Taylor Swift's Punk Phase

On Wednesday night, after idly flipping to Fox’s “The Masked Singer” thanks to a complete void of worthwhile television, I was caught off guard when one of the singers was revealed to be John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon, most famous as lead singer of the extraordinarily influential punk rock band The Sex Pistols. On Thursday, I found myself listening to their iconic debut album Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols on repeat throughout the day. And on Friday, I listened to its spiritual successor, Taylor Swift’s re-recording of her 2012 album Red. Now hear me out.

Nevermind the Bollocks is easily one of my five favorite albums ever released. The first time I listened to it, I regarded it as a scholarly project, along the lines of listening to Robert Johnson’s 1930s blues recordings to try to pick up on why Eric Clapton and Keith Richards were so into them—I didn’t think I would actually enjoy it. But it blew me away, and part of why it blew me away was because of what the album wasn’t. The Sex Pistols, a band that almost everybody knows of but are far less famous for their actual music, are perceived as an extremely raw band, but their lone studio album itself is produced in a way more reminiscent of a Guns N’ Roses album than a live recording—the guitars and loud and layered, the drums are heavy, and the bass is downright competent (given that Sid Vicious, who does not appear on the album, was a famously terrible musician and is arguably the most well-known member of the band, this was a tad surprising). But the vocals were what truly drew me in. Johnny Rotten is nobody’s definition of a great or even a good or even a competent singer (that Ken Jeong guessed that a masked Rotten was The Who vocalist Roger Daltrey should, frankly, invite a lawsuit from Daltrey), but he sang with such an energy and ferocity that it helped me discover what I truly enjoy in vocal performance. For some people, the guy who did this was Bob Dylan—for me, it was John Lydon.

Is Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols the greatest punk album? Is it a punk album at all? How do you define punk rock? The three most definitive bands labeled “punk” from its earliest days (not counting the great late-1960s Detroit rock bands like the MC5 and the Stooges, to whom the label was retrospectively assigned) are the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, and the Clash, and the factors which link the three bands are fairly loose. If you took the politics of the Clash, the style of the Sex Pistols, and the song length of the Ramones, you’d have a fairly good idea of what the genre is seen to be from the outside, but their disparate styles create a complicated definition of the genre.

In the 1970s, the Sex Pistols were viewed as a dangerous and revolutionary group, but sonically, it is hard to imagine a band more within the established form of rock and roll. Structurally, they were mostly a louder version of 1950s rock and roll—there is a reason their cover of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”, aside from Johnny Rotten’s carnival-barker vocal delivery, is so faithful to the original. And for as much attention as the Sex Pistols got for their anti-monarchist views, their primary form of rebellion was against progressive rock. While the Sex Pistols were loud in their hatred of the Beatles, it is fair to assume their primary grievances were with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and not, say, their cover of “Roll Over Beethoven”.

The Clash are a particularly unusual case because, aside from their debut album, their musical style was rarely even in the same neighborhood as the Sex Pistols. Fundamentally, Joe Strummer was a much deeper thinker than John Lydon, a fact which simultaneously made his politics (and by extension his lyrics) far more sophisticated and his music far less passionate. I don’t think any of this makes Lydon a dumb guy, but rather a man motivated by different things than Strummer. Joe Strummer was a committed socialist with a deep musical appreciation who wanted to articulate his leftism with a rich variety of worldly music influences. Johnny Rotten, particularly in his non-Lydon days, was a broke kid from London who wanted to yell about the things that made him mad. The part of me that tries to sound fancy in blogs reveres Strummer; the part of me with a crippling Twitter addiction reveres Rotten. I love them both so much.

The expressly political songs on Nevermind the Bollocks are a mixed bag in terms of lyrical effectiveness, largely because the man who wrote the lyrics doesn’t seem to really know whether or not he even believes in them, even if he goes all the way in when it comes to performing them. “Anarchy in the UK” calls for its title sentiment, but Lydon has dismissed literal anarchy as a political concept. “God Save the Queen” has almost nothing to do with Queen Elizabeth II but a more general disaffection with the upper-class of 1970s England (the same can be said of “Holidays in the Sun”). “Bodies” is an aggressively anti-abortion song, but Lydon has expressed relatively pro-choice political views, which suggests, unsurprisingly, that he was mostly just a troll.

But for my money, the most “punk rock” in the casual sense of the term song on Nevermind the Bollocks is “Submission”. The song is not the least bit political, but the backstory of the song reflects the Sex Pistols’ irreverence—their manager, Malcolm McLaren, wanted the band to write a song called “Submission”, thinking a song about bondage. The band hated the idea and hated even more being told what to do, so the band wrote a childish song called “Submission” about being on a mission on a submarine, opening with the hilariously dopey line, “I’m on a submarine mission for you, baby!” It’s a mid-tempo song whose primary musical hook is the layered, yelled vocals of the chorus. And it inexplicably is one of my favorite songs on the album. Great art can come out of spite.

Taylor Swift has built much of her career on the back of spite. While her reputation as “only writing songs about boys she broke up with” is an unfair and largely sexist trope (though now that Olivia Rodrigo exists, maybe we can much more fairly transfer that to her), she has turned grudges into art regularly. Whether it is “Picture to Burn” (rage), “Mean” (passive-aggressive), or “Look What You Made Me Do” (empowered/famously not about a man but there really aren’t as many examples as you think), Taylor Swift rarely ventures into political themes in her music, but she is very aware of her own feelings.

Biographically, Taylor Swift is much closer to Joe Strummer than John Lydon. Strummer, despite his image, was the son of a diplomat and a nurse and his upbringing, which included ample world travel and private schooling, could not be described as anything lower than middle class. Swift, the daughter of finance employees, received intense parental support, including a teenage relocation from Pennsylvania to Tennessee to further her burgeoning attempt at a musical career. Musically, she isn’t especially close to either, though I guess I’d say she’s closer to Strummer since he has some songs without yelling in them. Spiritually, Taylor Swift is turning into John Lydon. And I love it.

Following the Sex Pistols’ 1978 implosion, the man then known as Johnny Rotten had plenty of options musically—while his band never made a significant dent on popular music in the United States during their existence, they were legitimate hitmakers in the United Kingdom. Would spending a decade making Sex Pistols-esque ragged hard rock as a solo artist or with a new band have been the “punk rock” move? It certainly would have been the move that led to music that most sounded like what had been defined as punk rock, but in a “punk rock equals subversion” way, going against expectations was the move, and the experimental, avant-garde Public Image Ltd was the way he went. I don’t listen to PiL nearly as much as I listen to the Sex Pistols, but the man now known as John Lydon made his own choice, and how can you not respect that?

In April, Taylor Swift released her pseudo-new album Fearless (Taylor’s Version). Like the original Fearless which catapulted Swift from country to pop superstardom, the album was met with critical acclaim. The album, mostly a re-recording of her original album along with some bonus tracks, did not exactly break new ground, though her matured voice did receive some praise supplemental from the original. But the main thing worthy of praise, as well as the thing about today’s release of Red (Taylor’s Version) even more worthy of praise than her ten-minute version of “All Too Well”, is itself extratextual. It is the most punk-rock-as-subversive move of her career.

Because the music business is nothing if not a shallow and vampiric industry, Big Machine Records released Taylor Swift’s first six albums under a contract signed with a then-minor desperate for a big break, but refused to negotiate with Swift when she offered more than fair value for the rights to the master copies to the recordings. Industry creep Scooter Braun instead bought up the rights for $300 million. Taylor Swift could have sued, but instead took on a more self-empowering route—she announced she was going to re-record the albums herself. Since she is still the songwriter or co-songwriter on every song on all six albums, she can license the new recordings and keep Braun from pocketing any of the money.

Ultimately, this is a fight between two insanely rich people, but similar fights exist all the time in sports. And just as I gravitate towards players, the doers, over owners, the financiers, I am inclined to support Taylor Swift’s quest to rankle the system. What Big Machine Records and Scooter Braun did was completely legal, but that does not make it ethical. A legal fight almost certainly would not have worked out for Taylor Swift but relying on the will of the people did.

The music of Red (Taylor’s Version) is still pop-country, music that was written by a singer-songwriter but otherwise has most of the DNA of a musical industrial complex. But despite the shine of it, the re-recordings were built up through an aggressively do-it-yourself aesthetic. Punks in 1970s London decided that they could make their own clothes and bang around on instruments, making noise despite a lack of formal training or talent, and Taylor Swift, refined and pristine as her music is, parlayed that aesthetic on the grandest scale.

The Seattle Kraken Expansion Draft—Ranking the picks from worst to best

 

Tonight, a major league sports team was born via the expansion draft in the National Hockey League’s thirty-second franchise, the Seattle Kraken. Having spent countless hours dissecting this draft, today was like Christmas for me.

Overall, I think the Kraken did a good job. There is a widely held belief that the Kraken can’t hold a candle to the 2017 Vegas Golden Knights’ draft, but the Golden Knights were also not widely believed to have had a particularly good draft in the moment. A huge amount of their roster-building came not via the draft itself but via trades made adjacent to it. And NHL teams learned their lessons. Teams aren’t stupid enough to give away one-third of a conference champion’s top line so that the team will draft another third of it. I am quite certain that if this were the 2017 draft, the Colorado Avalanche would not have traded Ryan Graves for a package that, while not as good as Graves himself, is substantially more valuable than the value of simply losing Graves to Seattle.

Seattle opted to stay closer to the salary floor, which I think is a good idea because while the Kraken could have created a more talented roster, there is a reason the high-end talent was exposed in the first place. As such, the Kraken do not have a single terrible contract on their books, and while they may have an overpay or two, these are players who will be extraordinarily significant for their team. Overall, I’d give Ron Francis and company an A-minus.

Here is how I rank the picks.

30. Adam Larsson, Edmonton Oilers—Larsson is a perfectly fine defenseman who gets a bad rap because he was on the wrong end of one of the most lopsided trades in recent NHL memory—the one-for-one deal which sent future league MVP Taylor Hall to New Jersey. But this pick is nonsensical primarily for a simple reason—he’s a pending free agent. And while a week of exclusive negotiating rights with a pending free agent isn’t nothing, I believe these picks should be made only if nobody who is any good is available to draft. But Edmonton did have some intriguing players exposed—Devin Shore, a dirt-cheap two-way forward capable of playing at all three forward positions, would have been my choice. There were the likes of Tyler Benson and William Lagesson, unfulfilled prospects but effectively lottery tickets. Even if Seattle converts this pick into signing Adam Larsson, as by all accounts they are likely to do, Larsson isn’t likely to be some incredible bargain for the Kraken. I hate this pick.

29. Chris Driedger, Florida Panthers—I really like Chris Driedger, a likely pivotal part of Seattle’s goaltending rotation and a man who frequently outplayed Florida’s highly paid starter, Sergei Bobrovsky, over the last two seasons. But Driedger is a free agent—granted, one more likely to have a competitive market than Larsson. I’m disappointed Florida didn’t take a chance on Frank Vatrano, who has developed into a solid NHL scorer and at a reasonable $2.5 million price tag, or any of a host of young players—among Florida goalies alone, I’d have preferred pending RFA Sam Montembeault for the team control perspective.

28. Gavin Bayreuther, Columbus Blue Jackets—Truthfully, I prefer this pick to the hotly rumored Max Domi, who I think is quite a bit overpaid. But a 27 year-old pending UFA with just 28 games played in his career does not exactly demand exclusive negotiating rights. This would be a more roastable pick if Columbus’s expansion lists weren’t so dire (I ended up going with Dean Kukan for mine, a player I admittedly don’t think much of), but even hoping to turn Kole Sherwood into something would have been a preferable option to Bayreuther.

27. Brandon Tanev, Pittsburgh Penguins—At least Tanev isn’t a UFA, but given his contract situation, Seattle might prefer that. Not that $3.5 million for each of the next four years is exactly an albatross, but Tanev is a forward who has never reached 15 goals nor 30 points in a season. His production is not where a player with his salary should be, and while Seattle is limited by the rules of the draft in terms of number of non-contracted players (RFAs and pending UFAs) they may select, I would have gladly taken one of those spots up for Zach Aston-Reese, a younger and considerably cheaper option who could have been an intriguing third line-ish forward.

26. Jamie Oleksiak, Dallas Stars—Here is the pending UFA I hate the least. The gigantic defenseman is a solid player, but most importantly, once Dallas convinced Ben Bishop to waive his no-move clause and thus taking Anton Khudobin off the board for the Kraken, the Stars had one of the worst collections of unprotected players in the league. I would have taken Tanner Kero, but life is too short to be too outraged about not taking a near-29 year-old forward with 13 NHL points since the last expansion draft.

25. Kurtis MacDermid, Los Angeles Kings—He’s a fine enough player—a cheap defenseman who can play on either side of the blue line. But the Kings had one of my favorite forwards available in Andreas Athanasiou, a former 30-goal scorer who is still putting up decent production and made just $1.2 million last season and remains in restricted free agency. But I’m probably higher on Athanasiou than most of his non-relatives. MacDermid isn’t bad at all.

24. John Quenneville, Chicago Blackhawks—Because he’s cousins with (I thought until very recently that he was the son of) former Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville, John got a lot more attention than his meager production suggested. And he’s a pending UFA. But while I don’t think Quenneville is a great pick, the Blackhawks did not provide much help to the Kraken. I’m only ranking Quenneville this far from the basement because they wisely avoided selecting the overpaid Calvin De Haan or Nikita Zadorov. I would’ve probably taken a goalie—my preference would have been Malcolm Subban, for his second expansion team dalliance—but the Kraken at least avoided the potential landmines.

23. Tyler Pitlick, Arizona Coyotes—Pitlick has only reached double-digit goals once and twenty points twice. Is the nearly thirty year-old winger worth $1.75 million? I don’t think so, but I’m willing to listen. For months, it seemed like Adin Hill (who was eventually traded to San Jose) would be the pick here, but I still think Seattle should’ve gone with Christian Fischer, who is younger, cheaper, and has already had higher highs in the NHL despite being just twenty-four.

22. Morgan Geekie, Carolina Hurricanes—Credit to the Kraken for not doing the silly “draft Dougie Hamilton for the negotiating rights” gambit that many suggested—Carolina has far too many good options to throw a pick away on that. And Geekie is young and a well-regarded prospect. But Jake Bean would’ve been my pick in a heartbeat. A 13^th overall pick just five years ago, Bean has been limited in his opportunities to play given Carolina’s robust defense core, and the 23 year-old could’ve grown into something special as a bottom-pairing lefty defenseman alongside Seattle’s veteran presence in the position.

21. Joey Daccord, Ottawa Senators—His numbers have been rough in the NHL, but the 24 year-old goalie is cheap and it’s not like Ottawa is overflowing with players that a team would want. I had them taking Anton Forsberg, who is older but probably a little better, but I totally understand, given that neither goalie would play much, wanting to go with the higher upside player.

20. Haydn Fleury, Anaheim Ducks—I was intrigued by Kevin Shattenkirk, notably older and more expensive but certainly more productive, but I can’t argue too vociferously against the former seventh overall pick. Fleury has been a bit underwhelming in the NHL, but he is still just twenty-five years old, and it’s hard to argue that he doesn’t have upside. And with just a $1.3 million salary in 2020-21, it’s not as though the team is digging itself into a hole.

