Over the weekend, Nate Schmidt and the Vegas Golden Knights had their arbitration resolved: The defender got two years at $2.25 million AAV, about half a million less and a year more than Schmidt’s camp wanted.

But in getting Schmidt locked in for two more seasons at a reasonable rate, George McPhee also quickly ran into another problem, and it’s one that should have been evident to any observer the night of the expansion draft:

Vegas has too many NHL-level defensemen.

Currently, the team has more than $20.8 million committed to — get this — 11 defensemen. In a given NHL season, you need about seven or eight. So that’s a few too many.

The team doesn’t need to free up money, especially once it LTIRs David Clarkson and Mikhail Grabovski, but they currently have the same number of forwards on NHL deals as defenders. You’ll note you need 12 forwards on a given game-day roster, so obviously they want to go with some kids like Alex Tuch or Brendan Leipsic to fill those depth roles.

But they do need to figure out what the hell is going on at the back just in terms of who plays and who doesn’t.

Keep in mind, also, that McPhee already traded away one defenseman on the roster, sending Alexei Emelin off to Nashville to be a bottom-pairing guy, but retaining $1.1 million in salary in the process. So really, that’s $21.9-plus million committed to 11 defensemen currently on the team, but they have a little bit of cap room at this point even now.

The problem, of course, is that their blue line is mostly bad. Schmidt and Clayton Stoner might be their best two options to actually get things done without completely embarrassing themselves — obviously not so much for Jason Garrison or Luca Sbisa — but these are perhaps middle-pairing defenders who might soon find themselves in top-pairing roles. Not where you want to be, and certainly not the kind of situation where you want to put a more promising kid like Shea Theodore.

After that it’s a hodgepodge of guys whose roles are, shall we say, difficult to guess.

Brayden McNabb, probably an NHL player this season but to say he was gently used in LA is a major understatement: he only played about 15 minutes a night last year.

Jon Merrill, who knows what they see him as, but he strikes me as a barely serviceable lower-end guy. Colin Miller is definitely a good bottom-three defender, but he might not be the kind of player Vegas truly values. Brad Hunt played more games in the AHL than NHL last season. Griffin Reinhart just seems to be pretty bad, insofar as he couldn’t crack their Oilers blue line last season at age 23. Deryk Engelland is definitely pretty bad no matter what age he is.

That’s another issue entirely: Most of the guys Vegas has on the roster were signed by their previous teams. That’s not the case for Engelland and Reinhart, both of whom were actively detrimental to their previous teams, but both of whom Vegas re-signed instead of either letting them walk (which they allowed to happen with guys like Chris Thorburn and JF Berube, both of whom aren’t good and were surplus to their needs).

But if Vegas re-signed them, clearly they’re in the team’s plans for at least next season. Who knows why, really, but if you sign two guys you intend to use them, right? Same goes for Schmidt and his brand new contract. Gotta figure Theodore is also a lock to make the everyday roster. So that’s four guys out of the seven you’re carrying for the bulk of the season, barring injury.

Maybe they don’t want to use all three of Garrison, Sbisa, and Stoner — the team’s three highest-paid defenders at a combined $8.525 million — but you probably have to keep them just given the cost.

But that still leaves you McNabb, Merrill, Miller and Hunt as guys on one-way deals. You have to figure out what you’re doing with them, and one imagines you can’t necessarily trade or demote all four of them.

Now, part of it is a process that’s (probably) going to work itself out at least somewhat naturally. Some teams are likely to run into issues in camp where maybe a rookie they had eyes on didn’t really make the cut. Vegas can also send a few of its lower-end guys down to the minors without a cap penalty, although one wonders about the team’s appetite to eat a few hundred thousand dollars in minor-league salaries for what are ostensibly NHL players.