturday morning, April 1, and the Stanley Cup Playoffs are starting to feel tantalizingly close for the Seattle Kraken, even if they have yet to officially wrap up a spot.
It's a busy morning at the Kraken Community Iceplex, the $90 million state-of-the-art practice facility that feels like it still has the protective plastic covering. Steve Chapman, the guest services representative, keeps an unofficial tally of the fans there to watch this skate, a number that reaches 219 on a chilly, overcast morning that will later yield to sunshine and spring.
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It will be five more days before it becomes official, when on April 6 the Kraken claim their first-ever berth in the playoffs. The buzz hasn't yet started.
But JT Brown can feel it coming.
"I think the support's been good all along, even going back to last year, but even sitting at practice now and you can just see all the fans coming in, getting ready for a pregame skate," said Brown, veteran of 41 playoff games with the Tampa Bay Lightning and Anaheim Ducks, and now a Kraken TV analyst.
"I think the city's ready for it."
The Kraken hadn't made the playoffs in their first season in the League, finishing 30th (27-49-6; 60 points), a disappointment to a fan base that had elevated expectations after watching the Vegas Golden Knights rocket to the Stanley Cup Final in 2017-18, their inaugural campaign.
Instead, it took until Year No. 2 and a record turnaround -- the largest improvements in wins (19) and points (40) for a team from its first to its second season in NHL history -- for the Kraken (46-28-8; 100 points) to find themselves adding extra games to the schedule, rolling out the red carpet for the vaunted playoffs.
"I think all you have to do is get into the playoffs," general manager Ron Francis said. "Every team that gets into the playoffs has a chance, right? You want an invitation to the dance and then you go from there."
Though the Kraken spent time as the No. 1 team in the Pacific Division, they weren't able to maintain that position, last leading the Pacific on Feb. 6. Instead, they will enter the playoffs as the first wild card in the Western Conference and will face the Colorado Avalanche in the first round, starting Tuesday in Denver (10 p.m. ET; ESPN, SN360, TVAS, ALT, ROOT-NW). They became the third team since 1968-69 to reach the playoffs in their second season, following the Golden Knights and the Atlanta Flames (1973-74).
When the series switches to Seattle and Climate Pledge Arena, the Kraken will host their first playoff game -- though, technically, not the city's first. The Seattle Metropolitans of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association hosted all five games of the 1919 Stanley Cup Final against the Montreal Canadiens at Seattle Ice Arena, the series ending when it was halted by the influenza pandemic.
But for those younger than 104, it will be their first taste of playoff hockey in Seattle. And they know the fans will be ready.
"If anyone's been to our building, they know how electric the atmosphere is and I think everyone's just so anxious to see what that could turn into in the playoffs, the support we would get in the city," defenseman Vince Dunn said. "It's already been amazing."
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When Seattle mayor Bruce Harrell was a preteen, 10 or 12 or thereabouts, his football team had an exchange program with a team in Vancouver. The sides would visit the other city and then stay overnight with the family of one of the players on the other team.
The initial time Harrell made the trek, with the Central Area Youth Association, he was introduced, for the first time, to hockey.
He was too busy playing other sports to invest too much time in hockey -- Harrell would go on to play in the Rose Bowl with the University of Washington football team -- but a seed was planted. And with the debut of the Kraken last season, that seed has sprouted.
"It was so fast," Harrell said, sitting in a conference room in his office in downtown Seattle. "They were so athletic. The hand-eye coordination was incredible. It was just nonstop action. Now, I love our Mariners, but I don't think anyone could say the action in baseball rivals the action in hockey. So I've become a big fan. I'm very proud of the Kraken right now."
Harrell is like many residents of Seattle, new or newish to the sport but open to learning, open to embracing a team that is their own. Open to the playoffs and all they have to offer.
Which is why the Kraken's marketing campaign for the playoffs will include an education component, allowing the Seattle community to see "that the Stanley Cup Playoffs is an amazing experience, best playoffs in sport, intense hockey and then leaning into the drama and that intensity," as Katie Townsend, the Kraken's senior vice president of marketing and communications, put it.
"With the playoffs we just have an opportunity to bring so many more fans that might not have engaged with us yet or might be kind of in that very casual fan base," she said. "I want them to feel like, wow, Seattle has a good hockey team and I should be invested and playoff hockey is crazy and anything can happen."
The Kraken have blueprints for the playoffs, swiped from the Seattle Mariners and the Seattle Seahawks.
The Mariners made the Major League Baseball playoffs last season after a drought of 20 years, the longest for a team in any of the four major professional leagues. They watched the joy and release that came with last October.
The Seahawks have been a more frequent participant in the NFL playoffs, making it nine of the past 11 seasons, including winning the Super Bowl in the 2013 season.
The Kraken -- and their fans -- want to see that for themselves.
"I think in some ways Seattle is a little unique in that I think we can borrow love from the other teams -- and that's what fans want," Townsend said. "I think they want to see that we are rooting for each other. I know that they're rooting for us."
