What lessons can the Avalanche learn from the Vegas expansion draft?

Regardless of whether the NHL has a season or not in the first half of 2021, the Seattle expansion draft is still expected to take place as planned in the summer. With that, we’re doing a series of articles here to dig into expansion a little bit.

Tomorrow we’ll have a piece up about how Colorado is positioned for the expansion draft this time around but today I wanted to dig in with what happened last time and what lessons they may take from the experience.

As we travel back in this very specific time portal, it’s important to remember the Avs were coming off the embarrassment of the 48-point season and didn’t have a roster brimming with NHL talent.

Keeping that in mind, here was Colorado’s protection list for the Vegas expansion:

• Sven Andrighetto
• Blake Comeau
• Matt Duchene
• Rocco Grimaldi
• Gabriel Landeskog
• Nathan MacKinnon
• Matt Nieto
• Erik Johnson
• Tyson Barrie
• Nikita Zadorov
• Semyon Varlamov

First thoughts? Pretty unimpressive list. Andrighetto had been acquired at the trade deadline months early for Andreas Martinsen and is already out of the NHL.

Grimaldi played just four games for the Avs that year and would only play six more in a Colorado uniform before leaving in free agency.

In fact, of this list, only three players remain in Colorado (MacKinnon, Landeskog, Johnson).

At the time, the biggest omissions were Carl Soderberg, who had just posted a 14-point season, and Calvin Pickard, the young goaltender whose ability to stay healthy was his main selling point as many fans clamored for the team to move on from Varlamov.

Pickard ended up being the choice for Vegas, but he never played for them. He was selected with the expectation of being the backup to Marc-Andre Fleury (whom Pittsburgh had traded a second round pick to Vegas for them to select) but when Vegas claimed Malcolm Subban off waivers from Boston, Pickard ended up being shipped to Toronto in what was the beginning of a very well-traveled path for Pickard.

Looking back on it, the 14-point season from Soderberg ended up being a blessing in disguise. Combined with his age (31) and three years remaining on his contract at $4.75M AAV, Vegas chose not to roll the dice on Soderberg and he stayed in Colorado.

Soderberg ended up playing two more years for the Avs, posting seasons of 37 and 49 points, before being traded to Arizona in a deal that was the precursor to Colorado acquiring Andre Burakovsky.

The Avs didn’t have much to offer Vegas and the Golden Knights ended up getting nothing of value from Colorado during the process. Colorado ended up completely unscathed and was one of the few franchises where the process didn’t matter to them at all.

That doesn’t mean there weren’t lessons to be learned from the process, however, as a lot of other teams participated in significant wheeling and dealing that helped shape Vegas into the power they are today.

I want to break these deals into some different categories because one of the narratives since that draft is that every team who made a trade with Vegas ended up regretting it. That isn’t quite true so let’s sift through the rubble a bit to find what really happened.

The Duds

These are the deals that didn’t involve any high-end players or high draft picks and were generally low-impact.

• Buffalo traded a sixth round pick for Vegas to select William Carrier
• Carolina traded a fifth round pick for Vegas to select Connor Brickley

Carrier is a nice player who just got a four-year extension from Vegas but is strictly a fourth-line player. Buffalo isn’t dying about losing Carrier and it only cost them a sixth. Brickley was a free agent and signed in Florida that summer.

These are the deals that mediocre teams made with Vegas to lose a player each team could (theoretically) replace pretty easily. No regrets here.

Expensive but fair

Here are the deals that were deep cuts but accomplished what the franchises were after and didn’t come back to haunt them.

• Winnipeg traded down 11 spots in the first round (from 13 to 24) and a third round pick for Vegas to select Chris Thorburn
• Tampa Bay traded second and fourth round picks along with Nikita Gusev’s rights to Vegas to select Jason Garrison
• The Islanders traded first and second round picks along with Mikhail Grabovski and Jake Bischoff to Vegas to select J.F. Berube
• Pittsburgh traded a second round pick to Vegas to select Marc-Andre Fleury

These are deals involving real draft capital but each team felt pretty good about it after all was said and done.

Fleury had just lost his job to Matt Murray in back-to-back championship seasons and while Fleury flourished and Murray floundered a bit, it was still the right call and it only cost them a second rounder.

Cap dumps from Tampa Bay and the Isles were more expensive but got done what they needed and there were no regrets from those teams about those moves.

Like Brickley, both Thorburn and Berube left in free agency and never played for Vegas.

Oh god what have you done?

