2021 Expansion Draft: Rules and Strategies

The 2021 National Hockey League Expansion Draft will take place on July 21, when the brand new Seattle Kraken franchise will select 30 players. Every other NHL team, with the exception of the Vegas Golden Knights who are exempt from participation, will lose one -- and only one -- player omitted from their list of protected players.

On July 17, every participating NHL team must submit to the NHL by 5 p.m. ET, it's final list of protecting players. All remaining players who meet Expansion Draft Eligibility rules are potential fair game for the Kraken to select.
With the Expansion Draft looming, it may be useful to provide a refresher of the rules and strategies that teams employ.
The rules in 2021 are identical to the 2017 Expansion Draft. As with before, teams have two options for crafting their protection list. They can either protect seven forwards, three defensemen and one goaltender or eight position players (any desired combination of forwards and defensemen) and one goalie.
Who is eligible for selection? All players who have completed an entry-level contract (in most cases, meaning that they've completed at least three professional seasons) are potentially eligible, depending on their contractual status for 2021-22 and health. Specifically:
In terms of formulating a protected player list, all teams MUST protect any player with a no-movement clause (NMC) in his contract unless the player agrees to waive it. For the Flyers, team captain Claude Giroux and center Kevin Hayes must be protected due to having an NMC.
Philadelphia Inquirer beat writer Sam Carchidi tweeted what he expects -- and is widely rumored elsewhere but not confirmed by the Flyers' organization -- to be the team's list of protected players:
Seven forwards: Claude Giroux (NMC), Kevin Hayes (NMC), Sean Couturier, Travis Konecny, Scott Laughton, Oskar Lindblom, and Nolan Patrick.
Three defensemen: Ivan Provorov, Travis Sanheim (RFA), Phil Myers.
One goaltender: Carter Hart (RFA).
The unprotected list would include all of the following: Jakub Voracek, James van Riemsdyk, Nicolas Aube-Kubel, Shayne Gostisbehere, Justin Braun, Robert Hägg and Phantoms goalie Felix Sandström..
In terms of salary considerations, here is the relevant information:
Voracek:three seasons of remaining term, $8.25 million average annual value (AAV), real-dollar salaries of $7.5 million in 2021-22, $6.25 million in 2022-23 ($5 million signing bonus installment on July 1, 2022, $1.25 million salary for the season), $7.5 million in 2023-24.
JVR:two seasons of remaining term, $7 million AAV, real dollar salaries of $7 million in 2021-22 ($1 million signing bonus installment this summer, $6 million for the season), and $5 million in 2022-23 ($1 million signing bonus installment on July 1, 2022, $4 million for the season).
Gostisbehere: two seasons of remaining term, $4.5 million AAV, real dollar salaries of $3.25 million in 2021-22 ($2.25 million signing bonus installment due this summer then $1 million base salary for the season), and $3.25 million in 2022-23 ($2.25 million signing bonus installment due on July 1, 2022, $1 million base salary for the season).
Aube-Kubel:One season of remaining term, then an arbitration-eligible RFA in the summer of 2022. His remaining contract will pay him $1.225 milion next season but his cap hit will be $1.075 million.
Braun: One season of remaining term, then a UFA. His real-dollar salary and cap hit for next season are $1.8 million.
Hägg: One season of remaining term, then a UFA. His cap hit for 2021-22 will be $1.6 million but his real-dollar salary will be $1.7 million.
Impending restricted free agents are generally eligible for the Expansion Draft, either on the protected or unprotected side, as long as they receive a qualifying contract offer from their current team. Unrestricted free agents need not be protected but Seattle will have an exclusive window to negotiate with UFAs and, if a player is signed by the Kraken, that signing will count as if the player had been selected from his now-former NHL club in the Expansion Draft,
Who is exempt from the Draft? Essentially, all unsigned Entry Draft picks, slide-rule eligible prospects and all pro players who still have at least one season remaining on their entry-level contract are exempt.
For the Flyers, exempt players include the likes of Joel Farabee, Cam York, Morgan Frost, Wade Allison, Tanner Laczynski, Egor Zamula, Tyson Foerster, Zayde Wisdom, Mason Millman, Wyatte Wylie, Linus Högberg, goalie prospects Samuel Ersson and KIrill Ustimenko, and unsigned collegiate player Jay O'Brien.
While the rules for the 2021 Expansion Draft will be identical to the 2017 Draft, teams strategies for approaching the Draft will likely be different. It may be tough for Seattle to duplicate all the wheeling and dealing that Las Vegas did in building a roster that ultimately reached the Stanley Cup Final in its inaugural season.
Back in 2017, former Flyers general manager Ron Hextall elected not to do what many other NHL teams did -- make arrangements where they compensated Las Vegas either to not take a certain player off their list of unprotected players and/or to select a specific exposed player from another team's list and then flip them in a trade for Entry Draft pick assets and/or prospects.
Ultimately, the Flyers lost veteran role-playing center Pierre-Edouard Bellemare to Vegas in the 2017 Expansion Draft. Shortly before Philly finalized its protected list, the team traded forward Nick Cousins (whom the club did not have room to protect from the Expansion Draft) to the Arizona Coyotes. The Coyotes protected Cousins.
This time around, Chuck Fletcher said that he's potentially agreeable to making an arrangement with Seattle to either take a specific player from Philadelphia's unprotected ranks or make a side deal that involves flipping a selected player from another team.
" I'm open to either. I've had several conversations with Ron going back a few months now. We'll probably take guidance from them if there's something that they think would make sense for them and would make sense for us. My expectation is we'll submit the list and if whether there'll be conversations after we submit the list or not, time will tell. We're certainly comfortable to submitting the list and having them select a player. I've just indicated to them if they have ideas on something else they want to accomplish to let us know," Fletcher said on July13.