Note: A good portion of this migrated from a previous gamethread.
Here we are. The end of the road.
The Kraken are a miracle that chose Seattle of all places to make itself manifest. This team that many of us have become hopefully a little invested in was welcomed to town with open arms and hearts, full of wonder at the kind of hockey team that would grace the rebuilt Key Arena which took the name Climate Pledge after construction’s end.
What we got was a team only Seattle could truly get straight out of an expansion draft: Not terribly good, mostly crippled by legendarily bad play at one of the most important parts of the game…and some of the weirdest things happening in a game like it was clockwork.
In retrospect, given the way that Seattle’s other sports teams (other than like…the Sounders I guess) have chosen to play games over the last few years, we probably should’ve expected things to be a little bizarre in hindsight. It’s just how things are done in Seattle: They know fans are passionate. That they can and usually do stomach some galaxy brain play if there’s hope at the end of the day for tomorrow to be better. And tomorrow will be better…But they’ll test you. They’ll put you through games that simply cannot be explained. Ones where your knowledge of how a team plays and should be rewarded as such gets flipped on it’s head. Having a good idea of what a team is will switch between games. Between days.
But the good thing is it never gets boring.
I had a lot of fun covering this team’s year one! Even when a lot of the excitement dulled a bit, even after poor Brandon Tanev got put on the mend for the entire year. It was always interesting, even if I sort of knew a result ahead of time. And I’m excited for that better day; not just for Seattle fans, but for DJLR. We’ve managed to put together a cozy little site that still has plenty of room to get better (after all, we get to do a preseason this fall, something we weren’t entirely afforded in our opening weeks), and have a little fun this offseason.
On behalf of everybody who writes for DJLR, we’d like to say thank you for coming on this rollercoaster with us. And we hope you’ll keep going on the new tilt-a-whirl known as The Offseason™!
So let’s ground these Jets.
Question of the Thread!: While yeah, there weren’t exactly a ton of great Kraken things given the record…what was your favorite moment or game from Season One?
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