Better luck next year: The Seattle Kraken just .... exist

This is what expansion teams used to look like and play like.

Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the next team to be eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention: The Seattle Kraken.

Back in the 1990s and 2000s when the NHL would add an expansion team, there was an expectation that it would probably take them several years to become a relevant, consistently competitive franchise. For the most part, that is exactly what happened.

Here is every NHL expansion team going back to the San Jose Sharks in 1991 and their playoff appearances through their first 10 years in the league (X means playoff appearance).

There are not a lot of X’s within those first five years, and in some cases, through the first 10 years. It is also worth keeping in mind that some of those earlier teams — like San Jose, Ottawa, Tampa Bay, Florida and Anaheim — were playing in a league where a significantly higher percentage of teams made the playoffs. It was easier to get into the dance then than it is now. Up until Nashville’s entry into the league in the late 1990s you were talking about a league where more than 60 percent of it was qualifying for the playoffs every season.

With each new team that entered, that percentage started to gradually go down. By the time you had teams like Atlanta, Columbus and Minnesota entering the league these teams were facing massive uphill builds with painfully difficult expansion draft rules that gave them access to only depth players to pick from.

It was also not a salary cap league at that point, so teams were not necessarily feeling as big of a financial pinch and were not forced into making moves and dumping players.

Vegas’ entrance into the league is where things changed, and changed dramatically.

Not only were the expansion draft rules more favorable, they also had teams feeling salary cap constraints and were able to feast on all of that. General managers panicked. Bad decisions were made. They suckered several teams into giving up multiple assets instead of just taking the hit of losing one second-tier player. The result was an immediate Stanley Cup contender that has been a force from day one and still is today eight years later.

That did two things for the NHL’s next expansion team, the Seattle Kraken.

1. It set an unfair, and probably unreachable, bar for immediate expectations.

2. It also caused the other teams around the league to quickly learn from their mistakes, and most teams just accepted they were going to lose one decent player and left it at that.

Now Seattle is four years into its existence and following the same path as some of the earlier expansion teams.

There is no immediate Stanley Cup Final appearance.

There is no consistent path to the playoffs.

It is a team that just pretty much …. exists.

Part of it is not being able to take advantage of other teams the way Vegas did. Part of it is just the natural early progression that comes from being an expansion team in a now 32-team league. Another part of it is that Seattle has just made a lot of really bad and, at times, baffling decisions in how it has built its roster.

Let’s talk about it.

What went right this season