Over the weekend, Seattle hosted the Seattle Hockey Analytics Conference (SeaHAC) on the University of Washington Campus. One of the agenda items was to simulate the 2021 Seattle Expansion Draft. Rosters, contracts, and protected list will all change between now and the summer of 2021 when Seattle will participate in the Expansion Draft but it was a fun exercise even though it really does not resemble anything close to reality.

Let’s take a look at how it shook out.

The protected list

We identified a few people in the hockey community to act as a GM for each NHL team. They decided who the clubs would protect according to the NHL expansion draft rules. In a situation where Emily Jo or I could not find a team expert, we would determine the protected players. There are certainly some questionable decisions in the protected list but like I’ve said, we expect this to change quite a bit so let’s just roll with it.

Here is a list of all the protected players identified by our appointed General Managers.

Now that we have a protected list, we asked attendees to get into groups and identify their team. I provided a simple tool for people to use to identify the available players. (The irony wasn’t lost on me that I asked an auditorium full of Hockey Analytics people to use a tool that only had age, salary cap, goals, and assists to simulate their expansion draft selections.) I then compiled the results to identify the most popular selection per team to determine our crowd sourced Seattle Expansion Team.

The Results

If you would like to create your own team. Fill out this Google Sheet and I will consolidate at the results in the near future.

Here is the simple expansion tool for you to use.

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