19. Carsen Twarnyski, Philadelphia Flyers—The Flyers were one of the more intriguing teams in this draft because they exposed a trio of accomplished but highly paid players—James Van Riemsdyk, Jakub Voracek, and the guy I would’ve taken, Shayne Gostisbehere. But it is clear that Seattle is going low-risk, and as such, a 23 year-old who makes the league minimum but has one career NHL point is ideologically consistent. A pick like this belongs firmly in the middle of any ranking—we know exactly what they are doing. It just isn’t very fun.

18. Jordan Eberle, New York Islanders—Is Eberle overpaid? Maybe a little--$5.5 million isn’t exactly cheap. But while Eberle has dropped off in production a little bit from his Edmonton Oilers days, and it’s not like the 31 year-old is exactly likely to take a step forward, a guy who has never scored fewer than 16 goals in an NHL season should be a welcome addition to the top six for an expansion team. Even if he’s a little overpaid, this won’t be as big of a blow for a team that probably shouldn’t be pressing against the salary cap over the remaining three years of his contract. I would’ve taken Andy Greene, who is ancient but still productive and very inexpensive, but this is admittedly a far more fun pick.

17. Alexander True, San Jose Sharks—This is a team so bereft of young talent that they voluntarily protected Brent Burns. In the end, Seattle did the right thing, selecting the large twenty-four year-old forward who makes peanuts and will not demand big minutes while the Kraken are still trying to figure out how good True actually is. Plus, he played junior hockey in Seattle, which is a thing that apparently matters. Ryan Donato, who is better but more expensive, was really the only other option.

16. Kole Lind, Vancouver Canucks—He’s 22, cheap, Canucks people seem to be high on Lind’s AHL production, and while I might’ve taken a shot on Jake Virtanen to have a bounce-back season, Kole Lind is the low risk option, and God knows Ron Francis is avoiding risks whenever possible. It’s fine. (Why yes, my middle section is going to include some brief summations. These are the least interesting picks. You can scan along if you want, it’s fine)

15. Nathan Bastian, New Jersey Devils—A decent prospect at 23, Bastian is a relatively strong choice given the mediocrity of his organization. And not that I expected the Seattle Kraken to jump in on P.K. Subban or anything unless the Devils compensated them heavily to do so, but I am still tempted to give Seattle some bonus points for not doing something crazy. I liked Scott Wedgewood, but this was my backup pick.

14. Mark Giordano, Calgary Flames—Here we go. The Calgary Flames lose their captain and a former Norris Trophy winner, and the Kraken presumably have their first captain. At $6.75 million, Giordano is certainly not cheap, but I would argue that he is not overpaid given that the 37 year-old has remained a very good, if no longer elite, defenseman. The drawback is that the Kraken probably don’t need a Mark Giordano for his remaining season under contract, but the positive is that if the Kraken aren’t very good, Giordano could be a very intriguing trade candidate and could easily bring back more value than the typical expansion pick is worth. It was going to either be Giordano or Oliver Kylington, and Calgary went with the far splashier route.

13. Will Borgen, Buffalo Sabres—I don’t know if Will Borgen is any good. But he’s a very low-risk pick from the worst team in the NHL, and despite the likely event that Will Borgen never does anything of consequence for the Seattle Kraken, this is still the right, if extremely dull, pick.

12. Joonas Donskoi, Colorado Avalanche—Unfortunately for the Kraken, the Avalanche did a great job of preparing for this draft, shipping off Ryan Graves and convincing Erik Johnson to waive his no-move clause so that this team’s core could be preserved. But they are still a loaded team and thus the Avalanche were bound to lose a good player, and Donskoi qualifies. At $3.9 million for each of the next two seasons, he should be a top-six forward for the Kraken—in each of the last four seasons, Donskoi has scored at least 14 goals and no fewer than 31 points. I might’ve gone with a cheaper player, such as defenseman Jacob MacDonald, but I can’t argue too much against Donskoi, a player with far more value to the Kraken than to the Avalanche.

11. Dennis Cholowski, Detroit Red Wings—I truly can’t believe Seattle got a player this solid from Detroit. A first-round pick in 2016, Cholowski has garnered second-pairing minutes for the Red Wings, and while his plus/minus stats aren’t great, this is practically a job requirement for Detroit. Cholowski is probably more of a bottom pairing or even a healthy scratch for Seattle, but for a league minimum guy from one of the league’s worst teams, that’s a pretty solid return.

10. Yanni Gourde, Tampa Bay Lightning—Consider Tampa Bay protected four defensemen, and thus could only protect four forwards, there was no shortage of options, and Gourde is the best of the bunch. Gourde will instantly be the #1 center for the Kraken, and there are a number of existing NHL teams whose top center isn’t as good as Gourde, who scored 17 goals and 36 points in 56 games for the Stanley Cup champion Lightning last season. My only real gripe here is that Seattle “only” got Gourde—while he’s a better player than Tyler Johnson, the Kraken could’ve convinced Tampa Bay to throw them a pick or two and come out even better (or perhaps even threaten to take Pat Maroon and thus deprive Tampa Bay of desperately-needed salary relief).

9. Jared McCann, Toronto Maple Leafs—Because the Maple Leafs obsessed with protecting defensemen, they left some strong forwards available. It really came down to draft McCann, Alex Kerfoot, or go cheap, but the Kraken correctly picked this as a point to draft a player with an actual salary. At just under $3 million last season, McCann is a bargain of a center with a goal scoring touch. Along with Gourde, on paper, the Kraken have stronger centers than the Vegas Golden Knights had following their expansion draft, and if one becomes their William Karlsson, it wouldn’t be too shocking.

8. Calle Jarnkrok, Nashville Predators—A veteran who was a contributor to Nashville’s run to the Stanley Cup Finals in 2017, Jarnkrok is a roughly half a point-per-game scorer who provides solid depth scoring. He is only under contract for one more season, but at just $2 million, Jarnkrok could be a great trade chip at the 2022 trade deadline.

7. Cale Fleury, Montreal Canadiens—In keeping with the rule of thumb “always draft guys named Fleury in the expansion draft”, the Kraken snatched Haydn’s younger brother, and while Cale didn’t produce a ton in his 41 NHL games, he’s cheap and only 22 and maybe will benefit from playing with his brother. But most importantly, Seattle resisted what would have been a potentially fatal mistake by not drafting Carey Price. The constant “he could be their Marc-Andre Fleury” takes didn’t scare the front office (note: Vegas didn’t select Fleury with a great amount of joy—Pittsburgh paid them to take him) and they deserve credit for their selective boringness.

6. Vince Dunn, St. Louis Blues—The Blues dangled Vladimir Tarasenko, but Seattle wisely opted for Vince Dunn, a still-young offensive defenseman who will surely get middle-pairing minutes behind Mark Giordano. Because the Blues tend to obsess with protecting their biggest names rather than their best values, there were plenty of lower-tier and intriguing options such as Niko Mikkola or Jake Walman, the higher-end Dunn was the smart, higher-upside pick.

5. Carson Soucy, Minnesota Wild—Minnesota moved Heaven, Earth, and Ryan Suter to protect Matt Dumba, who for a while looked like an automatic Kraken pick, but Seattle did still take a really good defenseman in Carson Soucy. Not Dumba-level, but Soucy has been a plus-minus monster (it’s a dumb stat but most of these guys very much are not) and had a career-best season in 2020-21. Minnesota didn’t have a realistic choice but to leave Soucy exposed, and it was very much to Seattle’s benefit.

4. Colin Blackwell, New York Rangers—The undersized center isn’t as exciting as some of the other names in this expansion draft, but he checks just about every box one can fathom for the Seattle Kraken. He’s cheap, with a league minimum salary for next season. He’s under contract, which is a consideration when it comes to expansion drafting—Seattle was required to take 20 such players, and UFAs don’t count to the total. And he’s coming off a breakthrough season with the Rangers, with 12 goals in 47 games. He is a high-upside player and comes with no downsides. An excellent pick.

3. Vitek Vanecek, Washington Capitals—Under the right circumstances, I could talk myself into Conor Sheary for the Kraken, but contextually, Vitek Vanecek makes a ton of sense. A late bloomer who debuted last season in the NHL at 25, Vanecek was rock-solid in goal for Washington, with a 2.69 GAA and .908 save percentage on his way to 21 wins in 36 starts. He could be an aberration, but he could also be a low-cost member of an intriguing goaltender tandem with Chris Driedger.

2. Mason Appleton, Winnipeg Jets—The Jets were not a great team, so I don’t really understand how they could possibly fit Mason Appleton into a protection list. At $900,000, the 25 year-old forward had a breakthrough 2020-21, with 12 goals and 25 points. And he’s named Appleton and he’s going to be playing in the state of Washington! George Lucas clearly invented this transaction.

1. Jérémy Lauzon, Boston Bruins—I love this pick. Love it, love it, love it. He’s a young defenseman on the rise, he’s cheap but still qualifies as having an NHL contract, and the advanced analytics are high on his defensive acumen. Lauzon is the exact kind of depth players that allows great NHL teams to compete for titles by being solid contributors at such a low price. And while the Kraken won’t be that, this is a good start.

If Vladimir Tarasenko can garner Jake DeBrusk or Trent Frederic and a first, the Blues should do that yesterday

Vladimir Tarasenko ranks fifth in St. Louis Blues history in goals, tenth in points, and ninth in Point Shares (a non-positionally specific statistic; among forwards, he ranks fourth, behind Brett Hull, Bernie Federko, and Pavol Demitra). In his prime, one of the richer eras in St. Louis Blues history, he was nearly a point-per-game player who perennially led the Blues in goals, including in 2018-19, when the Blues lifted their first Stanley Cup. He is a candidate for having his number retired by the franchise and is certainly among the franchise’s greatest contributors.

At 29, Vladimir Tarasenko is not quite old by hockey standards, but he is at the age when players, particularly players who rely heavily on speed, tend to decline. This is exacerbated by injuries—over the last two seasons, Tarasenko has played in just 42 games between the regular season and postseason. Since suffering a shoulder injury on October 24, 2019, Tarasenko has played in just 32 games, and while 6 goals and 16 points isn’t terrible, it is certainly a far cry from his pre-injury production.

It would be naïve not to at least consider the possibility that Tarasenko is damaged goods at this point. Perhaps this is not a Cam Neely situation, where devastating injuries force a superstar right winger out of the NHL at 30, but fearing a Dany Heatley situation—where his career continues on but he is merely a depth forward rather than the goal-scoring superstar of his younger years—is reasonable. He does still occasionally show flashes of greatness—Tarasenko did, after all, score two goals in what may end up being his final game in a St. Louis Blues sweater—so I’m not unreservedly giving up on the guy, but I’m also not willing to say that he is going to snap back into his old self at the drop of a hat.

We don’t know what the future holds for Vladimir Tarasenko in terms of production, but we do know that, at $7.5 million for the next two seasons, he is, along with Ryan O’Reilly (who had more points-per-game in 2020-21 than in any other season of his career), the highest paid player on the Blues. This isn’t baseball, where we can chalk up his high salary to the old “it’s not my money” principle—while I’m happy that money will go to Tarasenko rather than to decent-by-billionaire-standards-but-still-plenty-wealthy-so-let’s-not-valorize-the-guy-too-much owner Tom Stillman, the existence of a fairly rigid salary cap means that Vladimir Tarasenko’s $7.5 million also represents an opportunity cost. If the Blues didn’t have to pay his salary, that money would instead go to somebody else.

The hot rumor, which initially seemed like a pipe dream but would actually be perfectly manageable under the salary cap with Tarasenko off the books, is that the Blues are going to pursue Ryan O’Reilly’s old Colorado Avalanche teammate Gabriel Landeskog. Over their careers, Vladimir Tarasenko has been a superior player to Gabriel Landeskog—they have the same number of career goals, but Tarasenko has done so in 156 fewer games (the result of injuries and the fact that, despite being a year older than Landeskog, he debuted in the NHL a year later), and Tarasenko has edges in points per game and total career point shares. But in terms of recent track record, it’s no contest. The former (I guess still technically current?) Avalanche captain has outscored Tarasenko in each of the last three seasons, including Tarasenko’s healthy 2018-19, and totaled 20 goals and 52 points in 54 games last year. He was a crucial piece of arguably hockey’s best line, along with Nathan MacKinnon and Mikko Rantanen (I’d probably go with the Brad Marchand, Patrice Bergeron, and David Pastrnak line, but it’s a worthy #2), and his projected salary going forward isn’t far off of what Tarasenko is currently making.

Of course, for this to happen, the Blues would need to part ways with Vladimir Tarasenko, who has a no-trade clause but who has reportedly asked for a trade (as an aside, I am perfectly okay with him doing so and consider there to be a major difference between “player asks for a trade” and “player demands a trade and acts like a malcontent until he gets his way”—this is why I find Anthony Davis of the Los Angeles Lakers fine and James Harden of the Brooklyn Nets obnoxious). The reports of his discontent in St. Louis had the initial effect of exciting me that the Blues would do something I have already lobbied for them to do—leave Tarasenko exposed in next week’s Expansion Draft. While Tarasenko does have a no-trade clause, this differs from a no-move clause, which would require the Blues to protect Tarasenko from being selected by the Seattle Kraken. While this is occasionally framed as “the Blues would lose Tarasenko for nothing”, that’s not really the case, as Seattle is going to have to draft a Blues player regardless. In reality, the Blues would be losing Tarasenko in lieu of losing Oskar Sundqvist or Ivan Barbashev or Vince Dunn or some league-minimum depth guy—maybe that still doesn’t sound like a good deal to you, but it isn’t nothing.

But if what Jeremy Rutherford suggested on 101 ESPN yesterday is true, that the Boston Bruins might be willing to part with one of two young depth forwards—Jake DeBrusk or Trent Frederic—and their first-round pick (#21) in next weekend’s NHL Entry Draft, then that changes everything. The Blues should make that trade immediately.

Jake DeBrusk is an intriguing player. He has had a rough couple seasons, but in 2018-19, he was a 27-goal scorer for the Bruins, and at 24, he is a player who is in theory just entering his prime. At $3.675 million, DeBrusk makes less than half of what Tarasenko makes, and while that number may prove to be a little on the high side if he continues on his 2020-21 trajectory—just 14 points in 41 games—it also does not come with any required commitment beyond next year, as he is still in restricted free agency. Though if given the choice, I would rather have Trent Frederic. Just 23, the St. Louis native (since you’re going to ask me—DeSmet) hasn’t had anywhere close to DeBrusk’s NHL production and has been more of a fourth-line type, but he has provided solid defensive output and is scheduled to make just $1.05 million for each of the next two seasons—I am not at all concerned about paying him Kyle Clifford money to be a younger version of Kyle Clifford.

This trade wouldn’t really impact the Blues’ Expansion Draft strategy in any meaningful way, because whether the acquisition was DeBrusk or Frederic, he would almost certainly be immediately exposed to the Seattle Kraken. And if the Kraken took said player (most mock drafts I’ve seen have them taking Vince Dunn; I am holding out hope that Doug Armstrong is smarter than this and instead exposes Torey Krug, whose $6.5 million price tag for the next six years of his thirties would absolutely scare off Ron Francis from selecting him), then the Blues essentially got a first-round pick for Vladimir Tarasenko and didn’t have to lose somebody in the expansion draft. And this would be a massive victory for the Blues. A #21 overall pick isn’t an insignificant asset for a team to have—it may not allow you to draft a Connor McDavid, but it’s just one pick shy of where the Blues selected Robert Thomas. In recent years, it has garnered such solid NHL contributors as Filip Chytil, Colin White, and Our Old Friend Robby Fabbri. And it would give the Blues $7.5 million in cap space—in addition to the $14.35 million in cap space being shed with the contract expirations of Tyler Bozak, Mike Hoffman, and Jaden Schwartz, the Blues have an intriguing opportunity to reinvigorate their forward group on the fly.

