Speculation: VGK thwart Kraken plans

Vegas being the only team exempt from the expansion draft can greatly affect Seattle's leverage.

How? They can take on contracts/players/player rights from teams that either don't want to lose a player or want to protect players. Obviously they would have a handshake deal with other teams whereas they would trade the player back to the same team or through another team to get around any CBA limitations.

Reason VGK would be motivated to do this would be to keep assets away from SEA in the form of good players or picks/prospect because not only is SEA in the same conference but the same division. It would be in VGK best interest to weaken direct competition. VGK could also deal only with Eastern conference teams since they will have limited amount of contracts they can take and probably wouldn't want to help out the rest of the Western conference.

Just thinking outside the box. What do you think?

 

They could maybe do it with 1-2 players, but they still have to remain cap compliant and have almost no cap space.

 

All trades have to go through league officials, these kinds of deals would be shot down immediately

 

I think that they’re probably a little too cap crunched to be a major player in that market.

 

Keep thinking.

Do you actually think the league would allow it? Also Vegas is in cap hell and the only contract of note that comes off the books this summer is Alec Martinez's $4M. Not much room to make moves even with being able to overspend a little during the off season.

 

Nobody is going to get to circumvent the expansion draft...people have been touting similar ideas over on the Avs board, they're all incredibly obvious...to the point that the league has already addressed this particular idea....two years ago.
NHL won't let teams use Golden Knights to circumvent Seattle draft process"

 

What about teams that have RFA's that might have to be exposed. Their salary wouldn't count and only their rights would have to be traded. Maybe VGK can send some salary they don't want to other teams.

 

Also attempting to circumvent the leagues rules or the salary cap can carry heavy penalties. New Jersey found that out the hard way with Kovalchuk. The league isn't going to allow Vegas to mess with Seattle's expansion draft.

 

The NHL is clearly going to veto and trade-and-trade-back scenarios. This is obvious.

If Vegas actually had some cap space, then yes, they feasibly could make some interesting moves like they did the last go around. But not clear CBA and/or ED circumvention.

 

A team that trades away a player cannot hive him on his roster again for a full calendar year.

Plus, cap space. Even if we dumped our couple of UFAs, it wouldn't open a lot of space.

 

There is no such restriction on trades.

 

Very doubtful the league would allow any trade backs. Seattle paid too much money for them to just look the other way. It'd be easier for a team to just deal with Seattle directly.

 

0% chance the league would allow anything even remotely close to this.

 

I should have specified if salary retention is involved.

 

Whenever you say "Handshake deals"... they're definitely not allowed by the CBA.

 

No. There is no way the NHL would allow blatant f***ing cap circumvention like this to happen with an expansion draft... particularly if the team committing it is exempt from the draft. If you have to "think outside the box" and use handshake deals that will be undone after the fact to do so... it's against the CBA and you can't do it.

 

Did NJ really find out the hard way? Bettman gave the first rounder back.

 

It would be pretty funny to trade a player to Vegas and have them traded back after the draft.

 

1. Cap space still exists in the off-season

2. Every trade has to go through the league first and in this wouldn't be allowed

 

Sami Vatanen was traded at the deadline last year and promptly signed with NJ in the offseason

 

Yes I have already conceded that I missed an important part of that rule.

 

If you ever had to watch John Quenneville play you'd know they were severely punished lol

 

No deal can be made with implication that they will trade them back. Don't know the exact language in the rules, but I think there's definitely some sort of clause that they can't be traded back to the original team within a certain frame of time (likely most of a full season).

This said, Vegas can move their expansion
exempt players to teams for upgrades for their own team. And stock their team full of better versions of their prospects (if they could figure out the cap situation first)

 

Yeah, the league is not going to allow that.

That said, I don't see GMs being as friendly with this ED as they were with 2017 ED.

 

So how does trading a player to Vegas who has no cap space help a team out. Vegas wouldnt pay much and you just lose the next player on the list