According to the GM of the expansion Vegas Golden Knights, the team's braintrust will spend Tuesday making its final selections to fill out its roster as part of the highly anticipated expansion draft. The Golden Knights could enter the National Hockey League with a perfectly fine team, but from all indications, GM George McPhee won't be satisfied with that; he's got some dealing to do, and it'll be dealing from a position of power.
He emphasized that each team will be contacted and given the opportunity to have a say in protecting its roster. McPhee said Sunday. "It certainly changed today; it's a different phase".
Fleury is very likely to be selected by the Las Vegas Knights because he has proven many times that he can be a top-flight goaltender. He will have the ability to leverage the Expansion Draft to receive a fool's ransom of picks in the upcoming NHL Draft. McPhee, the former longtime Capitals GM, is a busy man right now.
"We can put a competitive team on the ice and accumulate draft picks", McPhee said, via the Knights Twitter account. The deals the Golden Knights make are expected to be announced at the draft Wednesday night.
The Florida Panthers made an interesting decision as they decided not to protect Jonathan Marchessault, who scored 30 goals for them past year, and instead protected Nick Bjugstad.
Neal is a nine-time 20-goal scorer. Anaheim wants to keep defensemen Sami Vatanen and Josh Manson, Columbus wants to keep goalie Joonas Korpisalo, forward Josh Anderson, and defenseman Jack Johnson, and NY wants to keep forwards Josh Bailey and Casey Cizikas.
Vatanen, a fifth-year player, won't be ready for the start of next season after having surgery to fix a shoulder injury. The Knights have already signed 30-year-old Russian center Vadim Shipachyov, who scored 26 goals and had 76 points for SKA St. Petersburg of the KHL this season, as well as WHL forward Reid Duke, 21, and Czech forward Tomas Hyka, 24.
Among the other available goaltenders: Cam Ward (Carolina); Petr Mrazek (Detroit); Jonathan Bernier (Anaheim); Brian Elliott (Calgary); Joonas Korpisalo (Columbus); Ryan Miller (Vancouver); Jaroslav Halak (New York Islanders); Roberto Luongo (Florida); Antti Niemi (Dallas); Kari Lehtonen (Dallas).
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With an average age of 24 years and four months, Germany have the most youthful squad of the eight Confederations Cup teams. At the end of the match Germany on the counter was much closer to the fourth goal than Australia to a sensational draw.
The unprotected list includes players eligible to become restricted or unrestricted free agents.
San Jose has two notable veteran free agents in Joe Thornton and Patrick Marleau. The lockout threw things off a little, but six years after stockpiling picks at their expansion draft, Atlanta iced 90-point teams in two straight seasons. "Our response is we're either going to claim that player for us and keep him, or the value you give to us has to be better than something else we could have claimed from that team". He has one year left on his contract, with a cap hit of $2.1 million.
The Senators were handcuffed by veteran defenseman Dion Phaneuf's decision to not waive his no-movement clause.
There is a really deep talent of players that are available from each team and there are some star-level players that teams made available.
Teams went one of two routes when compiling who would be protected - either pulling aside seven forwards, three defensemen and one goaltender or eight skaters and one netminder. With Matt Murray ready to take over as the clear-cut starter, the Penguins exposed the top overall pick from the 2003 National Hockey League draft, who has won 375 games and three Stanley Cups and is still only 32.
One interesting avenue the team has started exploring is signing a free agent during this exclusive negotiating window.
Since the expansion draft started Sunday morning, McPhee has been negotiating with teams that want to protest exposed players.
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