If the Blues do opt to protect Vladimir Tarasenko, I am going to convince myself that this is Doug Armstrong exhibiting patience once again. In 2017, protecting enforcer Ryan Reaves over David Perron, a productive offensive player who had committed the mortal sin of “having a bad few weeks at the end of the last season”, seemed like malpractice, but it seemed a whole lot more defensible when it turned out that Armstrong had, somehow, convinced the Pittsburgh Penguins to trade him Oskar Sundqvist and the first-round pick that turned into Klim Kostin for Reaves and a second. Maybe the Bruins want to wait until the Seattle Kraken draft their team so that they wouldn’t be forced to protect Tarasenko. Either way, it does seem like a matter of if and not when the Blues and Tarasenko part ways. And if a young forward and a first-round pick comes back in return, the Blues will have won the trade in a landslide.

Who should the St. Louis Blues protect in the 2021 NHL Expansion Draft?

 

For anyone who is new here, I need to explain something—I love expansion drafts. I don’t even really enjoy when professional sports leagues expand on the whole, but the moment when the expansion draft happens is beautiful to me. It’s a perfect marriage of game theory between the existing franchises and the new one. I have a history of caring too much about this.

There is no science to how teams will choose whom to protect. For the upcoming NHL Expansion Draft, it makes particular sense for the Detroit Red Wings, for instance, to dangle veterans—even if they are among the team’s best players, the Red Wings are going to be a last-place team with or without Danny DeKeyser. A team like the Tampa Bay Lightning, locked and loaded and trying to maximize damage to the rest of the league right now, might be a bit more protective of your Patricks Maroon or your Ondreii Palat than a rebuilding team.

The St. Louis Blues are closer to the Lightning than the Red Wings, but they are somewhere between the two extremes. The Blues are certainly an above-average NHL team right now, though not an inner-circle Stanley Cup contender (the same could have been said in 2019, to be extremely clear), but they also have an eye on the future. They don’t have a great farm system, but they also aren’t looking at trading all of their CHL and NCAA prospects for veterans, either. It’s a pretty nice spot.

But the Blues will, by definition, be losing a player to the Seattle Kraken. The Kraken, despite the Vegas Golden Knights’ success in 2017-18, probably aren’t going to become instant contenders, but that doesn’t mean they will be averse to acquiring high-end talent, particularly as they will still have a salary floor to reach. Unlike in expansion drafts in other sports, however, hockey teams ought to focus more on keeping their best players than trying to plan around who Seattle will pick, as Seattle will pick somebody.

The Blues still have a lot of season left—hopefully a lot of season—but that doesn’t mean teams shouldn’t plan ahead. Teams planned for years around this expansion draft, and the Blues have done a pretty good job. First, they have no players with no-move clauses, which means there are no players that they are required to protect. The Chicago Blackhawks will be forced to protect Brent Seabrook, despite the fact that he is now terrible at hockey, expensive, and, most hilariously, retired. The Blues will have no such albatrosses. Second, the Blues have several pending free agents among their core, which means several players they won’t need to protect. The Blues may not bring back Tyler Bozak, Mike Hoffman, or Jaden Schwartz, but even if they do, they certainly won’t protect any of them. The Kraken could technically select any of them, but each will become a free agent a few days later, so that would be stupid. And despite naming their team after an epic Online meme, I don’t think they’re that stupid.

Here are the eleven players—one goalie, three defensemen, and seven forwards—that I think the Blues should protect (not will, but should). They can protect four defensemen and four forwards if they so chose, but I’ll spoil the surprise—I won’t be advising that.

Goalie—Ville Husso: I should be clear—I think Jordan Binnington is a perfectly fine NHL goaltender and I believe he should be the team’s predominant starting goalie. But I also wouldn’t have given him the extension the Blues gave him during the season because, as I said, I think he’s merely perfectly fine. I think he’s extremely replaceable, and I think the Blues can find a sufficient replacement for less than $6 million over the next six seasons. While I have quite a bit of trepidation about Ville Husso, he will only make $750,000 next season and even if he never makes a step forward, it’s not as though he’s substantially holding back the Blues in the long term. Binnington might.

Defensemen—Vince Dunn, Torey Krug, Colton Parayko: As oft-critiqued as Vince Dunn has been for the Blues, he is the team’s second-leading scoring defenseman and he’s cheap—he made under $2 million this season and is still a restricted free agent. Given the expansion draft, and given that Torey Krug is in many ways just a rich man’s version of Vince Dunn, I wouldn’t hate the Blues trying to trade Vince Dunn, but short of that, they should absolutely not give him up in the expansion draft for nothing—he has some of the highest trade value on the team. While Colton Parayko has had a down 2021 season, he’s the team’s most reliable defensive defenseman and will still only be the team’s third-highest paid one for 2021-22 (I would imagine he’s a prime candidate for an extension before he reaches free agency in the summer of 2022). And the third spot really comes down to Torey Krug or Justin Faulk, who are on identical $6.5 million contracts for the next six seasons. While Faulk has bounced back nicely from his poor 2019-20 season and he is no longer a player I am absolutely dying to dangle to Seattle, Krug has been the more consistent performer over the last several seasons. As for Marco Scandella and Robert Bortuzzo, they aren’t especially flight risks. Niko Mikkola and Jake Walman are nice depth players, but if the Blues lose one to Seattle, the Kraken probably think quite a bit more highly of them than the Blues do.

Forwards—Sammy Blais, Jordan Kyrou, Ryan O’Reilly, David Perron, Zach Sanford, Brayden Schenn, Robert Thomas: Ryan O’Reilly and David Perron, the point-ish a game forwards, are givens—ironically, when Perron signed with the Blues, it seemed he would be a prime candidate to once again be exposed, as he was when Vegas selected him, but he has elevated his game to previously unthinkable levels. And Ryan O’Reilly is the team’s best overall player, and while he is tied for being the team’s most expensive player, a $7.5 million contract for one of the sport’s best 200-feet centers is a bargain. Jordan Kyrou hasn’t always been a lock, but the youngster has broken through in 2021 and is still on his entry-level contract. And while there is a case that Robert Thomas hasn’t quite become what Blues fans assumed he would become, he is still only 21 years old, has flashes of absolute brilliance, and is also on an ELC. These four are mortal locks.

Brayden Schenn once looked like Kraken-bait, but with 28 points in 42 games, his $6.5 million price tag is quite reasonable. Maybe a lesser team would dangle Schenn, but a team hoping to contend could use a player like him in its top six. Sammy Blais hasn’t quite become a star, but he’s still just twenty-four and is a solid middle-six type forward at just $1.5 million for next season. And while Zach Sanford’s defensive lapses have been a bit frustrating, he’s one of the team’s more lethal scoring threats and he’s still in restricted free agency.

This leaves a few solid forwards unprotected. Kyle Clifford isn’t a star but he’s reasonably cheap veteran depth. Oskar Sundqvist has been a solid bottom-six forward, but coming off an injury and at a not-exactly-cheap $2.75 million salary for the next two seasons, he isn’t quite indispensable. Ivan Barbashev nearly cracked my list of seven, but while he and Sanford are in similar situations contract and age-wise, I had to opt for the player who has been more of a scoring threat in recent days. But the real heartbreak was leaving Vladimir Tarasenko exposed.

It’s tough! And it’s not like Tarasenko has even been bad in 2021. But he hasn’t been a $7.5 million player. And this is a player who is nearly thirty—it is perfectly reasonable to wonder if Tarasenko will ever be the same again. But he’s been dealing with brutal injuries that tend to hamper and limit careers of players as they enter the latter stages of their careers. And I love Vladimir Tarasenko and if the Blues lost him to Seattle, I would absolutely pull for him to become the forward equivalent of Marc-Andre Fleury with the Vegas Golden Knights. But the tough truth is that Vladimir Tarasenko is no longer the no-doubter franchise player he was just two years ago. It’s a brutal sport and I now hate expansion drafts.

Donald Trump and the value of learning how to lose

 In 1972, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael noted in a lecture that she “live(s) in a rather special world” where she “only know(s) one person who voted for Nixon”, noting that despite Richard Nixon, a month prior, having won the popular vote by nearly 18 million votes and carrying all but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia in the Electoral College, Kael lived in a world of urban bohemians. It is a refreshingly self-aware quote that has aged reasonably well, but the line has instead been bastardized beyond the point of recognition by conservative pundits, whose misquote usually amounts to something in the neighborhood of “I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”

Kael’s original quote is far more sympathetic, as it exhibits self-awareness (also, no matter how insular your community is, to not know one supporter of the overwhelmingly popular incumbent would be bizarre). But the misquote fits a common narrative—that liberals exist in their own ecosystem, divorced from the tastes and preferences of the so-called Silent Majority.

In the case of Nixon, the “Silent Majority” tag was never totally accurate, but it made some degree of sense. Richard Nixon was, for better or worse, a boring presidential candidate. He was simultaneously experienced, having served six years in Congress and eight years as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president before serving four years as president leading up to the 1972 election, and relatively young—while Nixon is frequently juxtaposed with John F. Kennedy’s youthfulness from their 1960 debates, Nixon was just 47 during those debates and was just 59 when he ran for re-election, just three years older than Kamala Harris, hyped by establishment Democrats as a nod to the next generation, when she was elected vice president. Nixon was a competent but not especially charismatic public speaker. He was raised poor but was objectively intelligent and hard-working, later graduating third in his class from the Duke University School of Law.

If this sounds like a fairly glowing perspective on Richard Nixon, it may be because I have spent the last five years thinking every single day about Donald Trump. Trump is frequently compared to Nixon, but the similarities are minimal. They are both Republicans who were elected president. Nixon had been a full-time politician since his early thirties; Trump didn’t become a full-time politician until he was 69 years old. Nixon was, by the standards of politics, middle-aged; Trump is the oldest person ever inaugurated as president (a record that will soon be broken). Nixon was a nerdy lawyer who was more qualified to craft policy than to be an inspirational figure; Trump speaks in vague generalities and seems happiest when speaking before large gatherings of his most ardent supporters. Nixon rose from poverty to become very successful; Trump was born into extreme wealth. From a purely biographical standpoint, Nixon is much closer to Joe Biden, if not an exact match (Biden is a generation older than Nixon was and his background was more comfortably middle-class than Nixon’s, even if it tilts far more towards the 37^th president than the 45^th).

Most people who rise to the level of Presidential runner-up have lost before, or at the very least faced some sort of major adversity. The same ambition that it requires to believe you are capable of being president also requires you to expose yourself to a potentially hostile public. Hillary Clinton had squandered a large polling lead in the build-up to the 2008 Democratic primaries. Mitt Romney lost his first election, for U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, by over 17 percentage points. John McCain lost a bitter primary fight in 2000 against George W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination. John Kerry lost his first election, for U.S. Representative. Al Gore ran an unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1988.

Had Joe Biden lost in the 2020 presidential election, he would join this group, and he would fit. In 1988 and 2008, his presidential campaigns disappeared as quickly as they arrived. The nature of the 2020 election, inherently delayed by COVID-19, might have delayed his concession beyond when Hillary Clinton had conceded in 2016 (one of the more outlandish of Donald Trump’s many 2020 campaign lies was that Democrats never conceded; Clinton conceded the next morning). But if the dust had settled with Trump appearing to have won the Electoral College with the same margin of victory as in 2016 and with a five million vote edge in the popular vote, as it appears has happened with Biden, there is no question in my mind that Biden would have conceded.

Donald Trump has never run for public office and not won, because 2016 was the first time he ran for public office in any sort of serious way. In 2016, after Ted Cruz won the Republican Iowa caucuses, Trump alleged fraud. After the 2016 general election, which even his opponent freely acknowledged Trump had won, Trump insisted that massive fraud had happened and that Hillary Clinton’s admittedly meaningless consolation prize of a popular vote victory was the result of that. What Trump is doing now should not be a surprise to anyone who has followed his political life so far.

There is a relatively magnanimous way that Donald Trump could be going about not conceding to Joe Biden. “Joe Biden is being reported as the narrow winner in several key swing states. It is clear that both Vice President Biden and I received historic numbers of votes, and with this unprecedented volume, the risk of error is even greater. Recounting the votes is imperative to assure that the electoral process adheres to the will of the American people, and whether I win or Vice President Biden wins, all Americans deserve to know the system worked as designed.” But Trump jumped straight to baseless conspiracies about Republicans votes being dumped and Republican poll watchers being excluded from polling locations. Given that Republicans gained seats in the House of Representatives and will likely retain control of the Senate, vote-fixing from Democrats would have been shockingly incompetent. And while I am not usually one to dismiss accusations against the Democratic Party of being incompetent, that seems unlikely here.

But as much as Donald Trump lies, I don’t think he’s lying when he says he believes there was massive voter fraud and that he is the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election. I believe he’s extremely wrong, but that’s a different matter. Donald Trump exists in an echo chamber. He has been surrounded by yes-men his entire life. He has never worked for anybody other than himself or his father. Despite living his entire life in the same deep-blue enclave of America as Pauline Kael did when she only knew one Nixon voter in 1972, he has never associated with those people. There is a reason he constantly called in to Fox News, whose viewership is overwhelmingly already on his side and whose personalities would never fight back against him even if they disagreed with him. There is a reason he held his first super-spreader rally of the pandemic era (you know, the one that killed Herman Cain) not in a competitive swing state but in blood-red Oklahoma. Donald Trump truly believes that he is overwhelmingly popular because he ignores anyone who might say otherwise. This is a guy who insists to this day that he was a superstar high school baseball player who was scouted by MLB teams but turned down the pros because he could make more money in business, despite unearthed (admittedly incomplete) box scores revealing he had a .138 batting average while playing first base in what was not exactly a hotbed of MLB-caliber talent. And this is a completely irrelevant thing about which to lie!

I am quite certain that if I played my dad one-on-one in basketball, or if I played him in Trivial Pursuit, today, I would beat him. But my lifetime record against him in either of these endeavors is very low, because when I was in middle school, he would routinely school me in both games. He wasn’t a demonstrative jerk about asserting his dominance, but he never let me win. And that built character. I was determined to improve. My dad is not and never was an all-world basketball or trivia player, but he was better than I was, and I wanted to be better than he was, and I knew that I would have to work to get there. Donald Trump has avoided challenges his entire life. 

He was able to expand upon his wealth because he was born with so much of it that he could afford to take chances and incur losses that would destroy 99% of us. The second he started to face even minor adversity, losing an Iowa caucus that he was never expected to win given that his brand was considered more appealing to big business conservatives than social conservatives, he complained that the game wasn’t fair. And he keeps doing it. And he’s never going to stop. Because for the first time in his life, Donald Trump is being held accountable for something. And he isn’t ready for that.

The 2020 Seattle Expansion Draft--What would happen if the NHL decided to release the Kraken?

On September 16, 2020, mere minutes after the latest transactional National Hockey League news broke—a trade which sent Eric Staal from the Minnesota Wild to the Buffalo Sabres in exchange for Marcus Johansson and a contract extension for new Montreal Canadiens acquisition Joel Edmundson—the two most powerful men in the NHL were locked in what would become the most significant negotiation of the day.

