Basically, I like the idea of doing the expansion draft, but hockey in the desert just rubs me the wrong way. So I basically just started a Vegas expansion and then re-branded it as the Seattle Stingers. Having said that, I'm not going to bother un-doing the pre-existing deals (Subban, Engelland, Tuch, etc.)... too much work. We'll just start from that point and go forward from there.
I won't bore you with every single detail, but I'll give a high-level summary of the roster construction. There were a few iterations of playing around in Excel to get everything right -- salary, enough bodies at each position, coverage of all 30 teams, etc. -- before I finally did the draft.
The first pass was pulling together a core of "guys I really wanted" (Strome, Rust, Grabner leap out as fetish items) and "fairly easy choices where there was pretty clearly a best player" which got me to about 18 or 20 guys. From there, I had three tough-ish calls based on salary cap, four or five teams where nothing really appealed to me, and a couple true cases of indecision.
The tough calls were on offense, where it was a question of a first-line talent or a much cheaper player; specifically:
- Florida: Jon Marchessault or Reilly Smith. Smith has a higher ceiling, but at 6M would be the most expensive guy on the roster. (Also worth noting March is only cheap this year -- next year he's up at $5M.
- Nashville: James Neal or Colton Sissons. (Or, as a compromise choice, go with Craig Smith who is about a million cheaper than Neal but also not as good.)
- St. Louis: David Perron or someone young... Magnus Paajarvi, maybe? On one hand, I'm lukewarm on Perron because I'm a Pens fan and he was pretty meh when we had him; on the other hand, $3.75M isn't bad for a player of his caliber.
With Florida I went Marchessault because he wasn't that steep a drop-off and he can play any forward spot. For the other two, I decided to start with the expensive guy, and see where that left me. Also, ties go to the ex-Penguins.
Once those three slots were decided, I filled out the rest of the roster, which left me a little bit under the cap, but above my owner's budget, so I decided to go back and tweak a little. Specifically I swapped out Sami Vatanen (he's hurt anyway) for the much cheaper Josh Manson and Zack Bogosian became William Carrier. Those two moves (moving out $10.5M for something like $1.5M saved me almost $9M and got me back on budget.
The only mild annoyance was that the structure of the draft forced me to take a few defensemen (Markov, Koekkoek) I was on the bubble to get through the mandatory defense picks early in the draft, but whatever.
The finished product looked a little something like this...
