It’s anyone’s guess what Calgary’s protected list looks like a year from now. I plucked Jokiharju, thinking the favorable rules allowing expansion teams to load up on quality defenseman would allow the young Finn a nice environment to continue to develop his game on the third pairing. The Athletic protected Jokiharju CapFriendly protected Montour. The Sabres’ setup is more cut-and-dry – as things stand, they’ll either have to part with Henri Jokiharju, a 21-year old bona fide NHL defenseman, or Brandon Montour, an established second-pairing 26-year old D-man. ![]() I suppose I cut them a break here (which is a little alarming considering my roots in upstate New York) in taking career bottom-six winger Nick Ritchie. ![]() Assuming he re-signs (and there’s no reason to think that doesn’t happen), the B’s could have a tough time hanging onto Matt Grzelyck, who may be the odd defenseman out after Boston protects Krug, Charlie McAvoy, and Brandon Carlo. I tabbed the former fifth-rounder here.īoston is also difficult to project because of the massive uncertainty surrounding star defenseman Torey Krug’s future. This was still early in the exercise, and the GM in me thought I had just gotten some dumb luck that the Yotes left Garland up for grabs while holding onto Lawson Crouse. Elsewhere, forwards Derek Stepan and Christian Fischer as well as goaltender Antti Raanta deserve looks. Among those available, I have a hard time believing after 22 goals in 2019-20, Conor Garland will actually be left unprotected. I’ll take Steel and bet on his potential shining through eventually, even if his 22-point season this year didn’t exactly display it.Īrizona is tricky because they have a bunch of veterans like Niklas Hjalmarsson on contracts set to expire in 2021. Eric Stephens from The Athletic protected Steel – CapFriendly protected Lundestrom. Unless the rebuilding (reloading?) Ducks leave their leading scorer Adam Henrique up for grabs, Seattle will either opt for Anaheim’s first round center in 2016, Sam Steel, or their first round center from 2018, Isac Lundestrom. The end result still won’t be anything near the team Seattle actually drafts when the time comes, but it’ll be a heck of a lot closer than a Laine-Point-Boeser first line.īelow, I’ll walk through the logic behind my selection from each of the thirty unprotected lists (Vegas is exempt) before revealing my final team.īack in my naive, younger days when I thought this would be a simple simulation with minimal cross-referencing and hoop-jumping thanks to my handy dandy online expansion draft engine, I came across Anaheim’s actually reasonable protected list. To compensate, I leaned on a combination of stats and age/trajectory to make changes to the CapFriendly unprotected player lists as I saw fit. We still made it under the $79.5 million upper cap limit, too! Something tells me the Jets would want to hang on to their 2nd overall pick from 2016 who was well on his way to a fourth straight 30-goal campaign over, say, third-line center Adam Lowry. Want to see the squad I landed just picking the best of the best available on CapFriendly’s sim? I followed through on my plan to use the CapFriendly sim because it would allow others to do their own mock drafts and The Athletic’s much better player protected list is behind a paywall, but realized CapFriendly’s setup is poor while making the selections. And finally, the big ugly elephant in the room is how bad CapFriendly’s “crowdsourced” player protected lists are in their Expansion Draft Simulator. ![]() As The Athletic did in their own mock draft, I’ll just leave those players on their current teams for now, even if that’s an imperfect solution. It’s difficult to know what to do with the players slated to be free agents before Seattle drafts.There is quite a bit of roster turnover year-to-year in the NHL, and teams will be especially diligent on this front ahead of Seattle’s draft. The rosters NHL Seattle picks one summer from now will look quite different than they do today.Some necessary disclaimers as we wade through this exercise: From there, NHL Seattle GM Ron Francis will likely cut a number of side deals with the league’s thirty other GMs to lay off (or take on) certain players in exchange for ample draft-pick ammunition, just like Vegas’ George McPhee did three summers ago. Just to jog some memories, remember that each existing team can choose to protect either seven forwards, three defensemen, and one goalie or eight skaters and one goalie from Seattle’s selection. Whether COVID-19 will push those dates back is another conversation, but for the sports junkies like me who also grew up on the Be-A-GM modes of the video game universe, we can hardly wait to see another round of league-wide roster chaos like that which ensued when Vegas joined the fray in 2017. NHL Seattle is slated to make its expansion draft selections about one year from now ahead of their inaugural season in 2021-22.
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