“You know we can’t have this, right?” Donald Fehr, a legendary sports union negotiator and the decade-long head of the NHL Players Association, sipped on his Coors Light, the official beer of the National Hockey League, in full view of his laptop camera on a Zoom call with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman.

Bettman replied, “It’s not about what anyone wants. Nobody wants this.”

“Of course you want this. Don’t pretend this is about the state of the game, Gary. You’re the voice of the owners, and the owners don’t want to pay players.”

“They do if it’s how the league keeps going,” Bettman confidently asserted. “Look, you know how important ticket revenue is in this league. This isn’t the NFL or the NBA—we’re taking a massive hit.”

As much as Donald Fehr, a man who viewed Gary Bettman as his current greatest professional adversary, did not want to admit it, he knew Bettman was right. The league took a substantial hit due to COVID-19, and the league’s television deal wasn’t strong enough to withstand it. Maybe this was in the long term Bettman’s fault, but it didn’t matter now.

“I understand that the cap can’t go up. I understand that RFAs can’t cash in like they wanted to. But if the NHLPA agrees to salary cuts for the same amount of work, that sets a dangerous precedent. As a one time thing, yeah, maybe I get it, but then why can’t they take less because you negotiated a TV deal with the Tennis Channel and the league’s trying to get them to air Finals games instead of some Borg-McEnroe match from 1983 or…look, we can handle a year of the salary cap being the same. It’s not ideal but it’s understandable and we can revisit it next season. But it can’t go down.”

“Don, we don’t have the money we had last year. You can check our books, but I promise you aren’t going to see anything that helps your argument.”

Fehr rubbed his hand against his face before an idea dawned on him. “So we need money, right? And fast, and it can be a temporary fix—we don’t expect the virus to still be an impediment a year from now, right?”

“Right,” Bettman passively replied, not sure the direction in which Fehr was heading.

“What if we unleashed the Kraken?”

And with those six words, the National Hockey League decided that the Seattle Kraken would begin play one year early.

Bettman placed calls to Seattle’s co-owners, David Bonderman and Jerry Bruckheimer, and inquired about their promised $650 million expansion fee. Asking for such an exorbitant sum on such short notice was going to be difficult, but this fee was going to be paid at some point. So Bettman made an agreement—in exchange for immediate payment, Seattle would be granted the 2023 All-Star Game and a 100% cut of the game’s revenues. These revenues would pale in comparison to the fee, but in conjunction with an additional year of typical revenue, all for a fee the owners would be paying anyway? Bonderman and Bruckheimer agreed.

Donald Fehr was thrilled by the news—expansion meant more NHLPA jobs, after all. Gary Bettman believed he was making the right decision, but he also needed to break the news to the owners—there was about to be an expansion draft for which the teams were not prepared.

The draft would follow the same rules as the 2017 draft which allowed the Vegas Golden Knights to build a team that, in year one, made the Stanley Cup Final. Bettman, on a call with the front offices of the league’s teams, assured them that what happened with the Golden Knights was an anomaly—that the more restrictive protection lists from the expansion drafts seventeen years prior were designed to make an expansion team viable, not great, and that it was the brilliant tactics of George McPhee that made Vegas an instant sensation rather than the format (McPhee, who was on the call, chuckled).

It was agreed that the Seattle Kraken would, like Vegas, select a player from each NHL team, thirty-one in total, while staying in compliance with the league’s salary cap, still at $81.5 million thanks to the arrival of the Kraken. For the draft, only players with more than two seasons in the NHL or its highest minor league, the American Hockey League, were draft eligible. Of this group, teams could protect one goalie, three defensemen, and seven forwards, or one goalie and eight total skaters regardless of position. All players with a No Move Clause in their contracts were required to be protected; players with a No Trade Clause were fair game for Seattle. The transactions would only become official at the conclusion of the Stanley Cup Final--players slated to be Unrestricted Free Agents, such as Alex Pietrangelo and Taylor Hall, could technically be drafted by Seattle, but this would merely give them exclusive negotiating rights for a few days, and no compensation could be granted. There would be very little advantage to selecting such players.

Two days later, all thirty-one teams submitted to the league and to Seattle their protection lists. Most teams had a few obvious players to protect, but a few notable players were made available to Seattle. In sharp contrast to 2017, however, the Kraken were not permitted to make trades in which not selecting a particular player (or selecting a particular player) was part of the agreement. They could, however, draft a player and then trade him later for picks. For instance, if the Colorado Avalanche decided they really wanted to protect their eighth-best forward or fourth-best defenseman but were unable to do so in the expansion draft, they could not stop Seattle from picking him, but Seattle could in turn ask for a draft pick to trade him back. This would impact the draft itself compared to 2017, but have less impact on the construction of the 2020-21 Kraken than one might think.

As was the case in 2017, the draft is conducted by selecting players from teams in reverse order of the league standings. This allows the drama to build, generally speaking—the Detroit Red Wings don’t have as many appealing players available as the Boston Bruins, for instance. Throughout the draft, the kind of team the Kraken plan on fielding will come into shape.

Without further adieu, here is the draft.

Detroit Red Wings

Goalie: Jonathan Bernier

Defensemen: Madison Bowey, Filip Hronek, Patrik Nemeth

Forwards: Tyler Bertuzzi, Robby Fabbri, Darren Helm, Dylan Larkin, Anthony Mantha, Brendan Perlini, Dmytro Timashov

With 39 points in 71 games in 2019-20, the Detroit Red Wings were easily the worst team in the NHL last season, and as such, it was not much of a challenge to find eleven players to protect. The team regularly played two goalies, one of whom (Jimmy Howard) is a pending UFA and one of whom, Jonathan Bernier, is a competent if unspectacular rotation goalie who, at $3 million for one more season, is hardly an albatross. Among blue-liners, the easiest choice is Hronek, the leading scorer among defensemen at 22 and still on his entry-level contract. Nemeth was the clear #2, and although his contract is a tad heftier at $3 million for one more season, he is one of the more consistently competent Red Wings. And while Madison Bowey is hardly integral, he is the only remaining defensemen with double-digit points last season and his salary is a mere $1 million, as he is still in the Restricted Free Agency stage of his career.

The team’s four leading scorers last season were all forwards who were 25 or younger—Larkin, Bertuzzi, Mantha, and Fabbri—so those were all easy saves. Darren Helm is a bit overpaid at $3.85 million, but he is a long-time Red Wing who is at least still a double-digit point scorer, and they do still have a salary floor to reach. Brendan Perlini was outright bad last season, scoring only one goal and tallying only three assists in 39 games, but he is a former lottery pick who scored double-digit goals in each of his previous three NHL seasons, so for less than a million dollars as a restricted free agent, he is a worthy prospect for the Red Wings to maintain. The pickings are a bit slim for the #7 forward slot, but Dmytro Timashov, who scored nine points as a rookie last season, doesn’t make very much money and makes so little money that a team would still rather have him than not. For Detroit, that’s all it takes.

With the first pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Calvin Pickard, goaltender from the Detroit Red Wings.

First, I have to make a promise to you—I did not make this choice as a joking nod to the 2017 Expansion Draft, where Vegas also selected Pickard with the #1 overall pick. Pickard isn’t a very good player and I suspect he won’t make this team. But, well, Detroit doesn’t offer a lot of great options. The list of draftable players are mostly overpaid, washed up veterans (Danny DeKeyser, Valtteri Filppula, Frans Nielsen, and especially Justin Abdelkader, who inexplicably still has three years remaining on his $4.25 million contract and who tallied three points, all on assists, in 49 games last season), and at least with Pickard, he’s only making $750,000 for a year and he does have NHL experience, including a season as a primary starter. Also, he played junior hockey in Seattle, so there’s that.

Ottawa Senators

Goalie: Anders Nilsson

Defensemen: Thomas Chabot, Christian Wolanin, Nikita Zaitsev

Forwards: Connor Brown, Anthony Duclair, Jayce Hawryluk, Nick Paul, Bobby Ryan, Chris Tierney, Colin White

With long-time goalie Craig Anderson a pending free agent, Ottawa gets to choose between one of two goalies who also got ample playing time last season: Anders Nilsson or Marcus Hogberg. They were statistically similar last season and Hogberg is younger, but Nilsson is a more proven commodity, having been a respectable backup goalie for nearly a decade. Defensively, the Senators, for being a not very good team, have recovered decently the loss of Erik Karlsson in the defensive realm. Although Chabot is not cheap, at $8 million for the next eight years, he has already positioned himself as an elite talent, certainly one an expansion team would jump at the chance to have. Nikita Zaitsev isn’t quite to that level, but he has formed a formidable top pair with Chabot and makes a reasonable $4.5 million for the next four seasons. And although a case could be made for Mike Reilly as the third defenseman to protect, Christian Wolanin, who missed most of last season but played well the year before and makes less than a million dollars next season and will still be an RFA the season after that, is a solid player who could be coveted by a team shooting for high-upside talent.

Because Brady Tkachuk, no worse than the second-best forward on the Senators, is not yet eligible for the Expansion Draft, it is that much easier for the Senators to avoid exposing top offensive talent. Brown, DuClair, and Tierney, the mid-twenties RFAs who are the next-best forwards on the team by raw offensive production, are obvious saves. Bobby Ryan is less than ideal, given his greatly diminished production and his $7.25 million price tag over the next two years, but given his No-Move Clause, the Senators are contractually obligated to protect him. Colin White is a slightly unusual choice, as he is a non-star who makes $4.75 million over the next half-decade, but he is a 23 year-old first-round pick who received Calder votes last season; he is among the team’s higher-upside talents. Although there is some temptation for the Senators to protect Artem Anisimov, a 15 goal scorer last season, he is on the wrong side of thirty, which is why the Senators instead protected Jayce Hawryluk and Nick Paul, young forwards who played the 2019-20 on entry level contracts.

With the second pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Marcus Hogberg, goaltender from the Ottawa Senators.

Two goalies in the first two picks may seem a bit unusual, but the price is absolutely right for him. Hogberg is a second or third goalie at best in the NHL, but he will make just $700,000 next year before reaching restricted free agency; for that price, and given that Seattle is selecting from a team that would have been regarded much worse had the Detroit Red Wings not existed, the 25 year-old Swede is a solid choice.

San Jose Sharks

Goalie: Martin Jones

Defensemen: Brent Burns, Erik Karlsson, Marc-Edouard Vlasic

Forwards: Logan Couture, Dylan Gambrell, Tomas Hertl, Evander Kane, Kevin Labanc, Timo Meier, Marcus Sorensen

Given that this team was in the conference finals in 2019, their immediate descent into abject mediocrity was a bit quick, even if they were a bit long in the tooth even when they were good. But a combination of lack of prospects and no-move clauses make their protected list a reflection of this. Although Martin Jones is, mostly rightly, a punching bag in goal, San Jose is a bit stuck with him—there isn’t another expansion draft-eligible goalie in the organization. And the Sharks are forced to protect two defensemen via NMCs—Erik Karlsson, a once-elite blue liner who looks as though injuries have rendered him a lost cause, and Marc-Edouard Vlasic, even more conclusively an extension bust. There is a case to be made that Brent Burns, who isn’t cheap, should be exposed as he is made a bit redundant by Karlsson, but circumstances suggest the Sharks need to steer into things and hope for a rebound in 2020-21—it’s not likely, per se, but it’s far more likely than that Detroit or Ottawa will contend.

At forward, the Sharks don’t have any no-move obligations. Logan Couture, the team’s captain, had a little bit of a down 2019-20, but given his upside, $8 million is a reasonable price tag. Tomas Hertl, at $5.625 million for the next two seasons, and Timo Meier, at $6 million for the next three years plus another RFA season, are the offensive bargains, and by the team’s standards, they are babies. Kevin Labanc also fits the Hertl bill, and as he is still in his RFA years, he if nothing else has far more trade value than they should rightfully let leave in an expansion draft. While Kane is arguably a touch overpriced, he’s too good of a player to resist. In the realm of more cost-effective forwards are Marcus Sorensen, who makes $1.5 million, and Dylan Gambrell, who still has another year remaining on his entry-level contract.

With the third pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Alex True, center from the San Jose Sharks.

In some cases, the Kraken aim for guys who can make a dent in the 2020-21 season, and in other cases, they aim for low-cost players who may not do much but won’t dramatically hurt the team, and Alex True is the latter. The Danish forward has only played in 12 NHL games, tallying four assists and no goals, but he was productive the year before in the AHL, with 24 goals and 31 assists in 68 games, and he still has another year remaining on his ELC. If nothing else, True is the kind of low-cost player that Seattle could easily flip for a low draft pick, which is better than an albatross contract.

Los Angeles Kings

Goalie: Calvin Petersen

Defensemen: Drew Doughty, Matt Roy, Sean Walker

Forwards: Michael Amadio, Dustin Brown, Martin Frk, Alex Iafallo, Adrian Kempe, Anze Kopitar, Austin Wagner

We finally have the chance of a true big-name player being selected, as the Kings left two-time Stanley Cup champion and former Team USA starting goalie Jonathan Quick exposed. It’s a simple case of risk aversion—Quick has been in decline over the last several years and the Kings would be forcing the expansion club to spend $5.8 million for each of the next three years on a risky player, which they may or may not do, but they’d definitely jump on Calvin Peterson for under a million for the next two seasons. The Kings are required to protect Drew Doughty, a very good but rather expensive defensemen, but have more fluidity with their next two choices. Matt Roy is obvious—he is a top three Kings defenseman while still making entry-level money. Sean Walker was #2 on the team in average minutes per game among defensemen, and he earns a reasonable $2.65 million over the next four seasons.

The team’s best forward by a fair margin is Anze Kopitar, and he is paid like it--$10 million on a poor team may seem like a mistake, but the Kings would not be able to find a player of Kopitar’s caliber in the off-season. The team’s next-most productive 2019-20 forward, Alex Iafallo, also qualifies as an automatic—he may not be a long-term King, but at $2.425 million for next season before he reaches free agency, he is a prime trade deadline candidate. Aside from Kopitar, who is still in the general vicinity of his peak powers, the Kings have two post-prime forwards on too high of contracts, and while Jeff Carter is somewhat expendable from a sentimental perspective, the man who hoisted two Cups as team captain, Dustin Brown, would be a tough emotional hit, hence his protection (and if the Kraken were inclined to select Dustin Brown, there probably isn’t a ton stopping them from picking Carter). With the remaining selections, the Kings go for four decent-to-upsidey guys in their early-to-mid twenties with no fewer than two years of (low) cost certainty.

With the fourth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Trevor Moore, winger from the Los Angeles Kings.

Rather than going the splashier routes of selecting Jonathan Quick or Jeff Carter, the Kings went the lower-cost route by selecting Moore, a 25 year-old coming off his first season spent primarily in the NHL. After beginning the 2019-20 season with the Toronto Maple Leafs, Lewis scored a total of six goals in 42 NHL games last season, and with a 2020-21 price tag of just $775,000, he could serve as a useful bottom six forward—if he was able to serve in this capacity for a playoff team in Toronto, it’s a reasonable expectation of him in Seattle.

