Minnesota Wild: Expansion Draft First Look

The NHL Board of Governors voted to allow the league’s first expansion team since 2000 when the Minnesota Wild and Columbus Blue Jackets entered the league. This decision will affect the Wild’s personnel plans more than you know and they will need to start formulating a plan for it starting now.

Its official the NHL family will now grow from 30 to 31 teams. The NHL Board of Governors voted on and announced today that they will grant Las Vegas a franchise to start play in the 2017-18 season. This is a banner moment in the history of the league for sure as they have not expanded since the 2000-01 season when the Columbus Blue Jackets and the Minnesota Wild began play. While still in the infant stages this expansion will have a huge impact on the Wild that will go well beyond another Western Conference foe to face each season.

The most impactful thing will be the expansion draft that will be held next offseason just before the entry draft. An expansion draft will mean that the Wild will lose a player with no compensation. The rules for the expansion draft are all not anywhere near solidified, but many have claimed from league sources to already have gotten many of the particulars.

The two sides to this draft simply are who can be protected, and who can Las Vegas take. Back in March Pierre LeBrun of ESPN was reporting that from a protection side teams would have be able to protect seven forwards, three defensemen, and one goalie; or they could protect eight skaters of any mixture and one goaltender. As far as who Las Vegas can take, according to reports they will be taking one player from every team including a minimum of three goalies, nine defenseman and fourteen forwards.

As far as further restrictions according to the Las Vegas Journal Review teams must protect players that have no-movement clauses active in the 2017-18 season (that player can elect to waive no movement clause to be unprotected for draft). No-move clauses active in 2016-17 will not be impacted. Additionally, teams will have to abide by the rule that at least one defenseman and two forwards who have played 40 games in a season or 70 games over two seasons must be left unprotected and must be under contract for the 2017-18 season. Furthermore, teams must expose 2 forwards and 1 defenseman that play 40 games in the 2016-17 season or 70 games between the 2015-16 and 2016-17 seasons. Finally, players with two years of professional experience or less are exempt from the process.

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So in plain English that means right off the bat the Wild and the other NHL franchises will have a significant chunk of their protected trade space eaten up by these provisions. But going forward it’s worth visiting the topic early and often of who the Wild should protect as the build up to their final list next summer. It’s important from the standpoint that whomever the Wild can’t protect they might want to think about trading in order to get something for them.

The first issue in formulating the protected list for the Wild is who is exempt because of two years or less professional experience the list is pretty long but includes many of the Wild’s key young chips like Mike Reilly, Alex Tuch, Joel Eriksson Ek, and Mario Lucia to name a few.

As it stands now the Wild must protect Zach Parise, Mikko Koivu, Jason Pominville, and Ryan Suter players due to NMCs. That leaves the team with slots to protect four more forwards, two more defensemen, and one goaltender if they go with the first model. If they choose the second model they will be able to protect four more skaters and a goaltender. So looking at that question it makes more sense for the Wild to choose the first protection option as it offers more protected spaces.

Taking all that into account here’s a good hack what the Wild’s protected list would be if the expansion draft happened today.

Forwards

Zach Parise
Mikko Koivu
Jason Pominville
Charlie Coyle
Nino Niederreiter
Erik Haula
Mikael Granlund

Defensemen

Ryan Suter
Jared Spurgeon
Marco Scandella

Goaltender

Devan Dubnyk

Granted this is a very rough list and does not take into account the windfall of moves that will happen in the next couple of days and weeks. Still it’s a solid place to start and shows you that more than likely the Wild will have some of their coveted defensive talent unprotected. This makes it even more imperative that they move someone now or lose them for nothing.

Dec 22, 2015; Saint Paul, MN, USA; The Minnesota Wild celebrate following the game against the Montreal Canadiens at Xcel Energy Center. The Wild defeated the Canadiens 3-1. Mandatory Credit: Brace Hemmelgarn-USA TODAY Sports /

You can debate who Vegas would take in this scenario, but Brodin and Dumba are both on the table and would more than likely would be the best options. The implication to this offseason is that since both Dumba and Brodin are being thrown around as trade bait, once you lose one this summer to trade you could still lose the other next summer to expansion. Also you can add Darcy Kuemper to the list as he would be an attractive pickup for Vegas. So the question becomes do the Wild move them now or sometime during this upcoming season, or do they gamble on Vegas passing them over?

Forward wise the list is much easier with more wiggle room. The issue here could be that with likely additions to the forward depth chart a player like Zucker could find themselves unprotected. That Zucker might be the one picked over one of the defensemen if Vegas decides they need a forward, or that they specifically just want Zucker.

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Long story short with all this expansion talk is, that the Wild will need to start planning now if they haven’t already. It adds another decision element to this offseason, this season, and next offseason that the team will need to get a head of and have a strategy. Hockey may not be coming to Las Vegas until the 2017-18 season, but that doesn’t mean the effects of that move don’t start right now.

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