An ‘Ominous’ Seattle Anniversary To Chuckle Over

Tough to believe it will already be a decade ago this coming Sunday that NHL expansion plans appeared to have left Seattle in the dust.

Or, more succinctly, that this city had left itself belly-flopped on the tracks and choking up particles stirred by an NHL train that had definitively left the station. Choose whatever metaphor you’d like, but the fact that potential arena groups from Seattle, Bellevue and Tukwila back then all declined to enter the bidding process for an NHL expansion franchise ahead of a July 20, 2015, deadline seemed to finish off our major professional winter sports aspirations for good.

Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. Things worked themselves out to where the Kraken this week released the schedule for their fifth NHL season playing in a $1.2 billion Climate Pledge Arena that used to be a KeyArena venue, where it was rumored no major pro league would ever venture again.

So much for that false narrative.

Not only did the NHL come to the completely rebuilt and renamed Climate Pledge venue, but the league isn’t stopping there. It also held a Winter Classic outdoor game in our city on Jan. 1 of last year and will be back once again this week when the annual NHL Club Business Meetings take place here in town as well.

Representatives from all 32 teams and the league’s head office will congregate all week in the Emerald City to exchange ideas and expertise on promoting pro hockey. That further signifies how much Seattle has become ingrained within the NHL, the Kraken an established and broken-in franchise not even the league’s newest anymore after the Utah Mammoth relocated from Arizona last summer.

It's easy to forget nowadays, when sports fans get to enjoy the NHL in one of North America’s finest hockey venues, that things weren’t looking so hot a decade or so back. A lot of blood, sweat and toil gets poured out during NHL games but that was nothing compared to what it took to even get the Kraken to town.

The first part required the NHL to exercise patience when its hopes of expanding to both Las Vegas and Seattle were temporarily dashed during that summer of 2015 process. Only one of those cities applied by the expansion deadline and – as we all now know – the franchise that soon became the Vegas Golden Knights was awarded 11 months later.

As for Seattle, though, the league never gave up hope. It helped that the NHL knew it had a prospective majority owner in David Bonderman and the first of several other key investors, Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer, waiting behind the scenes to step in and buy an expansion team.

As NHL commissioner Gary Bettman told me several years later, for the Rising From The Deep book I wrote about the Kraken and Climate Pledge Arena origins, keeping a 32^nd spot warm for however long it took for a Seattle franchise to happen was never really an issue. It had always been about getting a proper arena built – or, in this case, completely overhauled – and then all other questions about the city as a sports market would quickly fall into place.

“We had looked at Las Vegas for years,” Bettman, who’ll be in Seattle for next week’s meetings, told me back then. “But it wasn’t until a building was coming out of the ground and we knew it was coming out of the ground that it could happen.

“So, we knew the dance. And so, it was really a question of making sure there would be an arena.”

Plenty of political hurdles remained locally. But things began moving in earnest by 2016 and 2017 once the City of Seattle agreed to partner with the fledgling Oak View Group on levelling and replacing the entirety of KeyArena except for its historically protected 44-million-pound roof.

That would not have happened without Bonderman, who passed away last December at age 82, agreeing ahead of time to step in as owner of a future hockey franchise yet-to-be-awarded. Bonderman was in Sea Island, Georgia, in December 2018, along with Bruckheimer and other investors, as the NHL Seattle franchise – later named “Kraken” -- was finally birthed. The new franchise had been awarded just 41 months after Seattle had missed the prior 2015 expansion deadline.

It was Bonderman’s backing of the team – continued through his daughter, Kraken majority owner Samantha Holloway – that gave those involved in KeyArena’s rebuild the confidence to move forward on construction. Indeed, within days of the franchise being awarded, shovels hit the ground at the KeyArena site, and the renamed Climate Pledge venue officially reopened in October 2021 as the Kraken played their inaugural home game.

The lesson here, if any, is that when a sports league and a city both want a franchise to happen it usually will. But patience will always be key, especially with billions of dollars at stake.

In those cases, where fans tend to fret about delays lasting weeks or months, sports executives learn to view them in terms of years. Sure, Bettman and the NHL would have preferred to see a Seattle arena group apply for a team back in July 2015.

But none of the three prospective arena groups back then, the most visible being the one backed by Chris Hansen, looking to build a new venue in the city’s SoDo District, was ready to move forward. Rather than rush into a hastily devised plan, Bettman and the league sat back and waited for things to sort themselves out locally.

That it took two or three years longer than the league had initially hoped never really dissuaded anyone from the long-term vision. But everyone knew it was best to answer all the questions, on all sides, ahead of signing off on a team that would be around for decades to come.

“There’s a way to do this,” Bettman said. “There’s a process when you’re dealing with cities, when you’re dealing with funding, when you’re dealing with the board of governors of leagues. There’s a process. And if you take the right steps, in the right order, you can get from point A to point Z.”

Worth remembering on the eve of an “ominous” anniversary almost nobody in town even remembers now. Back in July 2015, it seemed as if Seattle had signed away any chance of ever attracting major pro winter sports again.

A decade later, all the fretting, angst and armchair quarterbacking that resulted now seems to have been a pointless waste of energy. If anything, the negative vibes just reinforced the will of those wanting the NHL here to keep pushing forward and make it happen.

Dawn will often emerge just when darkness seems bleakest. And in today’s much brighter times, this weekend’s 10^th anniversary of an opportunity missed amounts to a mere chuckle ahead of the more meaningful fifth season for an NHL team formed out of solidified circumstances everybody was good with.