Seattle Bound

The new rink

Marc Malsam has this vision.
The father of two children, ages 7 and 9, imagines a day when his daughter will come home from the University of Washington – the school that both Malsam and his wife attended.

She will have long ago picked a favorite NHL team, and maybe a favorite team to hate – a rival for the hometown Seattle team. And she will mark the dates on her calendar when that team will be in town, and she and her dad will go to those games season after season.
It will be their thing.
“I can’t wait for those special things,” said Malsam, a structural engineer. “I can’t wait for those experiences.”
And when Malsam retires, maybe even when he shuffles off this mortal coil, those tickets will still remain in his family, creating their own experiences on top of the ones created over the intervening years.
“Someone’s going to enjoy these tickets,” Malsam said. “These tickets are almost a legacy.”
In early November, Malsam walked into the Seattle NHL Preview Center in downtown Seattle and breathed life into that dream by selecting the four club seats that he and his business partner Ivan Tsang put deposits on when the call came last March for fans to prove that Seattle was ready to embrace the world’s best hockey league.

Possible team names

The Malsam family isn’t what you would call a prototypical club seat holder. They’re not transplanted from some other hockey market north of the border or across the continent in the American northeast. They didn’t grow up around the game.
Malsam is from the Seattle area. When he got his driver’s license he would occasionally venture down to see the Western Hockey League’s Thunderbirds.
“That’s my hockey exposure,” he said.

Malsam’s wife is related to longtime local hockey icon Guyle Fielder, who played in just nine NHL games but was a fixture in the old Western Hockey League playing for the Seattle Totems in the 1950s and 1960s. So they know the game. But not nearly as well as they’re going to.
And if they may not fit some sort of preconceived notion of what a Seattle season ticket holder might look like that’s probably a good thing given that this team seems built to break existing hockey molds.
Malsam and Tsang have built a small but thriving engineering company and one of the perks they like to offer their employees and clients are chances to go to local sporting events. So they buy season tickets for the local teams like the NFL’s Seahawks, MLB’s Mariners and MLS’s Sounders.
“Now we have the opportunity to give them NHL tickets,” Malsam said.
Getting in on the ground floor with the expansion team and certainly by getting a chance to physically select his own seats represents an entirely new experience.
“My Seahawks tickets suck,” Malsam admitted. And given the demand for NFL tickets in this market that isn’t likely to change as time passes.
His new hockey tickets, by comparison?
“Killer,” he said.
When the deposit period opened last March, three months after the NHL’s Board of Governors approved the Seattle expansion team, Malsam and Tsang were like tens of thousands of other mostly local hockey fans, setting up multiple computer screens, using their phones, trying to make sure that they at the very least got a shot at a seat.
He was No. 1,804. Not bad really considering that when the deposit period opened, 10,000 people put down money in the first 12 minutes. In the first 31 hours, 32,000 deposits were made and there’s now a waiting list for tickets that numbers 33,300.
Building a team from nothing, like Vegas did leading up to 2017-18 and what Seattle is in the throes of doing, is complex. That’s a given. But it requires more than a little elasticity, the ability to bend and manipulate time.

The Seattle Totems ?

The initial part, the deposits, was wildly exciting, the first tangible connection between the fan base and the expansion team. And frankly, the response was to be expected. After all, this is a market that owners, including movie titan Jerry Bruckheimer, believed strongly enough in to put down a $650 million expansion fee ($150 million more than Vegas Golden Knights owner Bill Foley in 2017), so seeing this kind of depositor response was anticipated, reassuring of course, but expected.
But then what?

An elaborate $930 million renovation of the former KeyArena pushed the team’s inaugural season to the 2021-22 campaign, which presented those in charge on the marketing and business side with a bit of a quandary.
How to keep alive the excitement for a team that is still without a name or jersey until at least early in 2020? How to keep a nascent fan base engaged when there is still a year and a half before the expansion draft?
And how do the folks in the team’s offices in Seattle nurture and grow interest in the game as a whole, and create a bond with a community that will sustain it through good times and bad?
“It definitely is a challenge,” said Heidi Dettmer, vice president of marketing for the team. “We have a long road map.”
The construction of New Arena at Seattle Center, a temporary name for the ambitious reconstruction project, created quite a buzz in and of itself. The original KeyArena roof, part of a structure built for the World’s Fair in 1962, will remain intact, buttressed and suspended above what will be a brand new arena with a capacity for hockey of 17,400.

The team has unveiled plans for a 180,000 square foot practice facility inside the city limits of Seattle, which will be the first hockey facility technically in the city. The plans, which include three ice pads and lots of parking for the public who will be invited to the team’s practices, speak to the team’s mission to create a team that will be accessible to everyone in the Seattle area regardless of ethnic or economic background.
A top-notch facility for the clubs’ American Hockey League team is being readied in Palm Springs, California, also.
There is the foundation of an NHL front office, now headed by GM Ron Francis. And there is the beginning of a talented, diverse hockey operations staff to begin the process of unearthing players.
But keeping fans attached to all of that is a delicate proposition.
There have been fan forums and early learn to play hockey sessions guided by the team’s new director of youth and community, Kyle Boyd. His mandate is to grow the existing hockey community, which has about 3,000 youth players, while opening doors to those who will be starting with the game from the ground up.
“We need to have something where kids can get their hands on hockey sticks,” Boyd said.

