Parity Charity

    

    So, you're a team in a rebuild. Your Stanley Cup window is closed, your prospect pool is thin and you're vying for a lottery pick in the draft. There's a lot of work to do, and the experts say building from within, with in-house-developed youth on cap-friendly contracts, is the way to fix your team.

    But what if there's another way?

    What if the worst team in the NHL's regular season could opt to draft first overall OR trade in the bulk of its roster and do an expansion draft?

    GMs say drafting and developing players is the way to go...yet the five-year-old Vegas Golden Knights are about to win their sixth playoff round and make their first appearance in the Cup Final. The two-year-old Seattle Kraken have won as many playoff series as the Original Six Toronto Maple Leafs have in the last twenty years.

    If you think about it, it makes sense. Building a team through the draft involves years of choosing good junior players and hoping they develop into good pros. That process may also include a string of losing seasons, management shakeups, coaching changes and prospects who turn out to be busts.  It involves careful salary cap management and contract juggling. An expansion draft, on the other hand, features established players other teams have already developed and who have played in the NHL already, so the wait-and-see-how-they-turn-out aspect of team building is eliminated.

    Within the rules of the expansion draft there's an exclusive window for a team to speak with pending free agents before anybody else does. That would be helpful in attracting a star player or two to build a new roster, especially when your salary cap is wide open.

    Existing NHL teams can only protect eight skaters and one goalie, or seven forwards, three defencemen and a goalie in an expansion draft. The rules say of the players exposed, each team must make available one defenceman and two forwards who are under contract for the coming season and have played at least 40 NHL games. They must also expose a goalie who's under contract or will be an RFA at the end of his deal. That leaves a huge number of decent-to-good players available for the plucking. If you have a solid front office in place, management has the potential to build a competitive team right away. There'd be no worries about a high draft pick not panning out, or figuring out how to fit a star player into a tight cap situation or hoping your amateur scouting staff knows what they're doing. 

    It wouldn't be cheap, though. The other teams in the league would have an opportunity to claim any unprotected players from your roster, with a similar priority given to lower-ranking teams as claiming players on waivers. Any players left unclaimed would have to have their contracts paid out in full and become free agents. If you have a bunch of players with no-movement or no-trade clauses, you'd be stuck with them. They'd have to be your protected players, so it would encourage GMs to avoid those clauses.

    In the end, it'd be like poker. You keep the good card and throw in the duds for a new hand. You may end up with a pair of threes, but you could also score a royal flush. 

    One thing's for sure: building through the draft may or may not get you to the promised land after years of trial and error. Evidence seems to show an expansion draft gives you a whole lot better chance at winning in a much shorter time frame. While Gary Bettman gifts rich expansion team owners with the most favourable team-building option possible, it's only fair established teams should have a chance to follow suit.

    With that opportunity available, now you're a team in a rebuild looking at a chance to kick-start the process and bring your fans a show worth watching in a much shorter time frame. Sounds pretty good, doesn't it?