MIDNIGHT RUN
By Lowetide
7 years agoThere are things that happen in life that make you double take. I think one of those moments will occur for hockey fans this summer at the expansion draft. Why? We are viewing the draft (mostly) through our own lens. For most of us, the expansion draft comes down to Patrick Maroon versus Brandon Davidson. However, the deeper we go into the process, the more difficult it becomes to guess what will happen this summer.
CAP FRIENDLY
The folks over at Cap Friendly have a wonderful expansion draft tool, and it offers all of us a chance to draft a team for Vegas using the current rules for the 2017 draft. It shows how daunting the process is, and how difficult it will be for general manager George McPhee to maximize all of the available talent.
If it were a matter of gathering the best player available from each of the 30 parent teams, that would be one thing. However, there are position and cap rules for the Golden Knights, and managing those will be a major problem.
MY OILERS PROTECTED LIST
- Goalies—Cam Talbot
- Left Defense—Oscar Klefbom, Andrej Sekera
- Right Defense—Adam Larsson
- Center—Leon Draisaitl, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Mark Letestu
- Left Wing—Milan Lucic, Patrick Maroon, Jujhar Khaira
- Right Wing—Jordan Eberle
THE RULES
The rules are difficult because it keeps the Vegas team from getting the 30 best players, and forces difficult decisions. The most restrictive of these rules (in my opinion) are the following:
- The Las Vegas franchise must select the following number of players
at each position: 14 forwards, nine defensemen and three goaltenders. - The Las Vegas franchise must select a minimum of 20 players who are under contract for the 2017-18 season.
- The Las Vegas franchise must select players with an aggregate Expansion
Draft value that is between 60-100% of the prior season’s upper limit
for the salary cap. - The Las Vegas franchise may not buy out any
of the players selected in the Expansion Draft earlier than the summer
following its first season.
Damn, that is some set of rapids, and it ends up driving you to distraction when using the expansion tool. I read all of the rules, and then set out to draft the best team available, using the following requirements:
- As many NHL-ready young players as possible
- Building up the middle
MY GOLDEN KNIGHTS
- Goalies—James Reimer, Philip Grubauer, Richard Bachman
- Left Defense—Jonas Brodin, David Schlemko, Brandon Davidson, Brayden McNabb, Derrick Pouliot, Patrick Wiercioch
- Right Defense—Ryan Pulock, Stephen Johns, Ryan Sproul
- Center—Derick Brassard, Alex Killorn, David Desharnais, Marcus Kruger, William Karlsson, Riley Nash
- Left Wing—Mike Cammalleri, Leo Komarov, Adam Lowry, Michael Ferland, Jordan Martinook
- Right Wing—Michael Grabner, Jakob Silfverberg, Colin Wilson, Matt Read, Lee Stempniak, Dmitri Jaskin, Nicolas Deslauriers
- Cap hit: $56.4 million
I had the computer generate the 29 protected lists, you can go in and do it manually as well. The lesson for me? Good luck. As much as an expansion draft is for nerds like me, the NHL has once again sufficiently blocked the new club in terms of competitiveness.
My guess is that the Vegas Golden Knights will be among the most competitive expansion teams in NHL history, but fall shy of the brilliant showings of teams like the Edmonton Oilers, Philadelphia Flyers and Buffalo Sabres in their formative years.
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