Growing Pains For The Seattle Kraken
from Geoff Baker of the Seattle Times,
The first casualty of the Kraken’s debut season came when the team announced Tuesday that goaltending coach Andrew Allen would not be retained....
“I thought we struggled early, and we just couldn’t kind of get out of it,” general manager Ron Francis said of the goaltending and the Allen move Tuesday during in a season-ending meeting with media members. “So we figured we’d look in a different direction for next season.”...
Nobody realistically expected the Kraken to make the Stanley Cup Final, as the expansion Vegas Golden Knights did four years ago.
What had been anticipated, by the Kraken themselves, was a reasonable middle ground someplace between that and their eventual 30th-place NHL standing. But at 27-49-6, they fell well short. And there are consequences for that, including the now-unemployed goaltending coach.
As mentioned in a recent story, the value of Kraken tickets declined heavily on the open market as demand waned once losses piled up quicker than expected. This is a big deal, because the team will need that value driven up again before it approaches season-ticket holders asking to renew when their minimum three-year commitments begin expiring two springs from now.
Also, not entirely unexpected, local Kraken TV ratings declined significantly once they fell out of contention early. Ratings for game broadcasts on ROOT Sports in the Seattle-Tacoma market plunged 68%, from a 2.2 average through the first eight October games to 0.7 in January, then a season-low 0.6 in February and March before ticking up slightly to 0.7 through much of April.
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