The NHL has finally announced the official rules for the 2017 Expansion Draft that will allow Las Vegas to field a hockey team.
It was only a matter of time before a major professional sports league decided to expand their league to the city of Las Vegas by giving them a team. The NHL beat the other leagues to the punch, ensuring that Vegas will have a hockey team for the 2017-18 season. With expansion comes a rare event: an expansion draft. It has been 16 years since the league has had one.
After looking at how badly other expansion teams in the league’s history have done, they’ve made a set of rules that should help Vegas while not completely gutting the other teams of talent. Here are the rules for the 2017 Expansion Draft.
Each NHL team will be allowed to protect a certain number of players. They will have two options. Teams can either protect seven forwards, three defensemen, and one goaltender or they can protect eight total skaters (forwards and defensemen combined) and one goaltender. This allows teams such as the Nashville Predators who pride themselves in their blue line to have another option than exposing a really good defenseman.
The issue of no movement clauses has been solved, as the league mandates that everyone with a no movement clause must be protected by their team. For a list of who has a no movement clause, check out General Fanager.
In order to prevent teams from stockpiling talent and leaving Las Vegas with unproven players, each team must expose at least one defensemen and at least two forwards who have either played 40 games in the 2016-17 season or 70 games in the previous two seasons combined. They also must expose one goaltender who, like the defenseman and the fowards, is under contract for the 2017-18 season.
Teams will not have to protect prospects who haven’t played in the NHL yet. That is huge because it allows NHL teams to protect their prospects. Any player who the league deems having a “career-ending” injury does not count towards the exposed limit.
The new NHL franchise must select 30 players (at least 20 of whom are under contract for the 2017-18 season) at the expansion draft and can only take one from each team. 14 forwards, nine defensemen, three goaltenders are the positional minimums. As far as salary, the new Vegas franchise will get a bit of break, as they will only have to have a minimum cap hit of 60 percent of whatever the salary cap ceiling is in 2017-18. The new Las Vegas team must submit their list of selections on June 20, 2017 by 5:00 PM EST. Hockey fans will know who was picked the following day.
It should be a fun process to watch. With teams likely up against the salary cap ceiling, Vegas could be in a position to do a lot of interesting things even once the expansion draft is over.
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