Seattle Expansion Draft Series: Article 18 – Updates and Final Predicted Protection List

Welcome back to our Seattle Expansion Draft Series. If you haven’t read the first article that lays out the rules of the expansion draft, that would be a good starting point, as I’ll only give the very basic rules in each of these follow up articles. If you are interested in Detroit, that was the second article and the seventh article.

We have made it! I’ll be honest, at parts of this journey I doubted we would ever reach the end of the series. And we’re not quite there, but we are close.

Today I will go over a few updated teams and give you access to the final Google sheet with all the predictions. I’ll also show you the easiest way to make your own team from the available players. On Friday, we will have mock drafts from several of the other WIIM writers and me, and you can post your teams in the comments then. I figure I’ll give people a couple days so you don’t have to rush it for today’s comments.

Anaheim

With Anaheim acquiring Haydn Fleury, it seems likely that they will now go 8-1 to not lose him. I spoke again to Jason Hernandez from Locked on Ducks to see what he thought now.

Okay, so I’m going to opt for the 8 players mainly because it MIGHT be worth it to expose a couple of those higher-priced contracts on forward (like Silfverberg & Henrique). Keeping some of those young guns might be best for the Ducks. Thus, my list is now:

Gibson

Fleury, Fowler, Lindholm, Manson
Terry, Lundestrom, Rakell, and Steel.

Yes, I’m leaving Max Jones unprotected, and this was not an easy choice.

Buffalo

Buffalo’s changes are due to players not being there anymore. Dustin Tokarski replaces Jonas Johansson at goal, and Zemgus Girgensons replaces Curtis Lazar.

Carolina

With Carolina allowing Dougie Hamilton to talk to other teams already, it makes zero sense to protect him. So that spot goes to Jake Bean.

Chicago

Chicago had a player leave the team, with Andrew Shaw retiring. I also made a mistake and had Alex Nylander down as eligible, so we now have them going 8-1 and protecting Calvin de Haan and exposing Brandon Hagel.

Colorado

There is no change here, but I wanted to emphasize that I have left Gabriel Landeskog off of Colorado’s protection list. I think that Colorado likely already knows the chances of their captain signing with Seattle. If they think that he might, then they would protect him and expose Tyson Jost.

To me, it just doesn’t make sense for a team to protect a UFA unless they think that the option of an 8th season when signing with Seattle would make their player sign with the Kraken. For example, if Landeskog really does want to sign with Seattle, he just has to wait until he goes on the open market, regardless of if Colorado protects him.

So Ken Holland signed Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, and they will be protecting him. It’s a classic Ken Holland contract, a few years too long and with a no move clause. Even without the NMC, they would obviously protect a player they just signed to an 8 year contract.

I reached out again to Jeff Chapman, managing editor for The Copper and Blue, and he thinks that the list Bob Stauffer put out recently is going to be accurate:

Chapman is not happy with this because it means that Caleb Jones will be exposed unless he’s traded. So when you’re making your teams, there’s an easy selection.

That’s it! (For now).

I’m sure that 5 minutes after this article publishes, we’ll have some news that will necessitate more updates. Oh well.

So here’s the best way to play along:

1. Go to this Google Sheet.
2. Open up the CapFriendly expansion draft tool.
3. Select the players from the list in the first tab (Protect Players). You will have to un-click some players because it auto protects anyone with a NMC, and we have some players waiving them.
4. Choose your team using the second tab (Select Team). You choose one player from each team. The requirements are listed at the top to help you.
5. Go to the third tab (View Team). You should be able to see a breakdown of your roster. I had a little trouble the first time and I had to reload my browser tab. The good thing is that CapFriendly will save your progress, even after you close the browser tab.
6. For Friday’s comments, you can either type your team out (which I know is a hassle) or you could post screenshots of your team. In order to do that, you have to have the screenshots saved somewhere online, like at Imgur or another site like that. I’ll put instructions for how to post screenshots in Friday’s article.
7. Have fun!

As long as they announce the official protected lists in time, like they did last time, we will have another mock draft article using the official protections.

I want to give a sincere thank you to everyone who read this series and who took time out to say nice things. I’m glad to be part of such a great community. I’m sure that when the official predictions are released, there will be a lot of differences from what I ended up with. Maybe not! We’ll see!

(Almost definitely yes.)