Why Vegas Nailed Its Expansion Draft and Seattle Didn't
Updated October 22, 2026
Updated October 22, 2026
When the Vegas Golden Knights entered the NHL in 2017, nobody expected much. Their roster consisted largely of players other teams were willing to lose, and the general assumption was that they'd spend their first few seasons near the bottom of the standings.
Eight months later, they were playing in the Stanley Cup Final.
Four years later, the Seattle Kraken entered the league under almost identical expansion-draft rules. They won 27 games, finished with 60 points and never came particularly close to the playoffs.
So what happened? Did Vegas simply draft better players? Was Seattle too cautious? Or had the rest of the NHL learned something from watching Vegas take advantage of its fellow general managers?
I think the answer is a combination of all three. But the most interesting part is that Vegas's success may have been the very thing that prevented Seattle from repeating it.
First, let's clear up a common misconception. The NHL didn't change the expansion-draft rules after watching Vegas reach the Stanley Cup Final in its inaugural season.
In fact, the league explicitly confirmed that Seattle's 2021 expansion draft followed the same rules as Vegas in 2017.
Expansion Draft Rule | Vegas 2017 | Seattle 2021 |
|---|---|---|
Players selected | 30 | 30 |
Selections per eligible team | 1 | 1 |
Protection option A | 7 forwards, 3 defensemen, 1 goalie | Same |
Protection option B | 8 skaters, 1 goalie | Same |
First- and second-year professionals | Exempt | Exempt |
Unsigned draft choices | Exempt | Exempt |
Active no-movement clauses | Must protect unless waived | Same |
Minimum positional selections | 14 F, 9 D, 3 G | Same |
Minimum players under contract | 20 | 20 |
Required draft salary value | 60–100% of prior cap ceiling | Same |
Special exemption | None | Vegas exempt |
There was one noteworthy difference. Vegas was exempt from Seattle's expansion draft, having entered the NHL only four years earlier. However, Seattle still selected 30 players from 30 eligible teams, exactly as Vegas had done.
The salary-cap ceiling was different, too, but the underlying requirements were identical.
The NHL hadn't weakened Seattle's position or made it harder to assemble a competitive roster. At least not through the rulebook.
The real difference was how other teams approached the process.
What George McPhee accomplished in 2017 was considerably more impressive than simply identifying the best unprotected players.
Vegas had one selection from each of the other 30 NHL teams, but McPhee understood that some general managers were far more concerned about losing certain players than others.
That created an opportunity.
If a team was desperate to protect an exposed player, Vegas could agree to select somebody else in exchange for additional compensation. And some teams were willing to pay handsomely for that privilege.
The results were remarkable. According to NHL.com's retrospective of the expansion draft, Vegas acquired seven additional players and 10 draft picks through side deals, on top of its 30 original selections.
Some of those transactions look almost ridiculous in hindsight.
Florida might be the most painful example. The Panthers left Jonathan Marchessault exposed despite his 30-goal season, and Vegas acquired Reilly Smith for a fourth-round pick in a related transaction.
Those two players eventually became integral parts of the Golden Knights' first line.
Anaheim effectively surrendered Shea Theodore, a promising young defenseman, to ensure Vegas selected Clayton Stoner. Theodore subsequently developed into a cornerstone of the Golden Knights' blue line and remains an important part of Vegas's defensive core in 2026-2027.
Minnesota parted with Alex Tuch as part of its arrangement involving Erik Haula. Columbus surrendered valuable draft capital and William Karlsson while using the process to move David Clarkson's contract.
Not every trade worked out, of course. But the important thing is that Vegas wasn't merely building its first NHL roster. It was also accumulating players, prospects and picks that could help the franchise for years.
And it wasn't finished. Some of those assets subsequently became useful trade chips as Vegas continued building toward its eventual Stanley Cup championship in 2023.
That aggressive approach has remained part of the franchise's identity. We explored another interesting example in our feature on how Vegas built a contender from the 2015 NHL Draft class.