Anaheim Ducks

Goalie: John Gibson

Defensemen: Christian Djoos, Cam Fowler, Hampus Lindholm

Forwards: Ryan Getzlaf, Danton Heinen, Adam Henrique, Ryan Kesler, Rickard Rakell, Jakob Silfverberg, Troy Terry

John Gibson is a painfully obvious protect—he is among the best handful of goalies in the NHL and he makes just $6.4 million over the next seven seasons. He is the single strongest trade asset the Ducks have, not to mention a candidate to still be very valuable when the Ducks are competitive again. Defensively, Cam Fowler is far and away the best defenseman on the roster; at $6.5 million for six years, he isn’t quite a Gibsonian bargain, but he is still quite valuable. Hampus Lindholm follows similar logic—since he is only under contract for two more years, he might not be on the next good Ducks team, but he has trade value. For the third protected defensemen, the Ducks choose Christian Djoos, who only played in nine games for the Ducks but won a Stanley Cup in Washington and has proven capable of handling second-pairing minutes at a price of just $1 million next season.

The Ducks’ forward group includes two no-move clauses. One of them belongs to Ryan Getzlaf, who is a tad overpaid at $8.25 million, but it’s only for one year and he is still a viable, if post-prime, player. The other, Ryan Kesler, is a disastrous albatross, having not played in 2019-20 and not having been good since 2016-17 but being owed $6.875 million for each of the next two seasons. From there, the Ducks are still able to protect their #1, #2, and #4 (Getzlaf is #3) scorer from last season in Henrique, Rakell, and Silfverberg—only Rakell could be reasonably dubbed a bargain at under $4 million, but 20+ goal scorers at or before thirty are not easy to let go easily. Danton Heinen, acquired from the Bruins during last season, has been a double-digit goal scorer with more assists in each of the last three seasons who still has a remaining RFA season after next. With their final protect, the Ducks opt for Troy Terry, on a team-friendly $1.45 million per the next three seasons contract and just turned twenty-three earlier this month.

With the fifth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Sonny Milano, winger from the Anaheim Ducks.

At $1.7 million, Milano isn’t free, but for two years of service for a guy who is twenty-four years old, the Kraken are hoping to find a breakout candidate. And Milano, who has spent most of his career with the Columbus Blue Jackets, has flirted with breakout seasons. In his nine games with Anaheim, Milano scored a pair of goals and assisted on three more, and two seasons ago, he scored 14. And the Kraken get him for two more seasons before he continued into restricted free agency.

New Jersey Devils

Goalie: Mackenzie Blackwood

Defensemen: Will Butcher, Mirco Mueller, Damon Severson

Forwards: Jesper Bratt, Nikita Gusev, Nico Hischier, Kyle Palmieri, Brett Seney, Miles Wood, Pavel Zacha

When your starting goalie is a 23 year-old who is still an RFA and your backup goalie is making $6 million for the next two seasons, the choice to leave Cory Schneider exposed isn’t really much of a choice. On the blue line, the team’s most famous defenseman, P.K. Subban, doesn’t make the cut, given his rapidly declining production and $9 million price tag. Damon Severson, a first-pairing defenseman, makes less than half as much and is just 26. While Will Butcher hasn’t quite replicated his Calder candidate 2017-18, he has been reasonably productive at an excusable $3.73 million price. And although Mirco Mueller has been generally disappointing in the NHL, only reaching double-digit points one time, his RFA status and relative youth at 25 makes him still something of a prospect.

The Devils do have a somewhat more intriguing crop of forwards to protect (Jack Hughes, the 2019 #1 overall pick, is not yet eligible). Jesper Bratt, barely 22 and coming off a season with 16 goals and 16 assists, is an automatic—he made less than a quarter-million last season. Kyle Palmieri, a star-level talent who is easy to underrate because of the obscurity of his team, makes less than $5 million a year, and is an automatic as well. Nico Hischier was a bit underwhelming last season, but a freshly extended #1 overall pick who is still just 21 is too intoxicating to resist. Rather than trying to preserve franchise stalwart Travis Zajac, the Devils instead opt for Nikita Gusev, who scored 44 points in his first NHL season, and a trio of under-25 forwards still in the RFA stages in Seney, Wood, and Zacha.

With the sixth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Connor Carrick, defenseman from the New Jersey Devils.

At $1.5 million for the next season, Carrick is a lightning-in-a-bottle pick. He had some solid if unspectacular seasons in Toronto before a brief stint in Dallas, followed by his move to New Jersey. He’s probably a bottom pairing defenseman at best, but Carrick has logged 230 NHL games and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, so there are some virtues to this as a lottery pick, as he’s almost a free agent anyway.

Buffalo Sabres

Goalie: Linus Ullmark

Defensemen: Jake McCabe, Brandon Montour, Rasmus Ristolainen

Forwards: Jack Eichel, Curtis Lazar, Casey Mittelstadt, Sam Reinhart, Jeff Skinner, Eric Staal, Tage Thompson

Buffalo isn’t the worst team in the NHL, but they do have the weakest crop of exposed players in this expansion draft. Linus Ullmark is the goalie choice over Carter Hutton because he’s younger and cheaper and probably better, and if Buffalo loses Hutton, it’s not a devastating absence. Defensively, with Rasmus Dahlin and Henri Jokiharju not yet eligible, the team is able to essentially protect its entire defensive corps, with the one exception being Colin Miller, who makes $3.875 million over the next two years and probably qualifies as overpaid, anyway.

Two of the best, conservatively, six forwards on the Sabres are not yet draft-eligible, so they need not concern themselves with Dominik Kahun nor Victor Olofsson. Jack Eichel, well-compensated in eight figures though he may be, is far too elite of a player to not protect, and Sam Reinhart is a bargain at $3.65 million while still in the RFA cycle. Jeff Skinner is wildly overpaid at $9 million for the next seven years, but a no-move clause means Buffalo is stuck with him. Veteran Eric Staal, the recent addition from Minnesota, only has one year remaining on his contract, but he figures to be one of the better forwards on the team, and at just $3.25 million, he could be act as a trade chip if they fall out of contention. Aside from these four, most of the remaining Sabres forwards are pending UFAs—only two forwards who played in the NHL in 2019-20 are actually draft eligible.

With the seventh pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Jean-Sebastien Dea, center from the Buffalo Sabres.

Dea only has played in 32 NHL games, three with the Sabres (all last year). He had a decent but unspectacular year with the AHL’s Rochester Americans. But he isn’t risky. He’s a 26 year-old who will make $700,000 next year before reaching free agency. Maybe he becomes a rotational forward, and compared to taking on the $18 million due over the next three years to Kyle Okposo, there isn’t a lot of downside. Maybe you are setting $700,000 on fire, but this is pocket change in the grand scheme of things.

Montreal Canadiens

Goalie: Carey Price

Defensemen: Ben Chiarot, Victor Mete, Jeff Petry

Forwards: Joel Armia, Phillip Danault, Max Domi, Jonathan Drouin, Brendan Gallagher, Artturi Lehkonen, Tomas Tatar

It can be argued that no team is hurt more by the sudden nature of the Seattle Kraken expansion draft than the Canadiens. They are weeks removed from trading for backup goalie Jake Allen, a player they are contractually obligated to leave unprotected because of Carey Price’s no-move clause (not that Price wouldn’t have been protected anyway). Defensively, they are obligated to protect Jeff Petry, whose no-move wouldn’t have been obstructive under the original expansion plan, as his contract ends after next season. Their other two defensive protections are strong—Chiarot, who logged over 23 minutes per game last season, and Mete, a 22 year-old who is just now entering restricted free agency and is already a viable part of the Canadiens defensive rotation. But this leaves two notable players exposed (three if you count Karl Alzner, who you should not)—Joel Edmundson, who just agreed to a 4-year contract worth $14 million earlier in the day, and even more noticeably, captain Shea Weber, a future Hall of Fame candidate who remains firmly above-average, though at over $7.85 million for each of the next six seasons.

The forward group does not need to include Nick Suzuki nor Jesperi Kotkaniemi, which is a definite plus. Among those that actually do need to be protected, Tomas Tatar was nearly a point-a-game player last season, and although he’s a year away from free agency, his $4.8 million price tag would make him an easy pick for Seattle. Similar logic follows for a handful of other Montreal forwards on one-year deals in Armia, Danault, and Gallagher. Max Domi is widely rumored to be a trade chip, and since he is a player who may generate a strong return, protecting him would be the smart play. Jonathan Drouin had a letdown season in 2019-20, in which he played in only 27 games, but the former third overall pick is still only 25. With their final forward spot, the Canadiens opt to protect Lehkonen, making $2.4 million and still with multiple years of club control remaining, and with double-digit goals in all four of his NHL seasons.

With the eighth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Shea Weber, defenseman from the Montreal Canadiens.

After seven relatively safe picks where the Kraken opted for guys who strictly obey the Hippocratic oath, the Canadiens select arguably the biggest name available to them. Guys of Weber’s caliber don’t come around too often, and even if $7,857,143 is a bit high for Weber, particularly on the back end of the contract, this is a team that will surely have cap room in the early years. The Kraken have an opportunity at a star, a marketable player, and a team captain all in one move. And the Canadiens get him off their books at a point where the P.K. Subban trade looks like an unexpected win for them. In a lot of ways, this is a win-win situation.

Chicago Blackhawks

Goalie: Malcolm Subban

Defensemen: Duncan Keith, Connor Murphy, Brent Seabrook

Forwards: Drake Caggiula, Alex DeBrincat, Patrick Kane, Alexander Nylander, Brandon Saad, Dylan Strome, Jonathan Toews

The Chicago Blackhawks have four no-move clauses on their books, but this doesn’t have much in terms of practical implications. The goalie, Malcolm Subban, is really just a bonus, as starter Corey Crawford is scheduled for unrestricted free agency (it is very unlikely that Subban is the regular starter for the Blackhawks next season). Two of the three protection slots are reserved for Duncan Keith, who is a little overpaid ($5,538,462 per year for the next three), and Brent Seabrook, who might have the most team-destructive contract in the NHL ($6.875 million for the next four years and he is occasionally a healthy scratch). Adam Boqvist isn’t yet eligible, and Olli Maatta and especially Calvin de Haan qualify as overpaid, so Connor Murphy, a solid defenseman who makes less than $4 million per year, is protected.

Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews and their combined $21 million annual salaries are no-move protected, though neither is a truly horrible contract (though if they had the chance, the Blackhawks probably wouldn’t mind letting Toews go). Dominik Kubalik is not eligible, but young flashy wingers Alex DeBrincat and Alexander Nylander are, and they are no-brainers. Dylan Strome has successfully rehabilitated what was already being anointed as bust status and is protected, as well. The next two picks come from different schools of thought—Saad makes $6 million but is among the team’s most prolific scorers, and Caggiula isn’t really a star, but considering he is still in the RFA stages, he is one of the handful of Blackhawks players who isn’t expensive.

With the ninth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Slater Koekkoek, defenseman from the Chicago Blackhawks.

There were more NHL-established options out there for the Kraken, but instead they go with a young-ish defenseman (26) just now exiting his entry-level contract. He isn’t a high-volume scorer, but he has played solid defense, is above-average in terms of puck possession, and is fairly low-risk. He is being selected with hopes that he can compete to be an inexpensive bottom pairing option.

Arizona Coyotes

Goalie: Darcy Kuemper

Defensemen: Jakob Chychrun, Oliver Ekman-Larsson, Niklas Hjalmarsson

Forwards: Lawson Crouse, Christian Dvorak, Conor Garland, Marian Hossa, Clayton Keller, Phil Kessel, Nick Schmaltz

In 2019-20, the Coyotes deployed two goalies in roughly equal measure, but in this case, they protect the younger, better, and longer-contracted Darcy Kuemper over Antti Raanta. Defensively, the Coyotes have two must-protects in Ekman-Larsson (fine) and Hjalmarsson (less fine, but least he only has a year left). The remaining defensemen are largely older guys on short contracts with the exception of Chychrun, a 22 year-old coming off his best NHL season who was seventh on the team in goals despite the notable handicap of playing on the blue line.

The Coyotes are obligated to protect two forwards—Phil Kessel, coming off his worst season since his teens, but at least an active NHL player, which is more than can be said of Marian Hossa, whose contract was traded to Arizona in 2018 after he was de-facto retired but has never played for the Coyotes (also, he’s in the Hall of Fame). Among their elective forwards, notables such as Taylor Hall and Carl Soderberg are already heading to free agency, so they can stick with under-25 forwards under club control like Crouse and Garland. And while Dvorak, Keller, and Schmaltz are all under more year-heavy contracts, they are all still under the age of 25 and have their primes ahead of them.

With the tenth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Alex Goligoski, defenseman from the Arizona Coyotes.

Two picks after selecting Shea Weber, the Kraken select Goligoski, a veteran who can either stand tall with Weber on the top blue line or solidify the team’s second pairing. He only has one year remaining on his contract, so his 35 years of age are less of a risk than Weber’s, and Goligoski led Coyotes defensemen last year in points, acting as a valued power play specialist. If the Kraken go on a 2017-18 Vegas-like run, Goligoski can be a major part of that; if they struggle, he could be dangled to contenders at the trade deadline.

Minnesota Wild

Goalie: Alex Stalock

Defensemen: Jonas Brodin, Mathew Dumba, Jared Spurgeon, Ryan Suter

Forwards: Kevin Fiala, Luke Kunin, Zach Parise, Mats Zuccarello

The Wild have the shortest protection list yet, having opted to protect four defensemen, therefore exposing three additional forwards to the draft. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it really comes down to whether the team values its #4 defenseman or its #5 forward more. In the case of the Wild, they have three defensemen with no-moves (and would have for an expansion draft next year too—Brodin, Spurgeon, Suter) and have a formidable two-way defenseman in Dumba otherwise exposed. As far as goalie was concerned, the Wild are probably itching for the Kraken to just go ahead and taken Devan Dubnyk, who had an awful 2019-20 and was largely usurped in the starting role by Stalock, also a veteran but somebody who outperformed Dubnyk last season and also will only make $785,000 for the next two seasons.

The Wild are prohibited by no-moves in the forward group as well, with two additional no-moves (that still would be no-moves next year) in high-priced veterans Zach Parise and Mats Zuccarello. Among the team’s remaining players to protect, Kevin Fiala is a no-brainer—he led last year’s Wild in points and was second in goals, is barely 24, and is only slated to make $3 million next year while still a restricted free agent. For their final protect, the Wild opt for Luke Kunin, who scored 15 goals and 31 points last season at age 22 and is just now entering his RFA years.

With the eleventh pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Ryan Donato, center from the Minnesota Wild.

This is the cost of the Wild giving out no-move clauses like candy—the loss of Donato, who scored 14 goals in his age-23 season last year (he is now 24). Donato will make under $2 million next season and continue through the RFA cycle while potentially contending for top six forward minutes, particularly in future seasons.

Winnipeg Jets

Goalie: Connor Hellebuyck

Defensemen: Josh Morrissey, Neal Pionk, Tucker Poolman

Forwards: Kyle Connor, Andrew Copp, Nikolaj Ehlers, Patrik Laine, Jack Roslovic, Mark Scheifele, Blake Wheeler

Hellebuyck, a Vezina-level goalie in 2019-20 who will make just over $6 million for each of the next four years, is an obvious protect, and Neal Pionk fits into that category as well, as he was easily the team’s most productive defenseman last season and he is a 25 year-old with years of cost control remaining. Josh Morrissey is still young and has seven years remaining on his “I’ll take a lower AAV if you get me paid before I reach free agency” contract; I was going to throw in an obligatory bad Smiths pun in reference to him, but That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore. The third defense slot goes to Tucker Poolman, less of a star than the other two but somebody making just $775,000 next season who was the third-best defenseman on the Jets in 2019-20.

