Welcome back to our Seattle Expansion Draft Series. If you haven’t read the first article that lays out the rules of the expansion draft, that would be a good starting point, as I’ll only give the very basic rules in each of these follow up articles. Previous articles focusing on Detroit in this series were the second article and the seventh article.

Updates

Because people typically don’t go back and look at past articles (because why would you?) here are some updates.

I talked to Alison Lukan about the Columbus selections we discussed in April, and there has been a change/correction. A lot of the focus in the Laine trade was, well Patrick Laine, and Jack Roslovic slipped her mind when we were talking. So for Columbus, Roslovic has replaced Stenlund. We aren’t going to make changes to the mock drafts we did because we would likely have to make changes many times between now and July 17 when the official protection lists are due to the league.

I will, however, make updates to the Google Sheet that you can find in Article 18 that you can use to make your own team. (The first link in the previous sentence will take you straight there).

Capfriendly has provided a helpful list of upcoming dates, in which the expansion draft figures pretty prominently.

With the calendar flipping over to July we are now only a couple of weeks away from kicking off what will surely be a busy off-season.

Here’s a look at some of the important dates to remember in July.https://t.co/nXfmDT1fO4 pic.twitter.com/rqRdU6A0YI

— CapFriendly (@CapFriendly) July 1, 2021

July 13 is the last day that teams can ask a player to waive their NMC for the expansion draft. Players have until July 16 to make the decision. Assuming they make it the same as they did for Vegas, a player will be allowed to waive their NMC only for the expansion draft. This will mostly happen for players who Seattle will not want to select, and their team will be able to protect another player. It’s possible that you’ll see some stories about players doing that (or not doing that) around that time.

July 16 is the last day that teams can place players on waivers prior to the expansion draft. This could be a way that teams could obtain players to meet the exposure requirement.

July 17 is the deadline for teams to submit their protection lists to the NHL. You’ll likely start reading some information about players that were protected or not protected that day. The next day is when everyone will receive the official protection lists, and they will likely be public on that day, July 18.

Our plan is to have another mock draft article the day of the expansion draft, which is July 21.

We plan to have a reaction article or articles after Seattle announces their players.

Detroit One Last Time

I’m not making changes to my previous protection list. I still think it would be a pretty big mistake to protect Lindstrom or Cholowski over Stecher. I think the last defenseman slot will come down to those two younger defenseman. Could they protect Lindstrom instead of Cholowski? Sure! I don’t think it matters that much. The simplest way I can explain my thinking is that Troy Stecher is already better than either of the other two will be.

At forward, I won’t be too surprised to see Svechnikov or Smith protected over Namestnikov. The team doesn’t seem to value Givani Smith as much as I do, same with Svechnikov. But maybe I’m wrong! While I like both of these younger players, I don’t think that losing either hurts the rebuild in a major way.

And that’s pretty much where I stand on Detroit’s outlook for the expansion draft. I don’t think any of the players they could lose will affect the rebuild in a major way. I’m saying that as a way of saying that I would be completely opposed to a scenario in which we give up anything to influence who Seattle takes.

Current Predicted Protections

Thomas Greiss

Filip Hronek
Troy Stecher
Dennis Cholowski

Dylan Larkin
Tyler Bertuzzi
Jakub Vrana
Robby Fabbri
Michael Rasmussen
Vladislav Namestikov
Adam Erne

Notable Unprotected Players

Evgeny Svechnikov
Givani Smith
Gustav Lindstrom

So what about you? Has anything changed for your protection list since the last time we looked?