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Expansion teams like the Seattle Kraken, the NHL’s newest team, are supposed to be bad. A new team hasn’t had years to accumulate talent, and its players start out with no experience playing together. Almost by definition, it should take several years before any new franchise—in any professional sport—gets really good.

The Las Vegas Golden Knights upended that theory. The NHL’s 31st franchise debuted in 2017 and made the Stanley Cup Final in its first year of existence, then followed that up with three more playoff seasons (and two more conference final appearances) over the last three years. A team that didn’t exist five years ago immediately became one of hockey’s most dependable organizations.

2021 brings the debut of the league’s 32nd team and its second expansion franchise in the last five years. The Seattle Kraken will attempt to follow the Golden Knights’ example with a strong opening season. Expecting similar success out of the gate is a lot to ask of a new team, but there are a few reasons to think Seattle will be competitive within a short time of the franchise’s opening face-off. Here’s a closer look at the team’s prospects.

giving the new locker room at @KrakenIceplex a quick test run.

stay tuned for more 👀 pic.twitter.com/YfK0xoJ4Z8

— Seattle Kraken (@SeattleKraken) August 3, 2021

The expansion draft is designed to give a new team depth right away.

To stock their roster, the Kraken got to draft one player from every other team in the league except for Vegas, which was exempt on the basis of still being a new team itself. The expansion draft rules for Seattle in July 2021 were the same as those for Vegas in 2017: Other teams could “protect” seven forwards, three defensemen, and a goaltender, or they could do away with offense/defense distinctions and lock down eight skaters of any position plus a goalie.

For an expansion team, the format cuts both ways. On the one hand, the rest of the NHL’s teams protected all of their best players. On the other hand, each team dresses 12 forwards and six defensemen every game, so the Kraken had the chance to stock their roster full of solid players from clubs around the league. The single goaltender protection limit also meant Seattle could select a couple of the league’s best backups—players who are presumably going to develop into better netminders than some teams’ current starting goalies.

In other words, every player Seattle drafted from another team is a legitimate NHL talent. The Kraken picked seven forwards who reached double-digit goals in the shortened 2020–2021 season, including two-time defending Stanley Cup champion center Yanni Gourde from the Tampa Bay Lightning. The team should have two playable goalies in former Florida Panther Chris Driedger (who had a sparkling 2.07 goals-against average in 23 games last season) and free agent pickup Phillip Grubauer.

General managers of the other NHL teams were not nearly as willing to trade with Seattle’s Ron Francis as they were with Vegas GM George McPhee four years ago, but Seattle pulled off a shrewd move by taking goalie Vitek Vanecek and dealing him back to the Capitals in exchange for a second-round draft pick.

The draft format prevented the Kraken from picking a top-end goal scorer, but there are other ways to find players who can put the puck in the net.

All the existing NHL teams protected their top scorers. That left Seattle to pick through depth players instead of those at the top of the Rocket Richard Trophy leaderboard.

But recent history says the Kraken will still have players who can score lots of goals. For one thing, many of the new Seattle players didn’t get many opportunities to be front-line scorers on their previous teams. They’ll now have a chance to step up and fill that role. Before joining Vegas in that franchise’s inaugural season in 2017, Swedish winger William Karlsson had scored 21 goals across five NHL seasons. When placed on a scoring line in Vegas, he scored 43 that year for the Knights.

That’s a huge breakout year, but it’s easy to imagine a few Seattle players posting career-best goal numbers. Keep an eye on Mason Appleton, a big forward the Kraken plucked from the Winnipeg Jets. Appleton scored 12 goals in 56 games last season after scoring eight in his first 82 with Winnipeg. Maybe he’ll continue his breakout this season.

The Kraken also made a few important free agent signings in ex-St. Louis Blues winger Jaden Schwartz (154 goals in 10 NHL seasons) and ex-Florida Panthers center Alexander Wennberg, who has seven years of NHL experience but is still young: He turns 27 in September.

The Kraken retained one of hockey’s most valuable assets: salary cap space.

GM Ron Francis has left himself more than $16 million in spending room under the NHL’s salary cap, according to data from the contract-tracking website CapFriendly. That will go down somewhat as the Kraken continue to fill out a complete NHL roster, but the point remains: Seattle has a lot of spending flexibility to add more talent. That’s flexibility most other teams lack.

Seven of the league’s 32 teams are currently over the $81.5 million cap and will have to make moves in the coming weeks to get into compliance. Another six teams have less than $3 million in salary cap space to work with, which severely limits the kinds of moves they can make. Seattle has more cap room than all but eight teams, giving Francis plenty of maneuverability both this year and over the next few seasons. Even if Seattle isn’t especially good in 2021, it’ll have room to grow.