McPhee essentially turned other teams' roster-management problems into opportunities for his own franchise.
Four years later, Ron Francis tried operating in a very different environment.
Here's perhaps the most revealing statistic from the two expansion drafts.
Vegas completed 10 expansion-draft trade transactions in 2017. Seattle completed zero draft-protection side deals in 2021.
Not one comparable arrangement that brought in extra assets for agreeing to select, or avoid selecting, a particular player.
The Associated Press reported extensively on the difference, including comments from general managers who had little interest in repeating their predecessors' mistakes.
Calgary GM Brad Treliving acknowledged that Seattle's asking price for an arrangement was more than the Flames were prepared to pay. Minnesota's Bill Guerin took a similarly straightforward approach: losing one player was unavoidable, but surrendering additional assets would only make matters worse.
In other words, teams had accepted something that appeared to frighten their counterparts in 2017.
They were going to lose a player. There was no reason to make that loss unnecessarily expensive.
And the lessons weren't limited to last-minute negotiations.
In April 2021, Sportsnet's Chris Johnston reported that the number of players whose no-movement clauses required expansion-draft protection had fallen from 66 in 2017 to 52 ahead of Seattle's draft.
Johnston explained that general managers had become more reluctant to hand out those clauses after recognizing the complications they created during the Vegas expansion process.
That's a fascinating detail because it shows how NHL teams had adjusted well before Seattle submitted its first selection.
They weren't simply negotiating differently. They had changed aspects of how they constructed their rosters and contracts.
The rules hadn't changed, but the people operating within them certainly had.
To be precise, Vegas was exempt from Seattle's draft, so only 30 of the NHL's other 31 teams actually participated. But the broader lesson had spread across the league.
I don't think it's fair to blame Seattle's disappointing expansion draft entirely on the other NHL general managers.
Ron Francis, Seattle's GM at the time, had opportunities to approach things differently. And some of his decisions deserve scrutiny.
For starters, there were reports that Seattle wanted first-round picks as compensation for certain protection arrangements. The idea wasn't unreasonable given what Vegas had extracted four years earlier, but the market had clearly changed.
At some point, you have to ask whether getting something in return would have been better than holding out for a deal that never materialized.
Then there's the salary-cap situation.
Seattle entered the league during the NHL's pandemic-era flat-cap environment, when several established teams were struggling to manage expensive contracts.
That should have presented opportunities. Seattle had significant cap flexibility and could theoretically have absorbed unwanted contracts in exchange for draft picks or prospects.
Instead, the Kraken emerged from the expansion draft with approximately $54 million committed against an $81.5 million salary ceiling, excluding some restricted free agents.
Keeping that flexibility wasn't necessarily a mistake. But cap space becomes particularly valuable when you can turn it into something useful.
The actual player selections also raised questions.
Seattle passed on Vladimir Tarasenko, who scored 34 goals the following season, and Matt Duchene, who scored 43. Both were expensive and carried legitimate concerns in July 2021, so it's too easy to criticize those decisions with hindsight.
Still, the Kraken also selected several players who contributed little or nothing at the NHL level, including Gavin Bayreuther and John Quenneville.
That conservative approach was difficult to reconcile with the lack of additional draft capital.
To be fair, Francis also landed Jared McCann, Vince Dunn, Jordan Eberle, Yanni Gourde and Adam Larsson. Those were useful building blocks, and Seattle wasn't wrong about every player.
But I can't help thinking the Kraken could have been a little more ambitious. Avoiding bad contracts is sensible. Avoiding almost every meaningful risk is another matter.
There's another part of the story that sometimes gets lost in the debate about general managers.
Vegas was extraordinarily good in its first season, and I don't think anyone could reasonably have predicted just how well things would come together.
Take William Karlsson.
He scored six goals for Columbus in 2016–17. One year later, playing for Vegas, he scored 43.
That's not a normal improvement. It's the sort of breakout season that changes an entire team's outlook. Karlsson subsequently established himself as an important part of the franchise and remains a key piece of Vegas's center depth.