The Jets’ only NMC belongs to Blake Wheeler, who is highly paid and probably a touch past his prime, but he is still their nearly point-per-game captain, so he is hardly an indefensible player to keep. The Jets had two point-per-game forwards in Connor and Scheifele, both of whom are under long-term value contracts. Nikolaj Ehlers is under a slightly cheaper contract, at $6 million for the next half-decade, but this is a solid value for the Jets, as he scored 25 goals and 58 points last season and he is currently just 24 years old. Patrik Laine hasn’t quite become the Ovechkin-level goal threat he was acclaimed to be in his first two seasons, but he still scored 28 goals and 35 assists last year and is still just 22—the Jets may not be able to keep him long-term, but they’re going to certainly get more value out of him than losing him to Seattle. The next two forwards are less obvious but still fairly clear, as Copp and Roslovic are the only two remaining double-digit goal scorers and still in the RFA stages. These protections allow the Jets to maintain their offensive core.

With the twelfth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Carl Dahlstrom, defenseman from the Winnipeg Jets.

It’s a bit of a step down from Goligoski and Donato in terms of exciting players Seattle drafts, but they do have a salary cap with which to comply. The former second-round pick is a 25 year-old rock of a defenseman who has never scored an NHL goal but has shown capable of playing second-pairing minutes, if not at a second-pairing level, and most relevantly, he still has another year remaining on his entry level contract.

Calgary Flames

Goalie: David Rittich

Defensemen: Rasmus Andersson, Mark Giordano, Noah Hanifin

Forwards: Mikael Backlund, Johnny Gaudreau, Elias Lindholm, Milan Lucic, Andrew Mangiapane, Sean Monahan, Matthew Tkachuk

With Cam Talbot as an impending UFA, there is little debate as to which NHL goalie to protect—the younger, probably better one making $2.75 million against the cap. Defensively, most of the NHL crop are pending free agents, and only four players who even played in the NHL last season are draft eligible. Thus the Flames protect 2018-19 Norris winner Giordano and a pair of young, extended defensemen in Andersson and Hanifin, with the one exposed goalie being Oliver Kylington, who is young and cheap but also has a career NHL high of eight points—they’d probably prefer he not be selected, but it’s not a pressing matter.

The Flames’ only obligated protect is for Milan Lucic, who had a little bit of a bounce-back season in 2019-20 but whom they certainly would prefer to expose (he is still owed $5.25 million for the next three seasons). Much happier protects come in the form of their four young star-level forwards Gaudreau (the elder statesman of the group, who just turned 27), Lindholm, Monahan, and Tkachuk, the four leading scorers by goals and points last season. Mikael Backlund, on the wrong side of 30 and with a not-immaterial cap hit of $5.35 million for the next four years, isn’t quite an automatic, but he is still a consistent two-way forward who has received Selke votes in each of the last four seasons and has cleared 45 points in each of the last five. And Andrew Mangiapane, fresh off a breakout season with 17 goals and 32 points, is an easy call—he is just 24 and only now entering restricted free agency.

With the thirteenth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Sam Bennett, center from the Calgary Flames.

A few years ago, the Flames leaving Sam Bennett exposed would have seemed inconceivable. The fourth overall pick in the 2014 draft, Bennett (who is still just 24, mind you) looked poised for superstardom when he tallied 18 goals as a teenager in 2015-16, but his production has stalled, and he scored just 12 total points last year. At $2.55 million for next season, this is a little bit of a gamble, though since Bennett has established himself as a solid defensive forward, his floor is probably as a fourth liner, which isn’t ideal for a player with that cap hit, but it’s not a total disaster considering NHL teams probably still view Bennett as a guy with untapped potential.

New York Rangers

Goalie: Henrik Lundqvist

Defensemen: Anthony DeAngelo, Marc Staal, Jacob Trouba

Forwards: Pavel Buchnevich, Filip Chytil, Chris Kreider, Brendan Lemieux, Artemi Panarin, Ryan Strome, Mika Zibanejad

The Rangers are contractually obligated to protect Lundqvist, which is tough beat for them, as Alexandar Georgiev, who is 14 years younger and far cheaper, now must be exposed. Defensively, the Rangers also are hamstrung by NMCs—Jacob Trouba (who they would have protected anyway) and Marc Staal (who isn’t a disaster but certainly is expendable, and whose contract expires after this season) are automatics, and although Adam Fox is thankfully not yet eligible, the Rangers have to choose between Anthony DeAngelo and Ryan Lindgren. While Lindgren is younger and cheaper for longer, DeAngelo is the more proven commodity, having tallied 15 goals and 38 assists in 2019-20. There is a case that the Rangers should protect four defensemen, but they also might prefer the Kraken select Lindgren than Georgiev or their fifth-best forward.

The Rangers’ forward group is includes three players with no-moves, but all three would have been protected anyway—Kreider, Panarin (who somehow looks like a bargain even after having signed a huge contract last off-season), and Zibanejad. The next obvious cases are Buchnevich and Strome, top-five scorers on the Rangers last season who are still in the RFA years. Filip Chytil isn’t quite yet a star, but a center who is barely of legal drinking age who has scored double-digit goals in each of the last two seasons is an asset worth having. And while Brendan Lemieux isn’t as obvious of a player to protect as the others, he has been a decent bottom-six forward who is still young and just coming off his ELC—given that Kaapo Kakko is not eligible, the remaining forward protection options are a bit thin.

With the fourteenth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Ryan Lindgren, defenseman from the New York Rangers.

Realistically, this was a least-bad situation for the Rangers. Although he had a productive rookie season, Lindgren’s value is mostly defensive and, to this point, not as quantifiable as Georgiev. And the Rangers are still able to keep four defensemen who are certainly worthy of being called top-four defensemen. And for the Kraken, they get a 22 year-old who still has a year remaining on his entry level contract who could easily take form as a defensive stalwart for the next many years.

Nashville Predators

Goalie: Pekka Rinne

Defensemen: Mattias Ekholm, Ryan Ellis, Roman Josi

Forwards: Viktor Arvidsson, Matt Duchene, Filip Forsberg, Rocco Grimaldi, Calle Jarnkrok, Colton Sissons, Austin Watson

Pekka Rinne’s no-move clause could come back to haunt the Predators. It’s not that Rinne is bad or even overpaid, though his 2019-20 season didn’t exactly inspire confidence—it’s that Juuse Saros, 25, is cheaper and younger and, at this point, probably better. Defensively, the Roman Josi no-move isn’t exactly prohibitive—he’s well-paid but he’s also one of the best defensemen in the league. Ryan Ellis and Mattias Ekholm continue to be strong two-way blue-liners who have a combined price tag of $10 million. Given that Dante Fabbro isn’t draft-eligible and the next three notable defensemen are pending free agents, the three to protect are rather obvious—if the Kraken want to make a run at Jarred Tinordi or Steven Santini, so be it.

On the forward front, Nashville is more than willing to dangle a handful of highly-paid forwards, including Ryan Johansen, Kyle Turris, and Nick Bonino. They could have easily thrown Duchene into this crop, but he has shown a little bit more recent proof of concept than Johansen or especially Turris. Arvidsson and Forsberg have lost a little bit of their luster, but even in their somewhat diminished states, are on team-friendly contracts. Calle Jarnkrok has developed into a consistent third-line type center for the Predators, and at just $2,000,000 for the next two years, is a safe protect; Rocco Grimaldi hasn’t proven himself quite as sustainably, but on an identical contract and being two years younger, he is a similarly solid choice. Colton Sissons is coming off a rough season, but at a jarringly low $2,857,143 price tag for the next half-dozen seasons, he is a tremendous bargain if he bounces back to being a 30-point player. With their final protection, the Predators look to Auston Watson, admittedly less exciting than the other forwards but on a cozy little $1.5 million contract for the next three seasons.

With the fifteenth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Juuse Saros, goalie from the Nashville Predators.

This one seemed inevitable. At a cost of just $1.5 million for next season with remaining RFA years ahead of him, and with the talent to be a serviceable starter for a playoff-contending NHL team, Saros is an incredible bargain for the Kraken. He’s good enough to be a starter and cheap enough to be a very strong backup, and if he takes another step in the right direction, he could be a foundational piece for this franchise.

Florida Panthers

Goalie: Sergei Bobrovsky

Defensemen: Aaron Ekblad, MacKenzie Weegar, Keith Yandle

Forwards: Noel Acciari, Aleksander Barkov, Brett Connolly, Jonathan Huberdeau, Colton Sceviour, Frank Vatrano, Lucas Wallmark

While the Florida Panthers would probably like a mulligan on the signing of Bobrovsky, who had a rough first year in Florida and is owed $10 million for each of the next six years into his thirties, but there’s a no-move clause in place. Defensively, their one no-move clause belongs to Keith Yandle, a less than ideal protect, but unlike in the 2017 draft, where the Panthers’ legendarily botched process included protecting four defensemen, they stuck to the three-D convention here by protecting Aaron Ekblad, who has been a bit disappointing since his Calder-winning rookie campaign following being the #1 overall draft pick but is still decently productive and just now entering what should be his prime, and MacKenzie Weegar, who has logged top-four defenseman minutes over the last two seasons and still a fairly inexpensive RFA. They’d presumably like to have kept Mike Matheson off the table, but that’s the cost of giving no-moves to veterans.

A large slate of Florida’s forwards are pending UFAs or not yet eligible, so the protection list becomes relatively easy. Their two best forwards, Barkov and Huberdeau, are automatics—both are in their primes and each makes under $6 million per year. Connolly and Vatrano qualify as lesser versions of this—neither is to that level, but both gravitate around half a point per game at reasonable costs. Lucas Wallmark is an ascending forward, just a hair over 25, and he is just now entering restricted free agency. Noel Acciari has become quite the bargain, as he scored 20 goals last season and makes less than two million dollars over the next two years. And while Colton Sceviour, over 30 and at just 16 points last season, is noticeably less valuable, but at just $1.2 million for one year and with a general lack of other great options, this is a valid pick.

With the sixteenth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Chris Driedger, goalie from the Florida Panthers.

With Bobrovsky locked into the Panthers via his no-move clause, the Kraken select their fourth goalie in sixteen picks with Driedger, who posted a .938 save percentage and a 2.05 goals against average in backup duty to Bobrovsky last season. This level of success is almost certainly not replicable, but if he can become even a fraction of that level of player for the Kraken, he’s a 26 year-old who is only scheduled to make $850,000 next season. Along with Juuse Saros, the Kraken are looking at a decent goaltending tandem.

Vancouver Canucks

Goalie: Thatcher Demko

Defensemen: Jordie Benn, Alexander Edler, Troy Stecher

Forwards: Brock Boeser, Micheal Ferland, Adam Gaudette, Bo Horvat, J.T. Miller, Tanner Pearson, Jake Virtanen

Even if Jacob Markstrom weren’t a pending free agent, the 2020 playoffs established Thatcher Demko as the obvious protect for the Canucks. His regular season as backup wasn’t as good as the Canucks may have hoped, but at just a hair over a million dollars, he would be scooped up in a heartbeat by an expansion team. Defensively, the new franchise defenseman Quinn Hughes need not be protected, while Alexander Edler is required to be (he would likely be protected anyway). As for the other two, Troy Stecher is a given, at $2.325 million and a relatively spry age of 26, and although Tyler Myers is a better player than Jordie Benn, the latter makes just $2 million while Myers has a prohibitive cost of $6 million for the next four years. Vancouver would surely prefer Myers walk; they certainly aren’t going to make it easier for him to stay.

Like Hughes on the defensive end, the Canucks have a foundational piece among their forwards that they are not required to protect in Elias Pettersson. With J.T. Miller coming off a career-high 27 goals and 72 points, he looks like a bargain at $5.25 million for three years; Vancouver will jump at the chance to protect him. Brock Boeser and Bo Horvat didn’t quite reach the J.T. Miller heights, but given their youth and cap hits in the fives of millions, they could easily be impact players on a championship team. Tanner Pearson only has a year remaining on his contract, but coming off a 20 goals and assists season and at $3.75 million, he is quite valuable to have on the roster. Micheal Ferland would be a candidate for exposure if not for a pesky little thing called a no-move clause. For the final two spots, Adam Gaudette and Jake Virtanen, just under and just over 24 respectively, are half-point-a-game type players who make well under their market value.

With the seventeenth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Zack MacEwen, center from the Vancouver Canucks.

The Canucks exposed quite a few high-priced veteran forwards, but instead, the Kraken opted for a pending RFA who made six figures last season in MacEwen. He hasn’t played a ton in the NHL, with 21 career games, but in his 17 games last season, he scored five goals and played his way onto the playoff roster. And at just 24, he could be a player growing into a prominent NHL role.

Columbus Blue Jackets

Goalie: Joonas Korpisalo

Defensemen: Seth Jones, Markus Nutivaara, Zach Werenski

Forwards: Josh Anderson, Cam Atkinson, Oliver Bjorkstrand, Brandon Dubinsky, Pierre-Luc Dubois, Nick Foligno, Gustav Nyquist

The Blue Jackets had tandem goaltenders for most of the season, and although Elvis Merzlikins had the superior statistics, Korpisalo got the bulk of playoff starts, where he played lights-out, and he is cheaper. Defensively, there are a clear top three defensemen—two of them, Jones and Werenski, get protected, while Vladislav Gavrikov is not yet eligible. David Savard and Ryan Murray remain useful defensemen, but at over $4 million cap hits with just a year remaining on each’s contract, Nutivaara is the younger, cheaper equivalent, with a $2.7 million cap hit for the next two years.

Forward-wise, the Blue Jackets have two no-move clauses to work around. One, for Nick Foligno, is manageable if not quite ideal, while the other belongs to Brandon Dubinsky, who didn’t play at all last season due to injuries. Bjorkstrand was the team’s leading goal scorer last season, and at just $2.5 million for next season, the 25 year-old is an obvious call. The team’s two leading scorers by points, Dubois and Nyquist, are also strong protection candidates—Dubois is just now entering restricted free agency and while Nyquist, at $5.5 million, isn’t quite that level of bargain, is still a productive player. While Cam Atkinson was uncharacteristically afflicted with injuries and poor play last season, his upside more than excuses his $5.875 million price tag. For the team’s final protection slot, they opt for Josh Anderson, who had an awful 2019-20, with just four points in 26 games, but the season before, he tallied 27 goals; if he can replicate that, his $1.85 million price tag last season would have been a bargain.

With the eighteenth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Eric Robinson, winger from the Columbus Blue Jackets.

Robinson, 25, is on a very team-friendly contract, with his $975,000 salary locked in for the next two seasons. He isn’t a star, but Robinson was a serviceable two-way winger last season and could work out as a rotational forward for the Seattle Kraken.

Toronto Maple Leafs

Goalie: Frederik Andersen

Defensemen: Travis Dermott, Jake Muzzin, Morgan Rielly

Forwards: Pierre Engvall, Zach Hyman, Alexander Kerfoot, Mitch Marner, Auston Matthews, William Nylander, John Tavares

As much as Frederik Andersen has been subject to criticism and trade rumors, he is still generally regarded as an above-average goalie, and even if he only has a year left under contract, $5 million for a true starting goalie when your alternative is Jack Campbell, who has had his moments but is far more of question mark, would be quite the gamble. And defensively, there really isn’t much of a choice. There’s Jake Muzzin, who has a no-move clause. The much-maligned Tyson Barrie and the even more maligned Cody Ceci are both pending UFAs. Morgan Rielly had a somewhat down 2019-20 but has flashed elite talent and costs just $5 million for each of the next two years, while Travis Dermott, who is only 23 and cheap for the next few years, has become a dependable force on the defensive end.

