Expansion Draft Thoughts

[omgitshim 903]

With expansion on the horizon, it's time to take a moment to think about how the expansion draft will work. When Moscow and Malmo were introduced to the league recently, the rules were as follows: each team may protect 7 players and the GM player, any player with a NTC must waive their NTC in order to be exposed, and if a team does not expose at least one active member, a 3rd round pick in one of the next 3 drafts may be selected as well. In addition, the expansion team was randomly given a draft spot between 5 & 10, and for Malmo's expansion, Moscow was excluded from the teams that could be drafted from. I think we can adjust these rules a little bit. First, like before I would exclude Malmo from the expansion draft (as they were just added in S66 and haven't gotten their feet grounded yet) and I would consider excluding Moscow as well since they are just three seasons in, though I could go either way on that at the moment. As for the protections themselves, leave it at the 7 players plus the GM player, but make it that any player on a rookie contract next season (S66 or S67 players) only count as half a slot (i.e., protecting two S67 players counts as one protection). This would help keep rebuilding teams from losing their valuable young assets and force competing teams to make a decision between wanting to keep all their veteran players for a playoff run or hanging on to more young guys to start a rebuild of their own. Finally, since there are two expansion teams, each other team will have to lose two players this time instead of one. I think that we keep the must expose one active member or risk losing a 3rd round pick rule, but we don't expand that to two active players. That adds a little strategy for the expansion teams themselves as they could be stuck taking an inactive if the active player or draft pick is taken by the other team before them (and could end up in a situation where you don't take the best player available because the other player available from that team is still good while another team only has one worthwhile asset).