Jonathan Marchessault produced 75 points, Reilly Smith added 60 and David Perron finished with 66. Erik Haula, another player acquired through the expansion process, contributed 29 goals.
Meanwhile, Marc-André Fleury delivered a .927 save percentage, and head coach Gerard Gallant somehow turned a collection of players from different organizations into one of the league's most effective teams.
Fleury would eventually retire in 2025 after 21 NHL seasons, but his performance during that inaugural Vegas campaign remains one of the defining seasons of his remarkable career.
Vegas finished 51–24–7 with 109 points before eventually losing to Washington in the Stanley Cup Final.
The Golden Knights deserve enormous credit for identifying talent and creating an environment where those players could thrive. But even excellent scouting cannot guarantee that several players will simultaneously produce career-best seasons.
Seattle experienced almost the opposite situation.
The Kraken signed Philipp Grubauer after an excellent season with Colorado, only for him to finish 2021–22 with an .889 save percentage. Seattle's overall team save percentage was just .880, compared with a league average of .902.
That's an enormous disadvantage for a team already struggling to score goals.
And goaltending has remained an issue for Seattle.
Could Seattle have drafted better? Absolutely. But even an improved expansion roster would have struggled with that level of goaltending in its inaugural season.
I think this is important when evaluating both franchises. Vegas wasn't merely a well-constructed expansion team. It also experienced a remarkable number of things going right at exactly the same time.
That's a difficult formula to reproduce, regardless of who is running the organization.
If you look back at the reaction to both expansion drafts, there are three recurring arguments.
1️⃣ The first is that Vegas simply outsmarted the rest of the league. George McPhee recognized the value of the position he was in and exploited other teams' concerns, sometimes acquiring players they probably should never have surrendered.
I largely agree with that assessment.
2️⃣ The second argument is considerably less flattering toward Seattle. Ron Francis was too conservative, demanded too much compensation in negotiations and failed to take advantage of a salary-cap environment that should have created opportunities.
There's some truth to that as well, although I think people sometimes underestimate how much the market had changed between 2017 and 2021.
3️⃣ The third argument is that we're judging Seattle against an almost impossible standard.
And this is where things get particularly interesting.
Seattle actually finished its second season with 100 points, qualified for the playoffs and eliminated the defending Stanley Cup champion Colorado Avalanche in seven games.
The Kraken then pushed Dallas to Game 7 of the second round.
That's a pretty significant improvement for a franchise that had looked completely out of its depth just twelve months earlier.
It doesn't mean Seattle's expansion draft was a masterpiece, but it does complicate the narrative that Francis built a hopeless team.
Unfortunately for the Kraken, that second-season success hasn't developed into sustained playoff contention.
Personally, I think both extremes miss the point.
Vegas did an outstanding job of taking advantage of the circumstances it encountered. Seattle was operating under more difficult negotiating conditions but also made some questionable choices of its own.
Neither conclusion requires pretending the other is false.
With expansion always a topic of interest around the NHL, I think there are some useful lessons here for whichever general managers eventually find themselves in a similar situation.
And those lessons apply to both sides of the negotiating table.
If I'm an established NHL general manager preparing for another expansion draft, I'm looking at what happened to Florida, Anaheim, Minnesota and Columbus in 2017.
If I'm running the expansion franchise, I'm studying both Vegas and Seattle. One demonstrated how valuable negotiating leverage can be, while the other showed what happens when that leverage isn't nearly as strong as expected.
Vegas deserves enormous credit for what it accomplished. McPhee and his staff made excellent decisions, found undervalued players and built the foundation of a franchise that would win the Stanley Cup six years after its expansion draft.
But I don't think the Golden Knights' success proves expansion teams should be competitive immediately. If anything, it demonstrates how difficult such an achievement is to repeat.
The irony is that the NHL never needed to change its expansion-draft rules after watching Vegas reach the Stanley Cup Final.
Its general managers had already learned their lesson.