Replicating Vegas’ instant success will be hard.

For an expansion franchise, a Stanley Cup Final appearance in the first year is a lot to live up to, and so is following that up with three more playoff runs the next three years. But the Golden Knights laid out a roadmap, and so far, Seattle seems to be in a good position to follow it. There’s no reason the Kraken can’t be a serious presence on the West Coast this season and in seasons to come.

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The 2021 Stanley Cup Final is filled with contrasts. On the one hand, the Montreal Canadiens are the most storied franchise in hockey history, with 23 Cups on the club’s resume. But they haven’t appeared in the Final since winning the last of those in 1993. On the other hand, the Tampa Bay Lightning had just become a team when the Habs last lifted Lord Stanley. Despite the franchise’s youth, the Lightning have become one of the league’s best teams this century. They won their second Cup last year and have established themselves as a mainstay in the playoffs.

Now the two will meet with everything on the line. The Canadiens emerged from the league’s pandemic-created North Division, a collection of the NHL’s six Canadian franchises (all grouped together because of COVID travel protocols and restrictions), and then beat the Vegas Golden Knights in the semifinal round to claim their spot in the Final. The Lightning took the Central Division and beat the prickly New York Islanders in a seven-game series to earn their shot at a repeat championship. The games start Monday night and run every other night until there’s a winner, with American broadcasts on NBC Sports Network for the first two games and NBC after that. Each game starts at 8 p.m. (EDT), except Game 7, which will start at 7 p.m. (EDT) if needed.

Here are four storylines that will define the series.

How will the Canadiens deal with the Lightning’s significant talent edge?

On paper and in reality, Tampa Bay has the better players. Center Brayden Point has 14 goals in this year’s playoffs; no other player has more than eight. Winger Nikita Kucherov, who missed the entire regular season with an injury, has 27 points. Nobody else has more than 20, and nobody outside Tampa Bay has more than 16. (Kucherov and Point, along with teammates Alex Killorn, Steven Stamkos, and Victor Hedman, lead the league in playoff points.) Montreal has two players, winger Tyler Toffoli and center Nick Suzuki, with 14 and 13 points, respectively.

The teams haven’t faced each other yet this season because the NHL limited teams to playing within their divisions. It’s not entirely clear how the Habs will try to neutralize the Lightning’s big guns. It’s also not clear how involved head coach Dominique Ducharme will be for the first two games: Due to a positive COVID test, he can’t get behind the bench until Game 3.

Both teams have elite goalies. Will either one crack?

26-year-old Lightning backstop Andrei Vasilevskiy is the best goaltender in the world right now. In 18 playoff games, he has allowed 36 goals, despite facing enough high-quality scoring chances that the analytics say he should’ve given up an additional 23 goals.

Vasilevskiy’s 22.8 goals saved above expectation in the playoffs are 11 more than the next-best goalie, who happens to be Montreal veteran Carey Price. The 33-year-old is a former league MVP and Vezina Trophy winner (awarded to the league’s top goalie), and he remains one of the best in the world. The likeliest outcome is that both netminders play well. If one of them surprisingly does not, that’ll change the entire dynamic of this Stanley Cup Final.

Where will Montreal find offense?

It’s obvious enough who will do the scoring for Tampa Bay. The Lightning have the best collection of forward talent in the world, and they’ll continue to get goals from those players. Their ace line of Ondrej Palat, Point, and Kucherov has been entirely unstoppable this spring. Their second line of Killorn, Stamkos, and Anthony Cirelli has been only slightly less superhuman.

Montreal doesn’t have scorers of that caliber, but the Habs do have some notable talent. They’ll need a lot from leading scorers Toffoli and Suzuki, certainly, but they’ll also need secondary scoring. One candidate who could provide it: Tiny rookie Cole Caufield. The 5-foot-7, 20-year-old winger didn’t make his NHL debut until April 26, but he has emerged as an important player for Montreal. After not scoring in his first nine playoff games, he’s scored four in his last six.

What effect will home crowds have on the series?

Home-ice advantage belongs to the Lightning, who will host the first two games, as well as Game 5 and Game 7 if necessary. When the Lightning are at home, they’ll enjoy the backing of a crowd of around 14,800 people—about 80 percent capacity for Amalie Arena. On the other hand, when the Canadiens host Games 3, 4, and (if necessary) 6, they’ll likely only have some 3,500 fans in attendance due to COVID regulations in Quebec. While those 3,500 people might make enough noise that they sound like 20,000, the varying crowds could affect how much of a boost the teams get at home.

