Crossing Our T's & Dotting Our I's (part II)

Today the flood gates opened! Deputy Commishioner, Bill Daley, finally gave the hockey world some details for the expansion process at least with regards to the draft. I will touch on that in-depth shortly, but it is important to note two key statements. First, Bill Foley claims that he expects an announcement within the month. Secondly, at the longest-case scenario, Daley expects a decision no later than June. This roughly 3 month window is made even more enticing with the news from many of the Canadian media that almost everyone seems to believe 1) the NHL will award at least one team and 2) Las Vegas is the only one that will be added.

With that speculation out of the way, we can dive into what the current 30 teams are now gnawing over with the news that broke today. As the GM meetings wrapped up, today’s discussion was on the possible aspects of the expansion draft. The details leaked include:

-          Teams can protect up to 3 defensemen, 7 forwards, (or some combination of 8 skaters) and 1 goalie and each of the current teams can only lose 1 player (if one team is awarded) 

-          Players on their first or second year of an entry-level contract are ineligible to be drafted.

-          Teams must expose at least 25% of the previous year’s payroll.

-          The expectation is that players with no-move clauses/no-trade clauses will not be eligible, and further its possible those players must be included in a teams protected players list (as reported by Elliotte Friedman on yesterday’s Hockey Central at Noon on Sportsnet).

-          There was no scenario presented where teams are allowed to keep more than 1 goaltender.

Of interest past these nuggets are multiple opinions that teams this off-season will execute free agent deals with the strict intent to make those players available for an expansion draft, or that Vegas could select upcoming unrestricted free agents in the draft in order for them to receive any forthcoming compensatory picks in the next entry-level draft. Finally, all of these pieces need to be voted on by the NHL Player’s Association. The rumor that players with no-movement clauses  will be eligible is a two-front preposition; firstly, it means that that league is willing to stay on a positive relationship with the PA (which bodes well for a new CBA in 2018 without a lockout), and secondly it gives this process no foreseeable reason for it not to be approved by the players.

Now, if we take all of that into account, where does that leave us? For an example, let’s take the Stanley Cup Champion, Chicago Blackhawks, and see how Stan Bowman has to work with. In this exercise, let’s presume that the expansion draft will take place this June prior to the entry level draft. Also, let’s work within a system where any player with a no-movement clause will be eligible, and will count against the 11 players Chicago will be able to protect. Lastly, the Blackhawks currently has a cap hit of $71.234 million, meaning they need to expose at least $17.81 million for Las Vegas to select from.

Lets begin by removing those no-movement clause players. Bryan Bickell, Brent Seabrook, Corey Crawford, Nick Hjalmmarsson, Patrick Kane, Duncan Keith, and Jonathan Toews are safe. Second, we remove any player who is a 1^st or 2^nd year professional. Kyle Baun, Vincent Hinostroza, Tanner Kero, Artemni Panarin, Dillon Fournier, Erik Gustafsson, and Ville Pokka are also safe. Because Chicago has 7 players locked with NMCs, they are only allowed to protect 4 more (and all must be skaters since Crawford is already a protected goaltender). Those players I would suspect would be Artem Anisimov, Marian Hossa, Markus Kruger, and Teuvo Teravainen. Finally, we have our list of players which will be eligible for Las Vegas to select from (the total salary made available is $11.4175 million):

Player	2015-16 Salary	Contract
Desjardins	0.8
Fraser	0.65	RFA
Haggerty	0.925	ELC-3
McNeill	0.863333	ELC-3
Panik	0.975	RFA
Rasmussen	0.575	RFA
Ross	0.636667	ELC-3
Shaw	2	RFA
Brisebois	0.655	ELC-3
Rundblad	0.1
Schilling	0.575
Svedberg	0.575
Van Riemsdyk	0.925	ELC-3
Carruth	0.575	RFA
Darling	0.5875

With this group of players, you’ll notice that Chicago is roughly $6.4 million short of the minimum 25% rule, meaning that they will need to unprotect either 1) Marian Hossa AND Markus Kruger or 2) Anisimov AND Kruger in order to comply. That is where this is going to be extremely fun for Las Vegas’ fans, and will be as equally annoying for the other 30 teams and their fans. 

Crossing Our T's & Dotting Our I's (part I)

[This is the first piece in a two-part column on the expansion front. In Part 1, I give you a reset as to what has transpired thus far. In Part 2, I will provide the insides to what is being leaked from the GM meetings and how it will affect the process.]

