I have a shallow interest in the Kraken’s deep dive into the postseason

The Seattle Kraken are in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Whoop-dee-freakin-doo.

Please excuse my sarcasm. I’m trying – I really am – to embrace hockey. I should be over the moon that the Kraken, in just their second season in the NHL, are in the postseason. I may watch tonight’s Game 1 against the Colorado Avalanche. On the other hand, I may not.

Yes, I’ve been to Climate Pledge Arena to watch a game. Vicki and I were there in early February to see the Kraken maul the Philadelphia Flyers, 6-2. We went more out of curiosity to see the new arena – which I might add is world-class – than anything else. It was a fun evening. The home team was dominating. The video graphics, lighting and sound system were second to none. It had a rock-concert feel to it. But the seats, three rows from the top of the arena, were $127 apiece. I had little desire to go back to another game this season.

Granted, the Kraken consistently draw capacity crowds to Climate Pledge. But in my opinion, it’s a niche audience. Like soccer fans, the majority of Kraken fans are in the stadium. TV ratings for Kraken games and newspaper readership for their stories are not impressive. I’m apparently not alone in my tepid interest in the team.

I recently finished a three-month temp stint in the Sports department of The Seattle Times, a paper I retired at in 2020. Each day in our daily front-page, lineup meetings on Zoom, an online editor would review the day’s “digital traffic.” That’s a fancy phrase for a rundown on how many readers were engaging with our stories online. It’s a way for editors at the paper to see what readers like.

In my early days in Sports, my way of gauging reader interest was very primitive. It went something like this. I watched the guy in the seat in front of me on the bus flip through the Sports section to see which pages and stories he spent the most time with.

The analytics newspapers and web sites use today, suffice it to say, are much more sophisticated. For example, a software program reveals not only which stories are most read, but how many readers are reading a story at a given time, whether they are subscribers or visitors, how much time he or she is spending with a given story, and what type of device they’re reading it on (smart phone, tablet or computer).

The analytics during my recent stint in Sports revealed this: Kraken stories consistently lagged behind the “Big Three” drivers of Sports online traffic: Husky football, the Seahawks and the Mariners., in that order. And this was during the peak of the Kraken’s historic season, which was the offseason for the aforementioned other sports. In other words, a story on projected two-deeps for next fall’s UW football team attracted more eyeballs than a Kraken story. Yes, this is the much-improved hockey team, that after winning just 27 of 82 games in its expansion season, put together an 8-game winning streak in January en route to an impressive 46-28 regular-season record and a third-place finish in the tough Pacific Division.

“We saw a pretty big spike initially when the team arrived,” one of The Times Sports editors told me. “But there was a huge drop-off when the team fell flat in year 1, and we haven’t seen folks return in full.

“It’s a bit of a head-scratcher considering they’re about to face the defending champs in the playoffs, but we’re still not seeing a ton of interest in our playoff preview stories.”

Furthermore, the Kraken’s stellar on-ice performance in Season 2 also didn’t transfer to good TV ratings. A Nielsen Media report in January revealed broadcast ratings for the Kraken were among the bottom third of U.S.-based NHL teams. The rating was virtually no different than the ratings from the previous year, when the expansion team had one of the worst records in the NHL.

Unlike Midwest and Eastern U.S. cities, we have a small sample size of major-league hockey in the Pacific Northwest. We grew up with minor-league hockey. Maybe we don’t understand the nuances of the game, or appreciate how skilled hockey players are, though it’s pretty obvious to me they are very athletic, in great shape and very good ice skaters.

Two years into this Kraken thing, I still couldn’t rattle off the names of more than four players on the roster. I don’t completely understand what “offsides” or “icing” is. They’re apparently egregious hockey violations that stop play. But that’s as much as I can tell you. The problem is, I don’t want to know.

Maybe postseason hockey is a different deal. Maybe if the Kraken start out hot, beat some teams they have no business beating, I’ll change my thinking. We’ll see.