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The 2021 NHL Playoffs will start May 15, and for the most part, the schedule of games has been finalized. When the playoffs begin, they’ll mark a return to normal after last summer’s bubble setup in Toronto and Edmonton. Teams will be back in their home arenas, and many will have at least some fans in attendance—a welcome change from the empty seats we’ve seen over the past year.

But these playoffs will be unusual in other ways, most notably because the NHL is using a different structure for the 2021 season. To mitigate travel during the pandemic, the league realigned into four divisions: the Central, East, West, and North, the latter of which is made up of the league’s six Canadian teams. The realignment creates the potential for unusual matchups. For instance, the Montreal Canadiens are normally in the Eastern Conference, and the Edmonton Oilers are in the Western Conference, so they could typically only meet in the Stanley Cup Final. But this year, they could face each other much earlier in the postseason, which would be a lot of fun to watch.

Though the divisions look different, the playoff format is similar to past years’ playoffs. A total of 16 teams will make the field, and the first two rounds will be devoted to sorting out a champion from each of the four divisions. Then, out of these “final four” (similar to NCAA March Madness), two teams will advance to the Stanley Cup Final, which should begin in late June or early July.

Here are four storylines that will shape this unique playoff season.

Is it finally Canada’s moment?

Seven of the NHL’s 31 franchises are based in Canada. Six have been around for decades, and a seventh, the Winnipeg Jets, joined in 2011. But no Canadian club has lifted the Stanley Cup since the Canadiens did it in 1993.

If that streak ends this year, there’s a good chance it will be thanks to players who weren’t even alive in 1993. Edmonton OIlers center Connor McDavid (born in 1997) has emerged as the best player in the world, and Toronto Maple Leafs center Auston Matthews (also born in 1997) isn’t far behind him. The Oilers and Leafs are Canada’s best shots to hoist Lord Stanley again.

Do the Pittsburgh Penguins’ aging superstars have another run in them?

With three Stanley Cups since 2009 and a repeat in 2016 and 2017, the Penguins are the closest thing to a dominant franchise in the current era of the NHL. Their success has largely rested on the contributions of two of the best centers of all time—Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin—and one of the league’s most talented (if less consistent) defenders, Kris Letang.

Those three have played together since 2006. They’re all 33 to 34 years old now, which is around the age where star players usually begin to fade. Crosby has been brilliant this season, while Letang has come on lately and Malkin is set to play in the postseason after missing much of the year with a lower-body injury. If they’re going to win a fourth Cup together, it will probably happen this year. (Or perhaps it’s time for McDavid or Matthews to take over.)

Who will emerge from a two-team power struggle in the West?

Two of the best teams in hockey this year have been the Vegas Golden Knights and the Colorado Avalanche. They couldn’t have been built more differently. The Knights are largely the product of an expansion draft (Vegas joined the league in 2017), but they’ve found quick success—making the Stanley Cup Final in 2018 and a conference final in 2020—by smartly adding big scorers like Max Pacioretty and Mark Stone to the roster.

On the other hand, the Avalanche got great the old-fashioned way: losing a lot and then using high draft picks to select incredible players. Left wing Gabriel Landeskog (second overall in 2011), center Nathan MacKinnon (first overall in 2013), right wing Mikko Rantanen (10th overall in 2015), and defenseman Cale Makar (fourth overall in 2017) give the Avs what might be the most talented core in the league.

Will Connor McDavid define the playoffs, or someone else?

It feels like McDavid’s time. He’s now in his sixth year in the league, and he has already won an MVP award and led the league in points multiple times. But he’s only appeared in the playoffs twice. The Oilers generally have failed to surround him with high-caliber teammates, and it has been difficult for McDavid to drag the team into the postseason.

Everything’s clicked this year, though. The Oilers are dominant, and they’ve finally found enough help for McDavid and fellow elite scorer Leon Draisaitl. Goaltender Mike Smith, at 39 years old, has emerged as a contender for the Vezina Trophy, which goes to the league’s top netminder. All of that to say: The Oilers have the pieces in place for a Stanley Cup win, and McDavid could be looking at his first Conn Smythe Trophy (awarded to the playoff MVP) this year.

Even so, hockey is a cruel game. The Oilers could run into trouble at any time, and a dream season for McDavid could go up in smoke. He has plenty of competition: Matthews and the Maple Leafs, Crosby and the Penguins, even MacKinnon and the star-studded Avalanche. Regardless of how this postseason goes, it’ll be fun to see such talented players and teams battle it out on the ice.

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