Francis embraced analytics in Carolina and was ready when the owners grilled him on the subject during his interview with Seattle.
"He's got innovation running through his blood," Leiweke said. "He really wants to get that side of the house right. When you have somebody who certainly understands talent and I think has the golden gut embracing technology on the other side of the house, it's very encouraging."
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Mandrycky and Francis had more than a blank slate when they arrived in Seattle. They had blank walls.
"When you walk into most NHL offices, they have pictures of their team playing, and we don't have that," Mandrycky said with a laugh. "So what are we going to do, put up pictures of, like, the Vancouver Canucks? No."
They have put up pictures of the Seattle Metropolitans, the Pacific Coast Hockey Association team that played from 1915-24 and defeated the Montreal Canadiens of the National Hockey Association in 1917, making Seattle the first team in the United States to win the Stanley Cup a few months before the NHL was born.
They have put up pictures of the Totems, generic hockey pictures and televisions, and they're setting up the war room where, Mandrycky said, "those expansion draft decisions and all the fun conversations are going to happen."
NHL Seattle is thinking about the 2021 NHL Expansion Draft already, but more in terms of how it will approach the draft than which specific players it will select at this point.
"I promise you who we're looking at now and who we look at in June of '21 is going to be dramatically different," Francis said. "That's just the reality of it.
"But I think it's more about the process of understanding what we want to do and how we want to go about it, so when we get to that point, we're prepared to make the tough decisions we want to make and make them quickly in that short window we have."
For now, the next step for hockey ops is to scout players and build the database.
"We got excited when we hit 100 reports, where some teams are in the tens of thousands, if not more," Mandrycky said.
After that, it's continuing to build the department.
Mandrycky said the team has received about 600 applications for three open jobs in hockey ops -- developer, data engineer and quantitative analyst -- benefitting from the deep pool of talent in Seattle's tech community.
Francis said the team wants its entire amateur scouting staff in place in the summer of 2020, a year ahead of the 2021 NHL Draft. It wants to hire an equipment manager and an athletic trainer then too, because they will have to order supplies and set up operations at the NHL and AHL levels.
The coaches likely will come in 2021.
"We're comfortable waiting, because you never know what's going to happen leading up to June of that year," Francis said.
As for the business side, the name, logo and colors are critical. On Oct. 21, NHL Seattle placed an envelope containing its five finalists for the name in a time capsule that will be opened on the 100th anniversary of the Space Needle in 2062.
"I'd say the pressure isn't from a timing standpoint," Leiweke said. "It's from ensuring that we get it right from a whole bunch of different perspectives -- the right name, certainly, (but also) the right design, the right brand story, the right legal background work. … We're getting focused on a very select group of names. I think we're going to land on the right thing."