Thoughts on Ron Francis stepping down as Kraken president of hockey operations

The first shoe has dropped for the still-spiraling Seattle Kraken, who announced on Wednesday that Ron Francis, their first general manager in franchise history and current president of hockey operations, will be stepping down at the end of the season.

Hired on July 17, 2019, two full years before the team’s expansion draft, Francis effectively built a hockey operations department and two teams—including the Coachella Valley Firebirds—from the ground up and was even involved in the designs for Kraken Community Iceplex and much more. Although he moved out of the general manager’s chair after last season, it is fair to say Francis has his fingerprints on almost every hockey-related facet of the organization.

“Ron and I agreed that this is the right moment to make a thoughtful transition for both Ron and the organization, and move in a new direction,” said Kraken CEO Tod Leiweke in a press release. “From a small office in Lower Queen Anne to the 32nd NHL franchise, Ron’s leadership and vision were instrumental in building this franchise from the ground up. Under his stewardship, we reached the playoffs in our second season, and he leaves behind a strong foundation of draft picks and promising prospects that will continue to shape the future of the team. We are grateful for his dedication and professionalism, and we wish Ron and his family the very best.”

The Kraken appear to be doing their best to make this a graceful exit for Francis, who even weighed in with a quote of his own in that same press release about his impending departure.

“It has been an honor to help launch and lead the Seattle Kraken over the past seven years,” Francis said. “I am proud of the culture we built, the people we brought together, and the milestones we achieved, including our historic first playoff run. I want to thank our entire ownership group, everyone throughout the organization, and our incredible fans for their unwavering support. This organization has a bright future, and I’m grateful to have been part of its beginning.”

It was a big undertaking

The job Francis took on back in 2019, creating an NHL team from scratch and soon being forced to navigate launching an expansion franchise in the midst of a pandemic, was a big one. And while he made plenty of shrewd moves along the way and seems to have set the organization up with a solid prospect pool and a handful of movable assets that could help the team improve, Seattle’s track record under his watch left a lot to be desired.

Indeed, the Kraken did go to the Stanley Cup Playoffs in Year 2. But that’s about the extent of what the Kraken have had to boast about in a very long five years. There’s no doubt that ownership and fans would have expected more progress, and the way this season’s team has nosedived back into “hoping for losses for a better draft pick” territory signaled that at least this change was on the way.

Francis has been massively respected and looked up to throughout the Kraken organization, and I think that has had something to do with why it took so long to get to this. But it was past time for Francis and the Kraken to part ways.

Good at drafting (apparently), not so good on the pro side

I genuinely think Francis did a good job of building out the prospect pipeline for this organization. I know there are plenty who will disagree with that sentiment, but he created an environment where a significant portion of the existing roster has risen through Seattle’s system to begin playing regular NHL minutes. Meanwhile, there’s a whole host of players in Coachella Valley who have shown glimpses of one day being NHLers.

Will any of them be star players who will take this team to the promised land? It doesn’t seem like that will be the case, but at a minimum, there are effective pieces there that can eventually fill some of the void when the original veterans have filtered out of the Kraken roster.

Remember, only a small percentage of NHL prospects actually make it. The fact that Seattle has so many of its homegrown players already here and playing regular minutes does show that the team is drafting and developing in the way that Francis always claimed they would.

But my gripe with Francis’ approach comes in how he built the Kraken’s roster from the beginning and how he so rarely found ways to pry talented players away from other teams. To me, it showed a lack of creativity.

At the Expansion Draft, for example, Seattle made no trades with other teams to allow them to protect certain players by handing over additional assets. The narrative at the time was that GMs had wised up after the Vegas Expansion Draft, and nobody wanted to be made to look foolish this time. That’s true, but it could also be that Seattle’s asks were unreasonable. It could also be that the Kraken weren’t clever enough in their wheeling and dealing to talk other teams into handing over additional talented players in the way that the Golden Knights had. Francis ended up going straight by the book, selecting from what was made available by the rest of the league.

And as the years went on and the losses mounted, we saw how Francis operated. Every transaction was so calculated and careful—except for when he threw big bags of money at Brandon Montour and Chandler Stephenson in free agency—that it was as if moves could only be made if they were absolute no-brainers, with no special arrangements involved.

There were no cap-retention, three-team trades with 10 different draft-pick conditions. There were only “here is a draft pick or two, now send me a bottom-six forward” type trades.

Even when it seems like players aren’t moving around the league that much, there’s always a price that can get GMs thinking about pulling the trigger on trades. And we kept hearing about how—after they started stockpiling draft picks—the team wouldn’t end up using all those picks and would instead cash some of them in to acquire talent. But that almost never happened.

So where did that lack of aggressiveness and creativity leave the Kraken? With one playoff appearance in five years and no obvious path toward immediate improvement.

Now what?

It seems that Jason Botterill is now fully in charge of hockey operations, though we’ll likely get more clarity on that after Tod Leiweke addresses the media on Thursday morning. What concerns me is that Botterill has so far—in his one year in the GM’s chair—shown a similar lack of propensity for creative moves.

Botterill traded two draft picks for Mason Marchment, then got similar draft picks back when that didn’t work out. He sent a fourth-round pick to Minnesota for Freddy Gaudreau. He sent two picks to Toronto for Bobby McMann, who is on an expiring contract and who I am less convinced with every passing loss will want to re-sign in Seattle.

So what really is changing with Francis leaving? Is Botterill suddenly going to get aggressive this summer and start swinging deals that will drastically improve the culture of the locker room and the on-ice talent? Why couldn’t he do that with Francis still around, given that Botterill was already calling the shots this season?

This team has a long way to go to even be relevant, and this is a pivotal moment for the Kraken. If this change leads to bolder, more creative decisions, then that could finally move the team forward. If not, and Seattle comes back with a similar roster yet again next season, then it risks being another cosmetic change for a franchise still seeking a clear direction.