As the NHLs general managers glad-hand this week down in Florida, there has been an uptick of discussions regarding expansion. This time it isn’t due to a softly-veiled comment (Foley’s January/February interview), but an itemized meeting topic in which the GMs around the league can begin to get a feeling for what is to come should the league finally come around and award a franchise to Las Vegas.

For the sake of this piece, if not simplistic honesty, I will only be including one expansion team in the discussion. It’s been clear that Quebec is a second option to expand, but for many reasons it won’t happen. For those nuggets I would extend an invitation to the numerous podcasts and articles detailing why they are not going to be selected. For Vegas, their ticket was punched as the main items have been checked off the list in recent years; an owner willing to pony up a rumored $500 million for a team, a stadium that is state-of-the-art and ready to house a team, and 14,000 season ticket commitments. At issue now for Foley and for the league are two large points that have been discussed for months; when will the team take to the ice, and how the rules will be structured for them to field a team.

Through the last 6 months, it has been made clear that the 100^th anniversary of the NHL would be the key season to expand, which would keep with the tradition of making large moves at important milestones (the league’s Original Six, the Western Expansion at its 50^th Anniversary). So the next question that I had was how soon a team would be able to drop the puck after getting a seat at the table. With that in mind, I was able to find an outlier in the 1990s expansion process whereas Nashville was able to enter the league only a year after being awarded a franchise. In January, I spoke with their play-by-play announcer, Pete Weber, who was able to give me a first-hand account of how the process played out. What I learned was that first off, the ownership was willing to get into the league as fast as possible to grab market share (this was to be the season prior to the Titans moving to Nashville, so they wanted to be the first franchise), and secondly that a quick turnaround is possible. Both of these items are mirrored to Las Vegas’ situation and desires.

As the dog days of winter set in, there was a significant lull in any expansion discussion. This lead many to pile on that the process had stalled. The Executive Committee met on a couple of occasions to discuss the bid, but there was very little that became public. We were led to believe that the sure thing that was the Las Vegas Rat Pack was over (maybe until Seattle joined the process?). With this week’s GM meeting, however the rational thinking returned. The conversation is now much more real with the team’s roster-builders knowing that they need to be involved in the process prior to the end of the season, free-agency, etc. How are they going to prepare for 2016-17 and beyond when they know they are going to have a wide-ranging change in the run-up to 2017-18?

“We have a general sense of what it’s going to be just by having been part of past expansion drafts,” said Edmonton Oilers GM Peter Chiarelli. “I think we’re all planning already, it would be nice if we could have it by this June.” (http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nhl-puck-daddy/nhl-gms-thrilled-with-3-on-3-all-star-game--gms-meetings-notebook-191927469.html)

As Chiarelli rightly expresses, and to a bigger point, what made the lull around the trade deadline so significant is that how can the current 30 GMs be expected to go about business as usual without having the rules governing expansion? Quite simply they can’t, and further, without knowing they are unable to fully exploit the up-coming changes. In the expansion period during the 90s, teams were allotted a certain number of players that could be protected from an expansion draft. What they were offer little to us now, and even less to anyone else who is being paid millions of dollars to win a Stanley Cup. The NHL now is much different from 16+ years ago. The league is younger, faster, and of course there is a salary cap.

So what is next? The GMs are most likely going to get the full monty in terms of what the Executive Committee has already shared with the Board of Governors. The inclusion of the GMs in this circle of information is a key step to the expansion process because it now shows there is enough of an understanding in the process to widen the depth of knowledge already collected.  When details start to fly, I will return with a comprehensive look at what it all means for the formation of a new expansion team in year 1.

A New Kind of Player “Rental”

It has been my belief that when the NHL finally releases the rules for the upcoming expansion draft that players with no-trade and no-movement clauses will be available to be selected if not protected by their current teams. This is something to keep in mind as trades are made prior to the deadline.  Today’s news that Dion Phaneuf was traded to Ottawa is a prime example of why. While this is a fantastic trade for Toronto (as they are full-go on a rebuild), this isn’t a zero-sum trade, as it makes sense for Ottawa to take on some salary (in the short-term) to get back into the playoff hunt.

Phaneuf, who turns 31 in April, has a $7 million AAV for the next 5 seasons ending in 2020-21, and he hasn’t played up to the contract to this point. That contract has looked bad for Toronto NOW, but Ottawa took a chance today to see what he can provide in a 2^nd line role. Looking up in the standings, they are behind 4 teams for the last wild card spot in the East (including the Islanders, who currently hold that last wild card position, and have 3 games in hand), so a move had to be made. With a -13 goal differential, and giving up the most goals in the conference, this move will assist in shoring up the blue line pairings.

