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GeekWire
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Davy Jones Locker Room
26 days
Who is Sportsology?: Seattle Kraken Hire Audit Firm
The Kraken announced Tuesday they have hired Sportsology Group to conduct the external audit of hockey operations that Tod Leiweke first mentioned on April 9, the day after Ron Francis’s departure as president of hockey operations was formally announced. Per the team, Sportsology is “conducting a full assessment of organizational structure, communication and decision-making, player development, amateur and professional scouting, analytics integration, coaching, roster construction philosophy, sports science, medical support, and the alignment between the Kraken and AHL affiliate Coachella Valley. The work is running parallel to the team’s own annual end-of-season review.” The question is: who is Sportsology, what they actually do, and if this audit is an actual audit or if it’s a “ooh look at the shiny distracting thing over here!” piece of theater. Who is Sportsology? Sportsology Group was founded in 2014 by Mike Forde, a Manchester native who spent 6 years as director of football operations at Chelsea FC. The Ringer described Forde as the most powerful person in the NBA that you don’t know. His firm operates across 5 continents and 9 sports. The documented client list is heavy on the NFL and NBA. The Los Angeles Rams, San Francisco 49ers, Philadelphia Eagles, and Atlanta Falcons all appear. So do the Dallas Mavericks, Washington Wizards, Brooklyn Nets, and the entire Harris Blitzer portfolio (76ers, Devils, Commanders, Crystal Palace FC, Joe Gibbs Racing). 4 MLS clubs are listed on Sportsology’s website: FC Cincinnati, LAFC, Chicago Fire, and Inter Miami. The NHL experience is thinner, the most prominent prior hockey engagement being the Chicago Blackhawks GM search after Stan Bowman resigned in the wake of the Kyle Beach sexual abuse scandal. This isn’t a Big Four accounting firm (say…didn’t that used to be a Big Five? Whatever did happen to Arthur Andersen anyway?), but rather a boutique firm focused entirely on professional sports organizations. They have only a couple of dozen employees by public reporting. 78% of the firm’s clients deal directly with ownership, which means the deliverable typically goes above the executives being evaluated. What they can do for Seattle The mechanics are not exotic, because this is a corporate audit and there is nothing remotely exotic about that. Auditors arrive, they interview everyone they can reach: front office, scouting, analytics, coaching staff, medical, support functions, and whoever else may be relevant to hockey operations. They ask how decisions get made, who has authority over what, they identify the silos, and identify who is not pulling their weight. Their strengths lie in identifying good org structures and figuring out where the contributions are actually coming from in the organization they are auditing. Then they deliver a report, and sometimes help ownership turn that report into an implementation plan. The only NHL client I could find publicly that Sportsology worked with is Chicago. After Bowman resigned in October 2021, Danny Wirtz brought Forde in to advise on the GM search alongside Eddie Olczyk (what’s he up to these days?), Marian Hossa, and Patrick Sharp. Wirtz wanted someone who had operated in different sports presumably to get the view of someone who wasn’t institutionalized with the sport’s blind spots. European soccer was far beyond what hockey was doing on the performance and medical side, and Sportsology’s soccer background was very appealing here. The Blackhawks promoted Kyle Davidson to GM, who gave us one of the greatest man on the street interviews ever and no that is not an exaggeration. But the Blackhawks were looking for a GM and used Sportsology to help them find him. The Kraken situation is more analogous to when the Boston Red Sox commissioned Sportsology in 2024. New chief baseball officer Craig Breslow had had the role for about 6 months when he brought Sportsology in to evaluate a baseball operations department of hundreds. Breslow wanted help wrapping his arms around the operation to understand who his people were, what work they were doing, and whether the org structure was working. Sportsology came in and identified a bunch of structural redundancies and reporting issues, gave Breslow a report with recommendations, and Breslow implemented them. The Athletic’s Keith Law called the resulting wave of firings and reassignments “a midnight massacre.” Long-tenured staff were let go or marginalized. Breslow said he was “not afraid to upset the apple cart.” Now, we’ll see in a few years if the Red Sox win as a result. But the audit produced inconvenient findings and the front office acted on them. In this case, there were a lot of extra people (hundreds in baseball operations! hundreds!) and they reduced the workforce. Other audits they’ve conducted did not, by my research, result in massive purges of personnel. It doesn’t seem to be their M.O. The Eagles have been a Sportsology client since last decade. We don’t know what exactly Sportsology recommended to the Eagles when they chose to fire Chip Kelly in December 2015 and hired Doug Pederson. But they won the Super Bowl two years later and are one of the best-run organizations in the NFL, having also won a second Super Bowl since. Feb 4, 2018; Minneapolis, MN, USA; Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Nick Foles (L) and quarterback Nate Sudfeld (R) react after defeating the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LII at U.S. Bank Stadium. The Eagles won 41-33. Mandatory Credit: Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports One Sportsology service is Corporate Knowledge Capture. They take the playbook of organizational philosophy and put it in writing and say “okay, this