They had learned, after all, that fans wanted to them to lean into the same color palette same color palette -- rooted in deep sea blue, with other blue-based hues supporting -- as other Seattle teams when they were launching the franchise, a symbiosis that might not work in other markets.
They have also learned exactly what a playoff run means for the city, the impacts felt financially and emotionally.
"Quite frankly, from a dollars-and-cents standpoint, if you look at the number of people we employ, if you look at what went into building the stadium, you look at the revenues around that area in particular, they've all increased dramatically," Harrell said. "And so there's a direct economic impact that is critical toward our success -- and when you win games, it only increases. So it's been a tremendous economic booster, as well as a morale booster."
They are anticipating more ridership on the Seattle Center Monorail, more people coming downtown, shopping at local businesses -- there is a 40 percent bump in sales at the Seattle Center Armory, right by Climate Pledge, on game days, according to Harrell -- and eating at restaurants. The Kraken and the Downtown Seattle Association will be working to take advantage of one of the many negatives of the pandemic: the shuttering of businesses in the city's downtown. So some of those empty storefronts will get a Kraken-themed makeover for the playoffs.
"The brand that the Kraken has created is one that everybody wants to be affiliated and associated with," said Jon Scholes, president and CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association. "I think they've done such a good job of putting out a brand that really ties strongly to Seattle's values: inclusive, unique, creative. So many businesses and organizations want to do whatever they can to hitch their wagon to the excitement of this team."
They want it to be obvious in the city that something is happening, that something is different. They want it to be felt and seen and heard. That's another area in which they're borrowing from the other professional sports, leaning on those familiar feelings from the Seahawks and the less familiar, but no less yearned for, feelings from the Mariners.
And the Kraken have a plan to do that, relying on everything from earned media, in the form of debate on sports talk radio, to paid media, in the form of TV ads. They will light up the city and put up banner flags and conduct scavenger hunts for tickets. There will be watch parties in bars and maybe outside, but even the Kraken have been in Seattle long enough not to rely on dry April weather.
This are not a team afraid of bandwagon jumpers. In fact, they welcome them.
"Therein lies the opportunity for us here in Seattle," Harrell said. "You take someone to a hockey game and they get hooked."
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When Tim Pipes arrived in Seattle from Toronto via Boston in 2003, he was begging bar owners to put on his Toronto Maple Leafs because there was nowhere to regularly watch hockey. His solution was to open a shrine to hockey in 2012, a bar called the Angry Beaver, where fans of all teams would be welcomed, even if the idea of Seattle having its own team was not even a pipe dream.
Now the Kraken are here.
They have worked so hard to get here, from securing the rights to the team to finding a fan base to building a franchise from the ground up. They have withstood a disappointing first season, with injuries and close-game losses and a longer summer than many had hoped.
Which, perhaps, makes it all the sweeter that, come the start of the playoffs, the Kraken will be included. They will still be playing past mid-April and, who knows, maybe into May or June if everything falls just right, as it did for the Golden Knights in 2017-18.
"We have those season ticket members who made this crazy investment before we had a team name and before we had a team, and I kind of want them to feel like that was worth it," Townsend said. "That their faith in us paid off."
They, now, will be rewarded.
"This is a great sports town," Francis said. "It's important for us to get in there and sort of have some success and establish our roots. I might be a little biased in this, but I don't think anything is better than playoff hockey, so if we can get into the playoffs and show our fans what that's all about, I think it's just a great experience for them to enjoy."
Because, if the NHL proves nothing else every year, it's that truly anything can happen once the regular season shifts to the postseason. And the organization and the team are eagerly anticipating showing that to their fans.
"There's nothing better than when playoff hockey hits," forward Jaden Schwartz said. "It's the funnest time of the year. It's so exciting to watch. The first round is always so fun to watch because everyone feels they've got a chance to win. Everyone feels like they got the players. The first time being in Seattle, it's going to be pretty crazy."
Because then that buzz starts. That special feeling.
It's what Townsend felt at both Olympics she worked at, in Sydney in 2000 and in London in 2012. It was everywhere, a low-level excitement that pervades everything. Under it all, all the marketing buzz words and corporate speak, that's what she wants to create in Seattle. What the Kraken can't wait to feel.
"It becomes sort of inescapable," Scholes said. "You see it on storefronts. You hear it on the radio. It's the chatter at work. That's what a playoff run is, in my mind. It's just all around. It's the first thing you talk about when you run into colleagues. And that's what takes over a town and I think they have an opportunity to do that."
When the Kraken played their very first game, in the preseason, not even the regular season, the atmosphere at the Angry Beaver was, as Pipes said, "unbelievable."
He had never seen the bar like that.
"That first game of preseason last year, we were so overwhelmed in here and I stood by the front door and I had a hard time keeping my emotions in check," Pipes said.
"I was in tears a couple times."
He can barely imagine what the bar might be like for Game 1 of the playoffs, with the hockey fans, old and new, in their Kraken jerseys and, yes, some in their Avalanche jerseys, filling out every inch of available space at the Angry Beaver.
"We're going to be packed to the rafters," Pipes said. "It's going to be nuts in here."
