And now, it’s officially official. Tuesday was a big day as the Seattle Kraken formally announced what the entire hockey world already knew: Dan Bylsma would be taking the wheel as the second head coach in the team’s history. 

For additional coverage on the hiring, I shared my reaction on Monday after the reports came out, along with some background on Bylsma. Give that a read if you haven’t already. John Barr and I also had the pleasure of interviewing Bylsma for the Sound Of Hockey Podcast immediately after the introductory presser, and it’s very much worth a listen. It’s an extremely fun interview with (oddly) plenty of Back to the Future references. 

With those housekeeping items covered and Disco Dan having now completed his intro press conference alongside general manager Ron Francis and team owner Samantha Holloway at Kraken Community Iceplex on Tuesday, I thought it was worth giving a few follow-up thoughts. 

Here are my takeaways from the press conference. 

First day of school vibes

There was a lot of pomp and circumstance surrounding Bylsma’s introduction, and I personally left KCI feeling excited for what will come from this team next season. The presser was held in the Kraken dressing room—a place the team has never held such a press conference—and it was packed to the gills with local media, team staff, and team ownership. 

Bylsma himself presented as humble but excited, grateful but deserving, serious but also downright funny. Before he was given the floor to make his own opening remarks, the team showed a video montage of Bylsma’s playing and coaching highlights, including a clip of him scoring one of his 17 career goals. 

“Being able to find a clip of me scoring a goal is evidence of the great work that’s already happening here,” Bylsma joked. 

Here are Dan Bylsma’s opening comments from his presser… #SeaKraken pic.twitter.com/jtrqIYfoe0

— Sound Of Hockey (@sound_hockey) May 28, 2024

There’s a certain comedic chemistry between him and Francis that shows they get along and know each other well after working together for three years. Francis also joked that he had previously interviewed Bylsma for a head-coaching role when Francis was the GM in Carolina, but “[Dan] didn’t have any interest in my job at that point.” To that, Bylsma quickly shot back, “There are two sides to that story,” but then declined to elaborate when given the opportunity. 

I’ve said it many times that I liked Dave Hakstol, but he was always guarded when dealing with the media. He never wanted to say anything that could be misconstrued or give another team even the slightest tactical advantage against the Kraken, so sometimes it was hard to get anything of interest out of him. I don’t get that same vibe from Bylsma, though, who effortlessly glided from one interview to the next following his presser and seemed to really enjoy doing it. Again, you’ll get a good taste of that in the latest Sound Of Hockey Podcast interview. 

A long journey

I mentioned Bylsma’s humility earlier, and where that shone through for me was when he answered my question about taking a step back from being an assistant in Detroit to being an assistant with the Charlotte Checkers of the AHL. I asked if becoming the Kraken head coach one day was on his radar when he took that job. 

“You could wonder why, maybe, my path led me to Charlotte, but really it was… I was grateful to Ron at the time of just giving me the opportunity to coach again,” Bylsma said. “I had taken few years off from being a head coach and kind of really decided that I wanted to give one more go at being a head coach again. And that’s really what led me to Charlotte. I did have an eye on CV, I will say that. I did, and I ended up coaching in CV… I did have an eye on proving to Ron that I would be the guy to be the head coach in CV when the franchise started two years ago.”

Think about what Bylsma did to get to this point. The guy was at the pinnacle of coaching, got fired twice, went back to being an assistant for three years, then went even farther back to being an assistant in the MINORS just to give himself a chance to be a head coach at the AHL level again. He didn’t take that Charlotte Checkers job thinking, Oh, this is my path back to being an NHL head coach. No, he took that hoping it could just make him a head coach again, not even at the top level, but at the AHL level. 

His ego wasn’t too big to do that, and his willingness to take two steps backward before three steps forward has paid dividends. 

More work to do

Adding an interesting wrinkle to this situation is that Byslma is still in the midst of a postseason run, with the Western Conference Finals of the AHL Calder Cup Playoffs getting underway Wednesday. 

In both his press conference and his podcast interview with us, Bylsma implied that this has been an unideal way of getting one of the 32 best head-coaching jobs in the world. 

“It hangs in the balance that I still have some other things to do in Coachella Valley,” Bylsma said. “So, we’ve got Game 1 [Wednesday]. I’m looking very much forward to getting… spending time with you here right now, but getting on a plane, getting back to Coachella Valley, and get on with Game 1.” 

And while his name had always been bandied about as a possibility to take this job, Bylsma did well to keep things relatively under wraps and hold firm that he was wholeheartedly focused on the Firebirds’ playoff run. Still, this has to have been an awkward situation to navigate.

Other hirings coming

By promoting their AHL coach, the Kraken have robbed Peter to pay Paul, in a sense. Moving Bylsma up doesn’t actually fill a hole as much as it just creates a different one, so at some point they will need to add one or two in headcount because they let both Hakstol and assistant coach Paul McFarland go following the 2023-24 season. 

So, at this point, there remains an opening for head coach in Coachella Valley, plus an assistant coach spot in Seattle, assuming the Kraken want to come back with the same number of coaches next season. 

Bylsma didn’t implicitly say it, but he sounded comfortable having Jay Leach and Dave Lowry as two of his assistants, and he also indicated that Jess Campbell and Stu Bickel, his assistants in Coachella Valley, would be given consideration for promotions.

I could see a world in which one of Campbell or Bickel gets an NHL assistant job and the other gets the AHL head coaching job, and then the organization hires two more AHL assistants to backfill. Again, they’re robbing Peter to pay Paul, but such moves could make sense. 

Following his public presser, Francis gave some clarity on that situation in an aside with a few of us. “That’s a process we’ll get to,” Francis said. “My inbox is going to blow up, now that we’ve hired Dan, for people that want to be on his staff here, as well as the staff there. And I said the same thing to Dan, anything that comes in here, we’ll just put that aside, and then we’ll work on putting a list together for CV. But our focus right now is on letting [the Firebirds] play, and once we get through that, I need to have the right conversations with Jessica, the right conversations with Stu, and look at what candidates we have and make that decision that’s best for the organization.”