It seems like NHL Expansion: Round Two is in full swing. After Commissioner Gary Bettman spent considerable time discussing the prospect of expansion yesterday, a report from NHL.com’s Dan Rosen suggests that the potential Seattle ownership group is nearing completion of it’s application. Unlike the most recent expansion process, during which the NHL had an open bidding window and multiple applications were considered, the Seattle group was granted an exclusive expansion application review back on December 7th. Now, it seems group leaders David Bonderman and Jerry Bruckheimer are closing in on being the league’s newest expansion selection.
The exact timeline for expansion remains somewhat unclear, but Bettman acknowledged that the league and the Seattle group are in constant communication, stating “we’re getting the information on a timely basis, whatever that timetable is, so we can go through the processes that we have to.” Bettman also recently met with Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan in person, who herself is a major proponent of the NHL in Seattle, to discuss the prospects of expansion. The process seems to be moving along at a nice clip, and although the Seattle group will likely need additional time to run a season ticket drive and of course to collect the $650MM expansion fee, the application could be completed in no time.
What we do know for sure, especially given the NHL’s excitement about Seattle, the increased expansion fee, and the success of the Vegas Golden Knights, is that the Expansion Draft structure will not be changing. The Seattle group will expect the same set of rules that helped create the Western Conference-leading Knights and no one can blame them. Back in June, the then-existing 30 other NHL teams were allowed to protect seven forwards, three defensemen and one goalie (or eight skaters regardless of position and one goalie) from being selected in the expansion draft. Side deals could be – and were – made to help protect players that didn’t fit in nicely to a team’s protection plan. Nevertheless, Vegas still ended up with All-Stars Marc-Andre Fleury and James Neal, exciting young scorers Jon Marchessault, William Karlsson, Erik Haula, and Alex Tuch, and a plethora of valuable draft picks. Seattle will want a chance to take the same caliber of player and add another instantly-competitive club into the NHL’s ranks. With the next round of expansion likely set for 2020, teams may have to begin thinking already about the Expansion Draft repercussions of any upcoming trades and free agent signings.
Ok so who wants in on the ownership group with me?
The GMs will be getting inline for this job
Cool! Another totally rigged heist of a one-team expansion process to follow!
Not rigged at all, they juggled fits between castoffs and high priced contracts and made a very competitive team, kudos to their front office.
Explain how its rigged? The NHL made it so the Vegas expansion team would be at least semi-competitive. Prior expansion teams, in basically all 4 major North American sports, have been pitiful their first few years because of their poor farm system and the old/untalented pool of players they had to choose from. Teams were often left to pick from a bunch of old, past their primes former stars (who would end up being traded or leave in free agency anyway) or minor role players. The Golden Knights being as good as they are is good for hockey.
You just said it. They engineered the process such that an chimpanzee could have banged his ass on a keyboard and selected a roster that was at least somewhat competitive. It was rigged. Maybe that’s a good thing. Still rigged.
In what way was it rigged? The Vegas roster had two players most viewed as actual top 6 talents(Marchessault and Neal) and no top pairing D. The rest were a bunch of 3rd liners, journeymen, overpaid under-achievers and fringe NHL’ers.
Everything has fallen Vegas’ way this year. Karlsson is playing out of his mind, Perron is playing like he did back in Edmonton and St. Louis, Reilly Smith has rebounded and they somehow got through 4 long-term goalie injuries. I seriously doubt this process will be repeatable in any way for Seattle, especially since the odds of a top end coach like Gallant being available seems slim at best.
There was no competition whatsoever. Vegas was able to milk the process for every cent it was worth and that included extorting extra talent out of teams in a manner that you could never do with a second expansion team.
The entire process was rigged to produce this end result. It isn’t like I’m distraught about it all, and I’m not even saying it’s a bad idea. But we can dispense with the idea that it was anything even vaguely resembling fair.
Every expansion has had the ability to make deals beforehand and they have. It just never happened in a salary cap system before. So it was plenty fair, Columbus chose to send Karlsson to Vegas to rid themselves of a bad contract they signed