Kraken show signs of improvement, look to calmer seas after rough first half to inaugural season

More than halfway through the Kraken’s first season, the on-ice team is finally stringing together wins and consistent play.

Likewise, off-ice operations are taking greater shape after some early setbacks.

For now, both remain a work in progress.

The NHL team’s debut in Seattle – the first new major winter-sports franchise since the NBA’s Sonics left in 2008 – had been highly anticipated, given the near $1.2 billion arena investment and the forward-thinking, innovative approach taken by ownership toward its hiring practices, marketing and community building.

Then, after a rush to get Climate Pledge Arena opened on time, the team experienced staffing shortages, a late-December snowstorm and COVID-19 challenges that spawned game postponements and restrictions on how players could be marketed.

But fans have generally responded well and earned praise across the league for their highly vocal, demonstrative support of a Kraken squad that, at only 15-27-4 (15 victories, 27 regulation losses and four overtime losses), has spent most of the season in last place.

“We’ve lived through a tragedy, one of the darkest periods of my life,” CEO Tod Leiweke said of launching the Kraken during a pandemic. “And if we can get through this we can get through anything. If we’ve drawn the crowds that we have in the midst of a global pandemic, I’m amazingly optimistic.”

Those crowds, officially sellouts of 17,151 fans a game, contain several hundred or more empty seats nightly. That’s commonplace around the NHL, where venues usually fill to about 93% capacity but are down 6-7% this season for U.S. teams compared with campaigns before the pandemic. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has attributed attendance declines to hesitancy by some fans concerned about COVID-19, and others put off by vaccination requirements at some venues. Bettman lauded the Kraken’s job and strong attendance.

•••

John Howie, a 53-year-old Queen Anne resident who is head of mergers and acquisitions for an IT security firm, has Kraken season tickets in a lower-bowl corner. He said Kraken games have an electric atmosphere similar to Seahawks games at Lumen Field, and feels the team has done “a really good job” overall.

“And it’s getting better, actually,” Howie said. “At the beginning of the season, especially for the first game, I was disappointed by the pregame show. … I thought there’d be more hoopla. But the new pregame show, which debuted last month, is really good. They definitely upped their game.”

The Kraken had planned a more lavish pregame introduction for opening night.

But pandemic-related shipping delays meant seating at Climate Pledge wasn’t completely installed until right before the Kraken’s Oct. 23 home debut against Vancouver.

Kraken chief operating officer Victor de Bonis said it wasn’t until the day before the opener that staffers could rehearse the entire game experience – everything from in-game entertainment to the scoreboard clocks, to a celebratory goal horn from the decommissioned 1967 MV Hyak ferry, which uses a 200-gallon, 65-horsepower air compressor to blast out sound.

“It was like a miracle what happened within the 24 hours of time we had to get it right,” de Bonis said. “And then it’s all just been building since. Because it wasn’t possible to do then what we’re doing now with the amount of time that we had.”

The Kraken introduced their upgraded, 41/2-minute pregame intro last month; a vast digital, sound and laser light show culminating with a 26-foot-tall, 1,200-pound Kraken-like aqua tentacle descending from the arena’s rafters on chains.

Shipping delays meant “The Tentacle” and its LED lighting set – which also features 28 ice shards, each weighing between 50 and 150 pounds – didn’t arrive until after the season began. A section of arena seating was removed to get the towering prop inside, and it was still a foot too tall to clear the entry.

Adjustments were needed before “The Tentacle” was hoisted to the rafters. But engineers miscalculated the force required to raise and lower it, causing delays pending machinery upgrades.

•••

On the ice, the Kraken went 5-4 the past two weeks against some of the NHL’s better clubs. Previously, they had endured a nine-game losing streak and were tracking 30 points below the 90-point season many oddsmakers and pundits predicted.

Though nobody anticipated a repeat of the Vegas Golden Knights reaching the Stanley Cup Final their 2017-18 debut season, the Kraken’s underperformance likely took a toll on enthusiasm and demand. Tom Wilkins, a season-ticket holder from Snoqualmie with lower-bowl, center-ice seats, said he has enjoyed his arena experience but is concerned about the team’s prior poor play.

“You know, we’re spending a lot of money here,” Wilkins said. “They weren’t supposed to be Vegas … but you know, we didn’t expect them to be fighting for last (place), either.”

He expects improvement next season.

“The team had a chance to just come in and own this city,” Wilkins said. “Really build a fan base. And I think they’ve used up a lot of that goodwill. I think next year, if they have a below-average team, I think they’re really going to have a hard time getting the attention of the average sports fan.”

The Kraken sold season tickets with minimum commitments of three, five and seven years.

Shane Savery, 48, of Normandy Park, made a three-year commitment on one of four lower-bowl corner tickets with three friends and said they’re concerned about declining secondary market demand. Savery said he paid about $180 a game for his ticket and has trouble reselling it for above $100 on platforms such as Ticketmaster, StubHub or Vivid Seats.

Season-ticket holders generally are not in it for the money, but many sell tickets for the games they can’t attend to recoup part of their investment.

Savery, who is fully vaccinated, said he feels vaccine requirements inside the building – not the team’s poor play – is mainly what has softened demand. He said he and his friends are debating whether they’ll attempt to get out of their contract.

Bill Chapin, the Kraken’s senior vice president of sales and service, said no fans have asked out of commitments. Chapin said proprietary league data shows Kraken tickets still command the highest resale prices of any team.

“I think our fans have been absolutely incredible during a global pandemic,” Chapin said. “We had snowstorms that, as we know, isn’t really Seattle’s cup of tea. We had postponements. And then we had vaccine verifications that, wherever you sit on the political spectrum, you know that’s a factor.”

A league source indicated the Kraken are indeed No. 1 in resale prices, and 58% of fans are making a profit selling their season tickets.

•••

Leiweke said it still bothers him to know some fans are selling seats for less than they paid.

“But I can look you in the eye and tell you that, if not for the global pandemic, this would be different,” he said.

Given some of the things now in place despite the challenges, he’s optimistic.

“It’s been incredibly difficult,” Leiweke said. “This has been the hardest thing I’ve done in my career by far. But what really motivates me every day is knowing our best days are in front of us.

“If we can do what we’ve done amidst a global pandemic, what’s that going to be like without that 10-pound weight on our ankle?”