Expansion hockey. Inaugural season coming to an end.
Cool name though. Logo needs a little work.
So they paid big money to try and stack the deck against having a weak first season and they still pretty much sucked. Let's Go BluesFor better or worse, with much of it being the latter, the Kraken are about to finish making memories from their debut NHL season.
Yes, they’ve produced mostly dismal results expected from a typical expansion squad. No, they were not expected to. It has nothing to do with unrealistic expectations after the Vegas Golden Knights made the Stanley Cup Final their expansion season. It has everything to do with the Kraken themselves expecting closer to a .500 season given the advantageous rules they had in picking players compared with expansion teams of yesteryear.
The Kraken’s 54 points leave them on pace to finish with 60. That’s already more than double the 24 points logged by the Ottawa Senators, during their 1992-93 expansion season. It’s also better than the 21 points logged by Washington in 1974-75, or the 30 by the New York Islanders in 1972-73, the 39 by the San Jose Sharks in 1991-92 and the Atlanta Thrashers in 1999-2000, and the 53 by Tampa Bay in 1992-93.
But hold off on celebrations: Those teams were built with brutal expansion draft rules. And the Kraken won’t even match the 83 points registered by the 1993-94 Florida Panthers and likely not the 63 points by the 1998-99 Nashville Predators.
They also lag the 2000-01 Columbus Blue Jackets and Minnesota Wild, who had 71 and 68 points, respectively. For an example of how rough those two teams had it compared to the Kraken, teams in the 2000 expansion draft could protect nine forwards, five defensemen and a goalie, or seven forwards, three defensemen and two goalies.
For the Kraken’s draft — same as with Vegas in 2017 — teams could only protect seven forwards, three defensemen and a goalie. Or, eight skaters overall and a goalie.
So, the Kraken were mostly guaranteed a top-nine forward, top-four defenseman and an experienced NHL goalie to choose off every roster. Columbus and Minnesota were getting fourth-line forwards, bottom-pairing defensemen and minor-leaguers.
They were each also picking players at the same time, meaning — unlike the Kraken — they’d often settle for their second choice. The NHL had also expanded the two prior years, diluting the talent pool.
Finally, the Kraken also had an exclusive free agency negotiation window before their draft. They used it to sign goalie Chris Driedger and defensive stalwarts Jamie Oleksiak and Adam Larsson.
The Blue Jackets and Wild paid just $80 million each in 2000 to join the NHL, which, even adjusting for inflation to $132 million today, is still only a fifth the Kraken’s $650 million entry fee. The Kraken paid the massively bigger amount to ensure more favorable rules so a “typical” NHL expansion season — by design — could never happen to them.