But the first point of contact for many has been the seat selection process.
It’s a short walk from the arena construction site to the seat preview center.
With the sound of construction in the background, visitors view the models of the arena, watch video presentations and view high tech representations of the various seat options to imagine what lies ahead.
Depositors can see exactly where the seats are vis a vis center ice, the players’ benches, penalty boxes, food services, restrooms and the ice resurfacing machine doors.
There are visual reminders of how this team will fit with the city’s long connection to the game, a history that includes the 1917 Stanley Cup won by the Seattle Metropolitans.

There is a short video featuring clips from, among others, Francis, Bruckheimer, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, and the team’s president and CEO Tod Leiweke, that ends with an iconic shot of a giant flag with the NHL logo fluttering from the top of the Seattle Space Needle observation tower.
Starting in late October depositors who opted for the prime club seats have been contacted one by one about coming down to the seat selection center and picking out their seats.
Although it has been logistically daunting, the business team is committed to maintaining the sanctity of the deposit order. Each of the depositors, 32,000 in all, were given a number, and that is the order in which the visits are scheduled.
Those who couldn’t come down in person to select their seats were given the opportunity to do so electronically. But for the hundreds who have come down in person it has been another small but important step in allowing these fans to take ownership of the team.
These visits will tell the early story of this franchise and in studying how other teams had set up their own seat selection process it was important to the Seattle group that the moment wasn’t just a transaction but an experience.
Between 40 and 50 people a day, six days a week make their way to the preview center to cement the relationship with the as yet unnamed team.

The individuals – and these are individuals as opposed to ticket brokers who were weeded out of the process from the get-go – have the choice of committing to the club seats for three, five or seven years, and at this point there is a fairly even split between the three options.
When people come in for their selection appointments, it’s often not just those who are purchasing the tickets, but extended family, friends, colleagues.
Bill Chapin is the senior vice president of sales for the new Seattle franchise. His previous experience includes stops with the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs and Seahawks, as well as the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings.
The incredible response from the depositors “put the wind in the sails of this franchise,” Chapin said.
Now they are getting to find out what they signed up for.
“We find that people are so excited to come down,” Chapin said. “They want to share in the excitement of what they’re doing.”
The club seats, which cost between $285-$355 a seat per game, come with access to one of two private in-arena clubs, first right of refusal for concert tickets at the new arena and benefits at both the new practice facility and the AHL facility in Palm Springs.
The club seats are phase one of the seat selection process. Located on the east and west side of the new arena, those 2,600 seats should all be allocated by the first of January.
That will be followed by distribution of general seats to the next level of depositors. Then the waitlist.
The marketing and ticket folks will also hold open houses and help disperse the 13,500 regular seats. Special access seats have already been allocated, as well.
“I think what we’re seeing here is completely unique,” Chapin said. “The fan base is just dying to engage and activate here. Now that we’ve got a team ready to go, the fan base is confirming what we knew about Seattle. Their fervor for hockey is real.”
One family walked through the doors of the selection center with an entourage of about 15 people. They were getting four seats and all of them were assisting the father who was making the final decision.
“They were all so excited and so engaged,” Chapin said. “You saw this father navigating it. There were a couple of tense moments, but he did a great job of masterfully navigating.”
When Adam Nathan heard the NHL was coming to town he and his wife, Michelle, decided they wanted in and prepared as best they could to make sure that happened. In fact, it became something of a ‘thing’ with his colleagues and pals.
“A lot of us had multiple computers, multiple browsers and windows open,” in preparation for the opening of the deposit period last March.
“I also had it up on the cell phone in case there were wi-fi issues. For whatever reason it was way faster on the phone,” Nathan said.
Faster indeed. They ended up with a magical number: Eight.
Eight among 32,000.
When they got the call to come down to pick their seats, they learned they were the first to physically show up for seat selection, as the others selected electronically or on the phone.
“They did a great job with their model and three-D renderings,” Nathan said. “It was way better, way smoother than I could have possibly imagined.”
So, you’re number eight of 32,000 and you’ve got to pick two seats? What do you do?
“I agonized over this a long time,” Nathan admitted. “Basically we had the pick of practically anything.”
Lots of questions later, lots of opinions offered and taken in, and it came down to seats on the glass that were a bit more expensive or in the middle of the club seat section.
Might as well be as close as possible, no?

So the Nathans are on the glass next to the penalty boxes.
And the family signed on for the seven-year plan.
“We figure we’re in this for the long-haul,” Nathan said.
Malsam and Tsang put down deposits on four tickets, and when they finally selected their seats, Malsam was euphoric.

“I was on Cloud Nine. I was so jazzed up about it,” he said of his new in-arena home about 20 rows up from the ice in the middle of the arena.
Yet, after selecting his seats, he began to covet seats that were closer to the ice to get a feel for the action of the game, the speed and physicality. So already he is imagining making contact with other season ticket holders about swapping seats periodically to get a different experience once the games start.
The Seattle group has anticipated this desire for fans to share their experiences, to meet one another, even if they don’t yet have players to ruminate over or special teams to laud or lament. Around Thanksgiving the team’s marketing group put on a Fansgiving event to help facilitate that kind of bonding where depositors got a chance to ask questions of the hockey operations folks, along with meeting fellow depositors.
Malsam isn’t on the Seattle payroll. But at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, he feels connected.
“I don’t know how you could do this better than these guys are doing it,” he said of being encouraged to weigh in on the team’s name, logos, color schemes, what kind of foods should be served at the arena.
“They’ve done a great job of rewarding all of the fans. They make me feel like a frickin’ rock star.”