is how you run your organization successfully using your people and your ethos.” Sportsology helped San Antonio Spurs GM R.C. Buford develop the Spurs Way. Although in this case with the Kraken, there is very little institutional success to codify so far. That probably came off meaner than intended. Sportsology, when it’s had misses, have been mostly the “we recommended the wrong person as GM,” which may or may not be fair given the hit/miss rate of GMs in their respective sports, and the results have been mixed. As far as misses go, Sportsology has a doozy: in 2021 they helped the Dallas Mavericks hire Nico Harrison as GM, who then made the most out-of-nowhere trade in the history of professional sports (and also one of the worst) when he traded Luka Doncic to the LA Lakers for Anthony Davis, a trade so implausible people thought that Shams was hacked when he tweeted the news. In hockey terms, Dallas traded Leon Draisaitl for Mark Stone straight up with no picks. I don’t know how much you peg that one on Sportsology for a trade made three+ years later with still no plausible explanation whatsoever why it happened, but if there are any who happen to be Kraken/Maverick fans reading “this company was a reason why Nico Harrison was the Dallas GM, setting in motion the worst moment in franchise history,” I apologize for putting you through that. Please enjoy Cooper Flagg as a consolation prize. Seattle has indicated they’re keeping the GM, so the Kraken are safe from the next Nico Harrison walking through that door. (Say what you will about the Ron Francis/Jason Botterill power platter the last five seasons: the Kraken almost never lost a trade. Actually, did they ever lose a trade? We might be throwing a perfect game here.) So it’s a structural audit, more like the Red Sox, rather than a search. The work is to examine why the organization that missed the playoffs four out of the last five seasons and figure out the action items. Apr 9, 2025; Dallas, Texas, USA; Los Angeles Lakers guard Luka Doncic (77) in action during the game between the Dallas Mavericks and the Los Angeles Lakers at American Airlines Center. Mandatory Credit: Jerome Miron-Imagn Images What if it’s all a sham? Okay, so how do we know that this isn’t just going through the motions and using this audit as a shield of sorts, saying “oh man, we totally were going to make big changes but ugh the audit said we were really close to being a consistent playoff contender?” I don’t know, but there are things we can look for: A legitimate audit should be defined by its capacity to be inconvenient. Not just “how you do your job” but “why you do it that way, and what happens if you do not?” A legitimate audit would find bottlenecks, find friction/siloed behavior between scouting and analytics (as an example; I don’t know if that’s the case with the Kraken), and creates a clear line of accountability. Asking a bunch of softball questions or meaningless questions (ooh another Meyers-Briggs test! I always get ENTJ) would point more to the sham side of things. More sham things: Scope limitation. If certain people or legacy processes off limits to the auditors (less likely legacy given how new the team is), then you’re not really leaving every stone unturned. This is especially true the higher you go, and the executives should participate fully. It’s really hard to drive structural change when the most important people to the success of the organization aren’t participating. Sham: If they’re talking about holistic talent integration and workflow optimization and business process improvement objectives and they aren’t able to actually provide anything of substance and talk like a real person, we’re in Sham-gri-la. Having worked in corporate environments, I understand that you have to play the game. Depending on the job, being able to speak fluent corporate can be a real asset and gets you on the good side of management and gets you noticed. But vibes can’t be all you bring. I don’t know if the recommendations go down to the hockey operations specifics. Like “drafting 7th every year is going to leave you in playoff purgatory and you’re only a 3% chance to be a Cup contender by 2030” and “buy out Chandler Stephenson, it’s very affordable” etc. or if it’s more about who reports to whom and getting the analytics team to talk to scouting or the GM’s office (like the analytics team surely had to have been sounding some alarm bells when Chandler Stephenson’s name came up during free agency discussion, right?) If the Kraken emerge from the deep dive in order to right the ship amidst stormy waters and nautical metaphor their way to a meaningful different org structure, then it’s a pretty strong indication they took Sportsology seriously and instituted the changes. If they announce the audit is complete, put out a vague statement, and resume business as usual, then the audit probably did nothing. Although this may be the sort of thing that takes years to see the effects, because hockey rosters are slow and hard to move around and the market is so tough right now. We are, of course, not entitled to all or any of the information in the audit, other than revealing nothing would be inconsistent with the messaging and commitments they’ve made so far. So a lot of this is speculative. If, however, the Kraken run a “fly on the wall” contest and you get to be the lucky fan who metamorphosizes into an insect and gets to sit in on the meetings, let us know how it went in the comments! These firms aren’t cheap, even for a sports team. It is more likely than not the Kraken ownership is serious about this. Also, this ownership clearly wants to win, and my guess is it eats them up that they aren’t winning more and are willing to take a hard look in the mirror. But I’m also an optimist.
GeekWire
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GeekWire
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