Forwards are the highlight of the Maple Leafs, but only one—Tavares—has no-move protection. Despite their hefty, eight-figure price tags, Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner are safe protections—the pair of twenty-three-year-olds are both elite offensive stars. William Nylander, at less than $7 million annually, might be the greatest bargain of the lot. Although Zach Hyman doesn’t likely fit into the team’s long-term plans, a $2.25 million salary for a guy who scored 37 points in 51 games last season is far too valuable to omit. While Alexander Kerfoot was a tad underwhelming in his first season in Toronto, his prior seasons in Colorado suggested that his $3.5 million salary over the next three seasons could wind up being a bargain. And while Pierre Engvall isn’t nearly the star of some of the other protected forwards, having scored 15 points in 48 games in his rookie season, he comes with the benefit of relatively cheap cost certainty—he will make $1.25 million for each of the next two seasons before reaching RFA status.

With the nineteenth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Justin Holl, defenseman from the Toronto Maple Leafs.

After playing primarily in the minor leagues in his professional career before last season, Holl was a revelation for Toronto in 2019-20, scoring 18 points and establishing himself as the team’s top stay-at-home defenseman by Point Shares. Holl certainly seems equipped to play for the Kraken, and his $2 million price tag for each of the next three years could make him a part of the team’s foundation if he is able to keep up his 2019-20 performance.

Edmonton Oilers

Goalie: Mikko Koskinen

Defensemen: Oscar Klefbom, Darnell Nurse, Kris Russell

Forwards: Andreas Athanasiou, Alex Chiasson, Leon Draisaitl, Zack Kassian, Connor McDavid, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Kailer Yamamoto

Although not quite a star, Mikko Koskinen has been a solid goaltender for the Oilers for the last two seasons, and being on the hook for $4.5 million for the next two seasons is hardly a massive liability. On the defensive end, the Oilers are hamstrung by Kris Russell’s no-move clause; while his $4 million price tag for one more year isn’t an albatross, it’s safe to say they’d rather use protection on somebody other than a guy that recorded zero goals and nine assists in 55 games last season. Klefbom and Nurse are, by a fairly large margin, the two best defensemen on the Oilers, and while $4.167 and $5.6 million cap hits aren’t bargains, they also aren’t going to be a thing to hold the Oilers back; they could also get $4 million-plus in cap relief if one of Adam Larsson is selected instead.

The Oilers are mostly noted for their high-end offensive talent, and while neither McDavid nor Draisaitl have no-moves, they might as well for the purposes of this exercise. To a lesser extent, the same applies to Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, who is a potential trade chip for the Oilers and is regarded as something of a lesser #1 overall pick, but he is without question a valuable player who is well worth his $6 million salary. Yamamoto is a very obvious protect—he scored nearly a point per game in the NHL last season and is still on his entry-level contract for another year. The remaining forwards are mid-level players who are at or perhaps slightly past their peaks in Athanasiou, Chiasson, and Kassian, but if the Oilers ever want to win anything with the McDavid/Draisaitl core, they are going to need players like these to shoulder some of the load as well.

With the twentieth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Ethan Bear, defenseman from the Edmonton Oilers.

Not unlike their previous selection, the Kraken are counting on a guy coming seemingly out of nowhere and having an awesome previous season being for real. Though in this case, there is even less risk for Seattle, as Ethan Bear is merely a first-year RFA who is going year-to-year with the Oilers. Last season, Bear (who was 22 and is now 23) was third on the team among defensemen in scoring, behind Klefbom and Nurse, averaging nearly 22 minutes per game. He is also a tidy sentimental pick, as a former Seattle Thunderbirds player in the Western Hockey League.

New York Islanders

Goalie: Semyon Varlamov

Defensemen: Scott Mayfield, Ryan Pulock, Devon Toews

Forwards: Josh Bailey, Mathew Barzal, Anthony Beauvillier, Jordan Eberle, Anders Lee, Brock Nelson, Jean-Gabriel Pageau

Semyon Varlamov has had an up-or-down last few years, but given his role in getting the Islanders to the conference finals this year, his $5 million cap hit for the next three years seems fairly moderate. On the defensive end, Pulock and Toews are extraordinarily easy protects—Pulock has become a quietly elite defenseman over the last two seasons and only made $2 million last season and is still a restricted free agent, while Toews is only now entering RFA status after having ascended into a top defenseman. The third is only marginally harder, as Scott Mayfield has become a formidable defensive defenseman and is under a very team-friendly $1.45 million cost for the next three years.

The forward group almost goes without saying—these were the seven best forwards on the Islanders last season by Hockey Reference Point Shares, none of them lay an especially credible claim to being particularly overpaid, and this frees the possibility that the Kraken will covet Veteran Presence and select somebody like Andrew Ladd or (perhaps more realistically) Leo Komarov or Cal Clutterbuck.

With the twenty-first pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Adam Pelech, defenseman from the New York Islanders.

Adam Pelech had a rough season offensively, scoring only nine points in 38 games. But his defensive value was still there, and he trailed only Ryan Pulock by average time on ice among Islanders skaters this season. Pelech is a valued penalty killer and comes at a price tag of only $1.6 million for next season before his continued restricted free agency. Whether he becomes a trusted two-way defenseman is an open question, but even if his primary function is as a penalty killing specialist, the Kraken could do a lot worse.

Dallas Stars

Goalie: Ben Bishop

Defensemen: Taylor Fedun, John Klingberg, Esa Lindell

Forwards: Jamie Benn, Jason Dickinson, Denis Gurianov, Roope Hintz, Joe Pavelski, Alexander Radulov, Tyler Seguin

Ben Bishop’s no-move clause makes any goalie discussion moot, though given his sub-$5 million cap hit for the next three years from a Vezina finalist in 2018-19, his level of player alone makes it moot. Defensively, the Stars have the luxury of not having to protect Miro Heiskanen just yet. They can instead protect their two best non-Heiskanen defensemen, Klingberg and Lindell, and protect another one just for fun. There is a case for protecting Jamie Oleksiak, but given that Taylor Fedun is on a mere six-figure deal and would make all the sense in the world for Seattle to nab, Fedun gets the honors.

Four forwards on the Dallas Stars have no-move clauses, so there isn’t much work for them to do here—Benn, Pavelski, Radulov, and Seguin are off the table (and would have been next summer as well). Roope Hintz and Denis Gurianov are probably next best forwards on the team and both are just entering restricted free agency, making them obvious protects for the Stars. And although he is less obvious than the first six, it’s hard to argue too vehemently against Jason Dickinson, who outscored any unprotected forwards this season, is entering his age-25 season, and is slated to make a moderate $1.5 million next season.

With the twenty-second pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Radek Faksa, center from the Dallas Stars.

Although Faksa’s 11 goals and 20 total points last season were his lowest marks since his rookie season in 2015-16, the Czech center has exhibited a tempting repartee for the Kraken in his NHL career. A two-time Selke voter recipient, Faksa is certainly capable of playing and making a dent on the expansion team, particularly as his $2.2 million price tag in 2019-20 doesn’t suggest he is going to be a particularly expensive player following a down season.

Carolina Hurricanes

Goalie: Petr Mrazek

Defensemen: Dougie Hamilton, Brett Pesce, Jaccob Slavin

Forwards: Sebastian Aho, Warren Foegele, Martin Necas, Nino Niederreiter, Jordan Staal, Teuvo Teravainen, Vincent Trocheck

The bulk of Carolina’s goaltending last year was conducted by Petr Mrazek or James Reimer, and between the two, there isn’t really much of a choice—Mrazek is younger, better, and cheaper. Defensively, the biggest question arguably was whether to protect four players, as this was the definite strength of the Hurricanes last year. Really solid defensemen such as Jake Gardiner and Brady Skjei were unable to be protected because of the presence of Hamilton, the best overall defenseman on the team, Pesce, perhaps the most envious contract among the Hurricanes defensive core from a team perspective with a $4.025 million cap hit for the next four years, and Slavin, whose $5.3 million cost for the next five seasons is a bargain if he can continue to play like a top pairing defenseman.

With Andrei Svechnikov tenure-protected, the fact that the Hurricanes are using a NMC on Jordan Staal feels a bit more palatable. Sebastian Aho, who led the Hurricanes in goals and points, is an easy choice—he may not quite be to, say, the Connor McDavid tier of offensive superweapon, but he is more or less a blank-check worthy player—his $8.454 million for four year price tag given that he is only 23 is quite reasonable. Teuvo Teravainen, has become an assist-heavy wizard since joining the Hurricanes, and at $5.4 million for the next four years, that’s quite the treat. Niederreiter and Trocheck are second-tier stars by comparison, but each has flashed excellence, and their contracts are reasonable for a team that views itself as a legitimate contender. Luckily for the Hurricanes, their next two protects go to Foegele, who is just now entering his RFA years, and Martin Necas, who still has two more years of an entry-level contract following a 36-point season in 2019-20.

With the twenty-third pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Haydn Fleury, defenseman from the Carolina Hurricanes.

Everyone knows that if you want your expansion team to be successful, you need to draft a guy with the last name Fleury. In this case, it is a 24 year-old defenseman who is six years removed from being a #7 overall pick. Although he hasn’t quite lived up to that hype, Fleury did tally 14 points with good possession numbers last season, and given his $850,000 tag last season, he should be a low-cost solution for the Kraken.

Vegas Golden Knights

Goalie: Marc-Andre Fleury

Defensemen: Nicolas Hague, Nate Schmidt, Shea Theodore

Forwards: William Karlsson, Jonathan Marchessault, Max Pacioretty, Reilly Smith, Chandler Stephenson, Mark Stone, Alex Tuch

Vegas is in a precarious situation with regards to Marc-Andre Fleury, as they are widely rumored to want to retain Robin Lehner and shop Fleury. But if they expose Fleury, Vegas is at risk of losing out on either goaltender, and given Fleury’s cockroach-like survival skills, this could be a potential embarrassment. Defensively, the Golden Knights retain their top pairing defensemen in Schmidt and Theodore, while also retaining Nicolas Hague, a 21 year-old still on his entry level contract. Given his astonishing penchant for scoring in the OHL, where he tallied 35 goals and 43 assists in 2017-18, he has very high upside and losing him for nothing would be a real shame.

Vegas has five forwards who could be considered truly integral, and all of them are on good-to-great contracts—Karlsson, Marchessault, Pacioretty, Smith, and Stone (who has a NMC). While Alex Tuch had a lackluster 2019-20, with only 17 points, $4.75 million for six years is still a bargain for the type of player he was in prior seasons. While Vegas could try to retain Paul Stastny, a bit overpaid but integral to the team, or William Carrier, who has signed a team-friendly extension, they instead protect Chandler Stephenson, who had by far his best NHL run after Vegas acquired him last season, having scored 22 points in 41 games while making only $1.05 million and remaining in restricted free agency.

With the twenty-fourth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Nick Cousins, winger from the Vegas Golden Knights.

Before the postseason began, Cousins had only played in seven games for Vegas (scoring one goal and recording two assists), which means the team probably isn’t that attached to him. But the twenty-seven year-old has displayed some scoring ability, with two double-digit goal seasons, and he reached 27 and 25 points over the last two seasons, along with solid defensive play. Cousins probably isn’t a star, but with his 2019-20 price tag at $1 million and a minimal raise at most likely being on the way, he doesn’t have to be.

Pittsburgh Penguins

Goalie: Tristan Jarry

Defensemen: Brian Dumoulin, Kris Letang, Marcus Pettersson

Forwards: Sidney Crosby, Jake Guentzel, Kasperi Kapanen, Evgeni Malkin, Jared McCann, Bryan Rust, Jason Zucker

For the second consecutive expansion draft, the Penguins are leaving a Stanley Cup-winning goalie exposed, but this time, they aren’t doing so because they are protecting a different one. But Tristan Jarry substantially outplayed Matt Murray this season, and while Murray, who made $3.75 million as an RFA last season, is hardly overpriced, Jarry is just now entering restricted free agency. Defensively, Kris Letang is a given, both because of his status as a Penguins all-timer and because he has a no-move clause. With John Marino, the team’s stud rookie, still under team control, the Penguins are able to solidify their current top-two pairings by also protecting Marcus Pettersson, a youngster, and Brian Dumoulin, a less-youngster, and leaving the most notable unprotected defenseman for the Penguins as Jack Johnson.

The Penguins have two forwards with no-move clauses, and they are the exact two you assume do—Crosby and Malkin, unless they had completely fallen off a cliff, were locks to remain on the Penguins, anyway. While Jake Guentzel and Bryan Rust’s reputations are impossible to separate from their play with playing alongside Crosby or Malkin, their statistics and relatively economical contracts make them impossible to push aside. Jared McCann has managed 35 points in each of the last two seasons, which is certainly acceptable for a player who only made $1.25 million last season and shouldn’t expect more than a marginal raise in 2020-21. The last two protects are reserved for new addition Kasperi Kapanen, whose departure from Toronto was for entirely cap-related reasons (though his $3.2 million salary isn’t that prohibitive for most teams), and Jason Zucker, whose $5.5 million cap hit is a bit concerning but who has scored at least 20 goals in each of the last four seasons.

With the twenty-fifth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Teddy Blueger, center from the Pittsburgh Penguins.

The Latvian center is certainly cost-effective, at $750,000 for next season followed by restricted free agency, and at that price, any level of productivity is probably acceptable, especially considering the Kraken could have nabbed Patric Hornqvist or Brandon Tanev, granted at much steeper prices. Blueger alternated between Pittsburgh and the AHL in 2018-19 before spending the entirety of 2019-20 with the Penguins, where he scored nine goals and 13 assists. A low-risk option who may end up getting some minutes at some point.

Philadelphia Flyers

Goalie: Brian Elliott

Defensemen: Shayne Gostisbehere, Philippe Myers, Ivan Provorov, Travis Sanheim

Forwards: Sean Couturier, Claude Giroux, Kevin Hayes, Travis Konecny

What a strange group of protected players the Flyers have. The strangest player is Brian Elliott, a player the Flyers had no concerns about leaving, since he is an unrestricted free agent. The Flyers do not have a single draft-eligible player who is not scheduled to become a free agent, as starter Carter Hart has only been a professional for two seasons, so they went ahead and protected Brian Elliott just to allow a veteran they like to get his name in the papers. And then defensively, the Flyers opted for four defensemen to protect—Provorov, the 23 year-old on a club-friendly $6.75 million for five years deal is a given, while Sanheim, who is just 24, gets the benefit of a known $3.25 million salary for next year before continuing in restricted free agency. Philippe Myers is just entering restricted free agency, a thing the team might not have noticed much had he not just concluded a breakout season in which he supplemented his 16 regular season points with an unexpected three playoff goals. And while Shayne Gostisbehere is coming off a certainly rough season, and his $4.5 million salary over the next three years is relevant, he has shown more upside than any other defenseman on the roster by a fairly wide margin.

Because of their protection of four defensemen, the Flyers only get to protect four forwards, two of whom have no-moves: Giroux, the team’s captain who would have been difficult to not protect for political reasons if nothing else, and Hayes, who did about what he was expected to do last season in the first year of his seven-year contract. The next choice is fairly obvious in Sean Couturier, who scored 59 points in 69 games in a Selke-winning campaign while making just $4.33 million. And rounding out the list of protected players, in a list which notably leaves veterans like Jakub Voracek and James van Riemsdyk unprotected, is Travis Konecny, the 23 year-old who led the Flyers in goals and points in 2019-20. The protected forward list may be brief, but it is certainly strong.