For the interest of Las Vegas fans, deals like this should be viewed as what it will mean in terms of the expansion draft. Ottawa (if my assumption that trade and movement clauses will not apply to the draft pool), is able to take on the ridiculous cap hit in the short-term just to see where a Phaneuf rental can give them for the rest of this year and through at least a full season next year. If made available to Vegas, he could provide a player with name recognition that would do well in a market with a smaller microscope than that Toronto puts on its players. The Edmonton-native is now a former captain of the most rabid hockey market in the league, and could easily fill the same role with Vegas.

As players move throughout the league prior to the trade deadline, through free agency this summer, and prior to next year’s trade deadline, keep in mind that 2017-18 is in focus for every move.  Make no mistake that the Executive Committee and Board of Directors are sharing every bit of information in regards to expansion with their GMs. There is no secret inside those offices what is going to happen, and it is front and center as deals are being made for players. This thinking provides an interesting side-show in the actions of teams moving forward.

If a team is in on a player, is it worth it to take the risk to mortgage talent in a trade, or salary cap space in hopes that a Vegas team will snag them in a draft? Just because a player is made available to Vegas to select, does not mean that they have to do so. This is not a given that Foley and his GM will pick up every high salary player, but it does allow current teams an excuse to make moves that they wouldn’t normally engage in because they have a situation where they could be freed of fault for taking on such a chance. Further, it will be interesting to see who Foley tags as his GM and if that person has had any actions in some of these deals.

Tying Lesson of Nashville to Las Vegas

The NHL All-Star Game takes place this weekend, and with it, another chance to get some updates from the NHL’s commissioner himself about the status of the expansion process. With two special sessions undertaken by the executive committee regarding Las Vegas and Quebec this month, there should be enough of a foundation for Gary to share with the public. He will most likely echo what has already been written about, but in the off-chance there is big news I reached out the Nashville Predator’s play-by-play announcer Pete Weber on how Nashville got its start to see if we can come to any conclusions.

Nashville was given a conditional franchise in June of 1997 along with Atlanta, Minnesota, and Columbus. The plan was to have Nashville, along with Atlanta join in 1999, with Minnesota and Columbus jumping in for the 2000-01 season. According to Weber, however, Nashville lobbied the league to come in a year earlier than scheduled. “At the time, the plan was for the Predators to join the NHL the same year that the then-Tennessee Oilers were set to move to Nashville themselves.” This move to jump the gun was spear-headed by then owner Craig Leipold and the NHL would grant such a request if they could sell 12,000 season tickets by March of 1998. The early entry was granted and they were able to become the first professional franchise in Nashville without any competition. “In hindsight, Nashville would have liked to have had joined with the Titans at the same time” Weber added, “because that first year for the Titans was when they went to the Super Bowl and that generate a lot of [interest]. It ended up favoring Nashville obviously because they did not have to share [an expansion draft].”

As we stand with the NHL in regards to Vegas, we know there has been no formal recommendation made to move to a vote on expansion. It would be highly suspect that one would occur if there was not enough support for at least one team to be accepted. To round out the next handful of months, there feels as though there are a few chances to get this process completed. It is most likely that in order to have the expansion situation ironed out, there has to be a ton of work behind the scenes with the owners, the league, and the players association being conducted. Intertwined with such back-room talks has to be the input of Bill Foley, and it would be easy to see that given the practice arena is all but ready to go (such an undertaking does not happen on a hunch, and was not part of any multi-structure financing package since T-Mobile Arena stands on its own financially).

Could Foley quietly be leading a charge to entering into a Nashville-esque entry? It’s not probable, but the signs are all there – the least of which is the deafening silence coming from the Foley camp. It’s said throughout sports that whenever it is the quietest, that is when most of the work is being done…and it’s been awful quiet for an awfully long time.

Back to Mr. Weber who had an interesting tidbit as we drew our conversation to a close, “I think it will work in Las Vegas. I’ve always said that whatever of the pro leagues gets to Vegas first would have success.” He likened the situation of Las Vegas to Portland, where a singular pro franchise was able to draw an uninterrupted market for full control. The big item on the table would be television distribution where he added that it would be quite a feat to launch a regional sports network (RSN) in short order, and that most likely Vegas would need to piggy-back off of an established RSN such as Fox Sports’ Arizona or West (Los Angeles).