NHL Will Decide On Expansion By The Draft In June. Here's What You Need To Know
The 2016 NHL General Managers Meetings are wrapping up and obviously the biggest news to come out this week was going to be on expansion news. Well what we found out today is that the NHL will decide by the Entry Draft in June on whether or not the league will expand by zero teams, 1 team or 2 teams. And that decision will, of course, impact how many players each team will end up losing to an Expansion Draft. So real quick let’s try to put together a SparkNotes version of how this Expansion Draft will look like if the NHL decides to put a team in Vegas for the 2017-18 season. (Most people are assuming Vegas will be the only expansion team for now, with the league still trying to find a way to make Seattle work and Quebec City getting put on the back burner for a little).
Pretty sure we all already knew this, but just putting this out there in case some people are worried about a Vegas team coming into the league and absolutely gutting their roster. Is it a tad socialist that a team can come into the league and pick players off of teams instead of working hard to earn their players the old fashion way like the rest of the teams? Sure, maybe. But as you’ll see, this isn’t Bernie Sanders completely trying to drain the 1%. 
So this is a slight drop-off from the amount of players each team could protect the last time the league expanded in 2000. At that point, teams could protect 9 forwards, 5 defensemen and 1 goalie, or they could go with 7 forwards, 3 defensemen and 2 goalies. It appears that every option for teams to put together a protected list only allows them to protect one goalie. Now where things get a little dicey here is when you’re dealing with players who have a NMC in their contract. It doesn’t look like the NHL has reached a decision on whether or not No Movement Clauses will exempt players from the Expansion Draft. And if they do exempt those players who have a NMC, will they still count towards their teams protected list? Basically, will teams be able to protect 7F, 3D and any player under contract with a NMC? Or will they only be able to protect the amount of players from the tweet above. It’s confusing as balls and I’m already too dumb to understand it in the first place, so we’ll let the experts and insiders take care of all of that.
Now this is pretty important, especially for teams like Philadelphia and Toronto who are stacked to the brim with prospects. LeBrun clarified this tweet and said that it’s prospects plus 1st and 2nd year “pros” which also includes years spent in the AHL. But still, your top young players aren’t going to be ripped away from you like babies are ripped away from their parents in Communist China. So far the NHL Expansion Draft will not be Bernie Sanders and it will not be Communist China. Things are looking pretty good, right?
That’s pretty much every single player on the Penguins’ payroll once they protect Crosby/Malkin/Kessel/Letang…
Well that fucking blows. No matter how teams decide to protect their players, they are still going to lose an important roster player. This is good for the league. You don’t want to put a team in Vegas and have them completely suck nuts for the first 5 years while they’re trying to put together an actual team out there. As a fan, you should want to see a competitive team or else this whole thing will be for nothing. So I get it. You don’t want to just let the Vegas team pick out of the bottom of the barrel and trash pick each team. Fill them up with a bunch of middle-of-the-road players and they at least start off as a team that doesn’t get blown out every night. But if I’m the Vegas team, I think I pick up some upcoming UFA’s here and there to flip them for draft picks. I think I put together a team that is going to finish toward the basement so you can build your team through the draft like Chicago has and like Los Angeles has. Is it the smartest move to have a team full of teenagers in Las Vegas? Not quite. But that’s probably a better way to achieve some longer-term success than to just have a bunch of 6-slot forwards on the roster.
Another big update to come out of the NHL GMs meeting this week was on goalie equipment. The league will be working to shrink the size of goalie equipment, starting first with the pants and chest protectors. These pads will be more streamlined/contoured and should be ready to go by the World Cup. Here’s the thing on that; if the goalies weren’t such pussies, they would wear Mylec street hockey pads and wear a baseball glove. Used to do that all the time as a kid growing up and you never heard me complain. Now goalies in the NHL want to have the biggest pads in the world and they aren’t even allowed to get hit without it being a penalty? Seems pretty bitch made to me.
Cameras will be placed on the blueline in time for the playoffs to start to help the incompetent refs finally learn what offside is. They are all a bunch of dumbasses and none of them know how to use their eyeballs and they fuck up every chance they get. I wish I loved anything as much as NHL refs love to fuck up calls. But the blueline cameras should make Coach’s Challenges take finally take less time than watching a full episode of How I Met Your Mother. Now if only they can figure out what goaltender interference is, we’d all be set.