Gotta keep that mascot head on a swivel.
The world of mascots – especially in the NHL – is a weird one. At some point, it seems as though professional sports teams went from thinking “How can we create a mascot that represents our team?” to “How can we bring to the life the weirdest, most unhinged mascot creature the world has ever seen?”
Philadelphia Flyer orange-mess-mascot Gritty being the best example.
But Seattle Kraken mascot “Buoy” is a close second. The west coast NHL team is only a couple of years old, as it was added into the league as an expansion team in 2021. Considering the name of the team is the Kraken (which is pretty bada** if you ask me), it might have made sense to have a kraken as the mascot.
Seattle decided to go with another mythical creature… a sea troll named Buoy, which they describe as this:
“Buoy is the Seattle sea-troll who inhabits the caverns of Climate Pledge Arena and for who nothing beats a day filled with Kraken hockey and the team’s fans. Buoy is a great admirer of the Kraken and pays tribute to the mysterious deep sea creature with a unique touch of magic in his hockey hair flow.”
Pretty weird, eh?
There’s no doubt that Buoy the Sea Troll is a little unsettling to look at for us humans. And just this week, we found out that wild animals aren’t particularly fond of the fever-dream mascot either. While the Seattle Kraken were filming promotional material out in the wild, Buoy and others – including center John Hayden – that were in the video narrowly avoided a bear attack.
I’m not making this up.
The official account for Buoy the Sea Troll posted proof that a coastal brown bear almost traded fish for troll in a recent encounter. Hayden and Buoy were fly fishing in some beautiful, Seattle scenery when a wild bear came bumbling out of the woods and into the river.
And the bear wasn’t afraid to approach the people standing in the water, and was certainly intrigued by the weird look of Buoy the Sea Troll. Center John Hayden explained how things went down in the incredibly scary video:
“While we were fishing, we had a pretty close call with a couple of bears. I want to blame it on Buoy. They were pretty interested in his whole look. We got out of it okay, but it was a close call.
Good to know that no trolls or bears were harmed in the making of that video.
I’m just glad that everyone involved with the Seattle Kraken media team were able to avoid disaster. Could you imagine the headlines if an NHL mascot got mauled by a bear? Like you can hear someone say in the video… that last dash by the bear towards Buoy did not look good at all. Generally, these coastal brown bears are pretty well-fed due to the amount of fish that is readily available in the environment, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be aggressive.
Happy that all parties – including the weird sea troll – were alright and accounted for after getting dangerously close to a bear out in the wild.