With the twenty-sixth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Oskar Lindblom, winger from the Philadelphia Flyers.

Oskar Lindblom, who just turned 24 last month, is due to make $3 million for each of the next three seasons and will continue to be under team control through restricted free agency, so he could be seen as a bit of a long-term project. And although he only played in 30 games last season, he tallied 11 goals and seven assists, which is a great way to inspire confidence. In the season before, Lindblom scored 17 goals and 16 assists. Lindblom may not become a top-line guy, but the Kraken are hoping that Lindblom can become a mainstay of their middle-six forwards for the next several seasons.

Washington Capitals

Goalie: Vitek Vanecek

Defensemen: John Carlson, Michal Kempny, Jonas Siegenthaler

Forwards: Nicklas Backstrom, Evgeny Kuznetsov, T.J. Oshie, Alex Ovechkin, Richard Panik, Jakub Vrana, Tom Wilson

Vitek Vanecek is a decent minor-league goalie that the Capitals are protecting purely for depth—Braden Holtby is a pending free agent, Ilya Samsonov is not draft eligible, and Pheonix Copley is somehow a bit overpaid at $1.1 million for the next two seasons. Defensively, Norris finalist John Carlson is an obvious call, even if his $8 million per season for six years renders him not quite a bargain. And while there is certainly a temptation to hold on to Dmitry Orlov, who is still a solid enough defenseman, Michal Kempny is a slightly lesser version at less than half the price. The final protection goes to Jonas Siegenthaler, undeniably a lesser defenseman but a player who showed defensive promise and is an inexpensive asset for a team with a bunch of expensive players.

Imagine the mutiny that would come from the Capitals losing Alex Ovechkin in an expansion draft—this will not be happening, but just imagine it. Nicklas Backstrom, the longtime Stockton to Ovi’s Malone, has a no-move clause, not that he would he unprotected anyway. Because the Capitals at this point don’t really have much choice but to keep chugging along with the personnel they have left over from 2018, the talented but also well-compensated veterans Kuznetsov and Oshie are also locked in. Richard Panik is coming off a lackluster season, but at $2.75 million, even this diminished version of him would be fine. Jakub Vrana, the rare Capitals player who seems to be ascending, is coming off a 25-goal season, which is following a 24-goal season, and he is just 24 while still in the midst of restricted free agency, so he is an obvious protect. #7 is a slightly more controversial call, with the divisive Tom Wilson being protected despite four remaining seasons at over $5 million a year, but Wilson is also deceptively young (he may have an antiquated style of pestering play, but he is only 26) and is coming off back-to-back 20+ goal seasons, even if he is somewhat of a product of the system.

With the twenty-seventh pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Lars Eller, center from the Washington Capitals.

Lars Eller is effectively the last veteran the Capitals couldn’t protect. At 31, he doesn’t fit the mold of a bunch of Kraken picks, but coming off a 16 goals, 23 assists season, and at a non-excessive $3.5 million tag for the next three years, Lars Eller will be given a chance to compete for first-line playing time. If the Kraken are able to contend right away, Eller will be a huge part of the reason why.

Colorado Avalanche

Goalie: Philipp Grubauer

Defensemen: Samuel Girard, Ryan Graves, Erik Johnson

Forwards: Andre Burkovsky, Tyson Jost, Nazem Kadri, Gabriel Landeskog, Nathan MacKinnon, Valeri Nichushkin, Mikko Rantanen

The Avalanche have two goalies they’d probably like to protect in Grubauer and Pavel Francouz, but while the latter performed a little stronger last season, Grubauer has long been Colorado’s guy—either goalie has a roughly equal chance of being snagged, and the Avalanche would feel worse if they lost Grubauer than Francouz. Defensively, Erik Johnson is saddled with a no-move clause the Avalanche may regret (less because Johnson isn’t worth protecting, but because other guys are), though Cale Makar being ineligible might warm their hearts. Samuel Girard, the 22 year-old defenseman who produced nearly half a point a game last season, is extended for the next seven seasons at a reasonable $5 million per year, and Ryan Graves, though a bit less explosive than Girard, had a league-best +40 last season and was third in the NHL in Defensive Point Shares—not bad for a guy who was still on his ELC.

Nathan MacKinnon may have the most desirable contract in the NHL for a team, as he will make only $6.3 million for the next three years to play Hart-caliber center. While Mikko Rantanen’s $9.25 million price tag didn’t pay dividends in 2019-20, as he only played 42 games (but totaled 41 points), but his talent is absolutely undeniable. Captain Gabriel Landeskog only has one year remaining, but for just a hair over $5.5 million, he’s a bargain. Nazem Kadri was a revelation in his first year from Toronto, and he has two years remaining at $4.5 million with the potential to be a strong #2 center. A pair of 25 year-old RFAs in Burakovsky and Nichushkin are similarly valuable players who could very conceivably be secondary scoring options for a championship team. For their final protect, the Avalanche opt less for a proven commodity and more for potential in Tyson Jost, who is just entering restricted free agency at 22.

With the twenty-eighth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select J.T. Compher, winger from the Colorado Avalanche.

Compher makes $3.5 million for the next three years and isn’t one of the super-premium Avalanche forwards, so the team should consider him relatively expendable. But for Seattle, there is a lot of potential here. Compher is just 25 and has cleared 30 points in each of the last two seasons. He has logged time on both the Colorado power play and penalty kill units, and for his career, Compher has more takeaways than giveaways. In Colorado, J.T. Compher is somewhat expendable, but for the Kraken, Compher could be useful in many different ways.

Tampa Bay Lightning

Goalie: Andrei Vasilevskiy

Defensemen: Erik Cernak, Victor Hedman, Mikhail Sergachev

Forwards: Anthony Cirelli, Blake Coleman, Alex Killorn, Nikita Kucherov, Ondrej Palat, Brayden Point, Steven Stamkos

A team is loaded with superpower as the Lightning was always inevitably going to have to risk some terrific talent, but Vasilevskiy was never at risk—as great as the skaters on the Lightning are, it is impossible to imagine the organization handing the reigns over to Curtis McElhinney. Defensively, Hedman might be the best blue-liner in the NHL, and he is making a hair under $8 million, so even if he didn’t have a no-move, he would be a slam-dunk to move heaven and earth to retain. Rather than trying to hold on to veterans Ryan McDonagh or Braydon Coburn, the Lightning make the obvious choice and protect their young, up-and-comers who are just now exiting their ELCs—Cernak, the physical 23 year-old Slovakian, and even more significantly Sergachev, the 22 year-old Russian who scored a career-high 10 goals last season and is already probably the best non-Hedman defenseman on the Lightning.

The group protected among the forwards is every bit as loaded. They do have two NMCs—Kucherov, the defending Hart Trophy winner who would easily be protected anyway, and Stamkos, whose injury history makes him a tad more frustrating but whose production when healthy makes $8.5 million per year seem like an impossible bargain. Brayden Point is the other indispensable Lightning forward—only 24, his 25 goals and 64 points in 66 games only looks underwhelming compared to his 41 goals and 92 points in 79 games the year before. Ondrej Palat is slightly older than Point and Kucherov and his $5.3 million is a tad more commensurate with his talents, but given the chemistry he has with his linemates, that is not something the Lightning would want to give up. Alex Killorn and Anthony Cirelli are both top-line center talents who happen to play on a team with Brayden Point and Steven Stamkos, but at $4.45 million and the early stages of restricted free agency, respectively, they aren’t paid like them. Blake Coleman might be a bit of a step down by the standards of the rest of the Lightning forwards, but the late-season acquisition from the New Jersey Devils is coming off back-to-back 20+ goal seasons and received Selke votes this season, quite the accomplishments for a player who has developed a strangely religious grit-and-sandpaper guy reputation.

With the twenty-ninth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Tyler Johnson, center from the Tampa Bay Lightning.

I mean, if you’re Tampa Bay, what can you do? You wouldn’t rather give up Tyler Johnson than any of the forwards listed above, but you also don’t want to lose him for nothing. The 30 year-old center isn’t cheap, at $5 million for each of the next four years, but he is certainly a player the Kraken will expect to build their first line around. In his career, Johnson has four 20-goal seasons, five 40-point seasons, and three seasons in which he received Selke votes. Playing for Tampa Bay has meant that Johnson never got a chance to become the guy, but he may get that chance in Seattle.

St. Louis Blues

Goalie: Jordan Binnington

Defensemen: Vince Dunn, Colton Parayko, Marco Scandella

Forwards: Ivan Barbashev, Ryan O’Reilly, David Perron, Zach Sanford, Brayden Schenn, Jaden Schwartz, Vladimir Tarasenko

Despite Binnington’s postseason struggles last season, there is zero chance the Blues are going to give up their Stanley Cup-winning goaltender coming off an All-Star season for $4.4 million for free. Defensively, Alex Pietrangelo’s pending free agency makes the defensive candidates a bit thin, though Colton Parayko, a top pairing defenseman on most teams who will make just $5.5 million for his next two, in his prime, seasons, and Vince Dunn, for whatever it’s worth the team’s plus-minus leader last season, who is just 23 and entering his first post-ELC season. The third pick goes to Scandella, a late-season addition who has experience playing on (lower-tier) top pairings and is under a reasonable $3.275 million cap hit for each of the next four seasons.

The forward position is a little bit tougher for the Blues, as nearly the entire 2019-20 roster is eligible (the exceptions are Robert Thomas and Jordan Kyrou, who are both too inexperienced, and Troy Brouwer, the late-season add who is a pending free agent). Ryan O’Reilly, the team’s leading scorer, defending Conn Smythe winner, and perpetual Selke candidate, is an automatic--$7.5 million for three years, considered a bit hefty when the Blues acquired the contract, now looks like a bargain. The team’s other $7.5 million contract, that of Vladimir Tarasenko, looks less automatic than it once did, as Tarasenko is dealing with a lingering injury, but when Tarasenko is right, he is such a superstar that the Blues avoid risking losing him. Brayden Schenn has played some of his best hockey since joining the Blues, and even though seven years at $6.5 million is too much to be considered a bargain, he’s still a very good player. While the Blues famously did not protect David Perron in the Vegas expansion draft, he is now coming off his best NHL season and his scoring levels go well beyond his $4 million cap hit. And Jaden Schwartz, although he only has one season left under contract, bounced back beautifully from a down 2018-19, and a 22 goal, 35 assist player is worth protecting even if it’s only for a year. For the last two slots, the Blues opt for a pair of early-RFA guys in Barbashev and Sanford, both of whom went from rotational guys who would semi-often be healthy scratched to everyday lineup presences last season, particularly Sanford, tied for fourth on the team in goals last season.

With the thirtieth pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Oskar Sundqvist, center from the St. Louis Blues.

Although he is not as accomplished as Tyler Johnson, this is a similar case in that a guy who tends to get lost in the shuffle for his current NHL team will now get a chance to be a prominent member of one. The 26 year-old Sundqvist, whose $2.75 million cap hit for the next three seasons is particularly reasonable if he can break into the top six, is coming off two consecutive double-digit goal seasons in which he played a significant share of his minutes in the defensive zone. Sundqvist has won the Stanley Cup with each of his two NHL teams so far, and Seattle is hoping his magic continues.

Boston Bruins

Goalie: Tuukka Rask

Defensemen: Brandon Carlo, Matt Grzelcyk, Charlie McAvoy

Forwards: Patrice Bergeron, Charlie Coyle, Jake Debrusk, David Krejci, Brad Marchand, David Pastrnak, Nick Ritchie

Despite the wishes of a handful of New England sports talk lunatics, Rask is firmly entrenched as Boston’s top goalie. Defensively, the pending free agencies of Zdeno Chara and Torey Krug make who to protect pretty clear, as the team’s three best remaining defensemen are all pretty definitively underpaid—McAvoy, at $4.9 million for the next two years, Carlo, at $2.85 million next season followed by further RFA time, and Grzelcyk, who made $1.4 million last year and is still a restricted free agent. They could bank on a John Moore bounce-back season, but that would require leaving a ton of good forwards exposed.

The Bruins have three forwards with no-move clauses—two of them, Bergeron and Marchand, are on bargain contracts and would be easily protected anyway, while the third, Coyle, doesn’t have a horrible cap hit considering the caliber of player involved ($5.25 million) but does have a hefty six-year term. David Pastrnak is the obvious protect—the NHL’s leading goal scorer at $6.66 million for three years was clearly a deal with the devil. David Krejci is arguably a bit overpaid at this point at $7.25 million, but it’s only for one more year and the Bruins would surely rather not lose out on their long-time #2 center for nothing. Jake Debrusk is one of the easier calls on the team, as he is just leaving his ELC and has never scored fewer than 16 goals in his three NHL seasons—he will barely be 24 when the next season begins. For their final protected slot, the Bruins opt for Nick Ritchie, slated to make a hair under $1.5 million next season, who has only played in 15 total games with the Bruins (he was acquired from Anaheim mid-season) but has demonstrated solid physicality and occasional scoring touch at a low price.

With the thirty-first and final pick in the 2020 NHL Expansion Draft, the Seattle Kraken select Ondrej Kase, winger from the Boston Bruins.

Kase, who was acquired as part of the deal with Anaheim that got David Backes off Boston’s books, only played in six regular-season games for the Bruins, followed by eleven in the postseason, but in his time in Anaheim, he proved a capable scorer. Two seasons ago, Kase put up 20 goals, and despite only played in 30 games in 2018-19, he totaled 11. Kase is coming off a bit of a down season, but he is still only 24 years old and at $2.6 million, his cost isn’t especially prohibitive.

And with that, the Seattle Kraken expansion draft has concluded. Below is a general approximation of what the team’s Opening Night lines would look like, based solely on draft results.

Goalies: Juuse Saros, Chris Driedger

Defensive Pairing 1: Alex Goligoski, Shea Weber

Defensive Pairing 2: Ryan Lindgren, Justin Holl

Defensive Pairing 3: Adam Pelech, Ethan Bear

Forward Line 1: Radek Faksa, Tyler Johnson, Ondrej Kase

Forward Line 2: Ryan Donato, Lars Eller, J.T. Compher

Forward Line 3: Oskar Lindblom, Nick Cousins, Oskar Sundqvist

Forward Line 4: Sonny Milano, Teddy Blueger, Sam Bennett

Healthy Scratches: Marcus Hogberg, Haydn Fleury, Zack MacEwen

Do I think the Seattle Kraken, as they currently stand, are a team capable of repeating the Vegas Golden Knights Stanley Cup Final run? No, I do not. Do I think the Seattle Kraken are capable of making the playoffs? Sure, but I wouldn’t bet on it. But I wouldn’t have bet on Vegas to do it, either. I do think this is a competent roster that wouldn’t completely embarrass itself and is certainly not the worst team in the NHL. The thirty-one players the Kraken selected, most of whom do not have salary commitments beyond next season, if you assume a minimum CBA-negotiated RFA raise for next season (which may seem generous, but given the financial uncertainty of the National Hockey League, I don’t think this is completely unreasonable), have a combined salary of $61,353,976, leaving them above the salary floor and with $20,146,024 to spare (even if I’m dramatically underestimating RFA wages this off-season, I guarantee I am not underestimating them by that much). Maybe Seattle can even make a run at Pietrangelo and Hall now. May the Kraken forever be unleashed.