The recent announcement that the National Hockey League is going to look into expansion is sending fans into a frenzy. What does this mean for the NHL? Will the league competition level deplete? Will it mean short term gains and long term losses? Does this mean we have to deal with multiple Twitter accounts demanding the relocation of more Southern American teams to Canada for the years to come?
The only answer that’s a definitive yes is the last sentence. What people don’t know is the more exciting part and I want to make it clear: I am absolutely ecstatic for this. NHL Expansion is more than just giving new North American cities places to watch NHL hockey. It’s more than just new logos. It’s more than just conference balance. Let me explain why I’m pumped for this: the expansion draft.
There have been 12 NHL expansion drafts in the history of the National Hockey League since 1967. One of these was actually a dispersal draft due to the merging of the Cleveland Barons with the Minnesota North Stars. The other was a combination expansion/dispersal in 1991, once again involving the Minnesota North Stars but this time about allowing the San Jose Sharks players from the North Stars organization in exchange for the team staying in Minnesota (it would instead head to Dallas in 1992-93 and return to the NHL in 2000).
In an NHL expansion draft, teams select players to protect and leave the rest unprotected. This allows these players available for poaching from the expansion teams. In 2000, each team could protect one goaltender, five defencemen and nine forwards or two goaltenders, three defencemen and seven forwards. At least one defencemen and two forwards unprotected must have appeared in 40 games from the season before or 70 games from the two seasons previous. If protecting two goaltenders, unprotected goalies had to appear in 10 games the season prior or 25 games from the previous two seasons combined. In the 1992 expansion draft, there was no distinction between forwards and defencemen. Since 1967, junior players have been excluded from the draft ensuring teams can’t just grab up all of the youngsters from a team. They have to be roster players. There’s no guarantee the NHL keeps these rules, but preventing the poaching of recent draft picks is likely.
If you see from previous years, teams don’t really pick up a lot of talent from this. Some teams get lucky like the Nashville Predators in 1998, who were able to select Tomas Vokoun from the Montreal Canadiens and Scott Walker from the Vancouver Canucks, who had two 25 goal seasons for the young Predators. Other teams end up like the Ottawa Senators in 1993, who got a 25 goal season out of Sylvain Turgeon and not much else.
So what makes me so excited about this? Think about it. The last expansion draft was in 2000. Since 2005-06, we’ve had a salary cap. This means teams might leave good players available to free up salary cap space and that these expansion teams must make the salary cap floor. Today the salary cap floor is at $52.8 million. This means teams are going to need to select a few players they might not want to because it gives flexibility to opponents but they need to make the floor. Contracts like Mike Richard’s $5.75M cap hit that expires in 2020 will be desirable to an expansion team trying to make floor. You can bet the Columbus Blue Jackets will leave David Clarkson’s $5.25M available to any expansion team, same with the Nathan Horton contract he was traded for currently paid by the Toronto Maple Leafs. These deals are cap space albatrosses and an expansion team is going to have eat what they are given. I’ve already put the idea out on Twitter and people are already thinking about who could be left unprotected:
Can the league expand now and take Vanek? Asking for a friend… https://t.co/swbmlBSrdQ
— Gretchen Maslowski (@EskomoKisses) June 24, 2015
The salary cap makes this so much more exciting. Imagine you’re the Chicago Blackhawks. You just made every move possible to keep your Stanley Cup core intact and suddenly you have to protect players for the expansion draft. There’s Marian Hossa’s contract sitting there costing only $1M in real money but taking $5.275M in cap space. Do you leave him unprotected? You could try to trade him but everyone knows why you’re trying to deal him. Do you suddenly lose Hossa for nothing?
There’s one more thing that makes the expansion draft fun: expansion trades. Teams will always trade players in the return that an expansion team doesn’t pick a certain player. In 1998, the Nashville Predators promised not to pick up Garry Galley from the Los Angeles Kings, who still had 190 games of hockey left in him. In return, the Kings gave up Jan Vopat and a Finnish defenceman who just retired after winning the Stanley Cup last week. That’s right, they got Kimmo Timonen just to fulfill a promise. That’s the risk and reward of the expansion draft.
Maybe you don’t like this because you’re afraid of giving up a Kimmo Timonen or watching your veteran back-up John Vanbiesbrouck take an expansion Florida Panthers to the Stanley Cup finals only three years after coming to the league. Now there’s the possibility that these expansion teams free up valuable cap space by taking the players you don’t like off the team and making free agency exciting for the first time in years. With salaries going up after the CBA changes in preventing exceedingly long contracts, players can demand more than ever of a salary cap chunk. This has caused them to usually re-sign with their current team instead of testing the cap strapped market where only the bad teams have free money. Expansion teams coming in (presumably two) will free up everyone’s money, even if they only get to the cap floor. Suddenly free agency won’t be so stale. It’s not just the expansion teams that’ll have space to pay but everyone that has contracts taken off of them.
If you see expansion as meaning more years of seeing guys like Tomas Fleischmann and Martin Erat playing in the NHL, maybe you’re right. But that doesn’t mean the expansion teams will be automatically horrible. And with the expansion draft, it’s no longer a lose/lose proposition for the existing 30 teams. With the salary cap involved, they open the door to helping themselves in the turnabout. You want an exciting summer? Hope for early NHL expansion.