Here are the disasters everyone remembers. Deals that involved top picks, prospects, or NHL players that looked bad at the time and got even worse as time went on.

• Florida traded Reilly Smith to Vegas for a fourth round pick and to take Jonathan Marchessault
• Anaheim traded Shea Theodore to Vegas to select Clayton Stoner
• Minnesota traded Alex Tuch to Vegas for a conditional third round pick and to select Erik Haula
• Columbus traded a first and second round pick along with David Clarkson to Vegas to select William Karlsson

Yeah. These happened. When you look at current Stanley Cup contending Vegas, you see that half of their top-six forwards came from these trades alone, with Tuch an important middle-six forward for them.

I feel bad for Columbus here. They aren’t a rich enough team to pay for the money of guys on LTIR like Clarkson, who wasn’t even their free agent mistake. They signed Nathan Horton, who was arguably the first premier free agent to ever sign in Columbus (unless you count an old Adam Foote, I suppose), who got hurt and had to retire. They swapped LTIR deals with Toronto to get Clarkson, and then had to use Vegas to dump that money on them.

That sucks and that’s bad luck more than bad management but they’re in this category because of William Karlsson. They acquired Karlsson in a trade with Anaheim and buried him in their lineup. They were so desperate for quality centers, they drafted Pierre-Luc Dubois ahead of Jesse Puljujarvi in 2016. That worked out great but they could have easily had Dubois and Karlsson anchoring the center spot as a lethal one-two punch.

Instead, they missed on Karlsson and let him go to Vegas, where he turned into “Wild Bill” and became a great two-way player. Some context is important here as they did so in order to protect Josh Anderson and Joonas Korpisalo. Korpisalo I can understand. Potential starting goaltenders are important. But a goal-scoring wing? Anderson had a 27-goal season in 18-19 but is now a Montreal Canadien. Major mistake.

Florida’s combo here of a cap dump of Smith and Marchessault’s contracts was bad enough but when you remember they also did it in part to keep Alex Petrovic from being selected, well, there you have it. If you’re unfamiliar with who Petrovic even is, that’s exactly my point because the hockey world is plenty familiar with Smith and Marchessault’s exploits in Vegas.

Minnesota was in a tough spot because of a swath of NMCs plus a defense they badly didn’t want Vegas to touch. It cost them Tuch, one of their few recent first round picks who lived up to his potential, and Haula, a depth player who had a career year in Vegas and then returned to earth. A tough spot but a very heavy price paid.

Anaheim was also in a tough spot because they still fancied themselves Cup contenders at the time and were facing likely losing Josh Manson from that blueline. Because of that, they traded their top prospect in Shea Theodore to only lose Stoner. Anaheim is now rebuilding with Manson on the trade block as he nears 30 and Theodore is on the top pairing in Vegas preparing for a career of competing for Stanley Cups. Whoops.

These teams were desperate and got taken advantage of. The lesson here is easy: Don’t be these teams.

Good teams who simply lost players

These are the teams who just decided to swallow the pill of losing a good player and not messing around. Some of these hurt more than others but all of them were considered notable losses at the time.

• Los Angeles lost Brayden McNabb
• Nashville lost James Neal
• Boston lost Colin Miller
• Ottawa lost Marc Methot
• St. Louis lost David Perron
• Montreal lost Alexei Emelin
• Chicago lost Trevor van Riemsdyk
• Washington lost Nate Schmidt

With 30 selections to make and a 23-man roster limit still in place, Vegas went the route of selecting 10 defensemen and trading several away. From this list above, Methot, Emelin, and van Riemsdyk were all traded after the expansion draft and before playing for Vegas.

For those three players, Vegas recouped two second round picks, a third round pick, and a goaltender prospect in Dylan Ferguson. Not a bad haul.

From that group, Vegas got plenty of value as Neal and Perron scored plenty of points in their short-lived Vegas tenures. Miller had a career year before being traded to Buffalo for picks and McNabb and Schmidt were top-four defenders before Schmidt was cap-dumped on Vancouver this offseason so Vegas could sign Alex Pietrangelo.

The teams that lost those players struggled to replace them (Washington especially with Schmidt) but most were on the precipice of a downturn anyway. Only Boston, St. Louis, and Washington remain serious Cup contenders from that group as the rest either transitioned into rebuilding phases or the dreaded mediocre middle class.

What did we learn?

There appear to be some clear lines of delineation here.

Some teams that weren’t very good lost players whom they did not miss very much. Colorado was in this camp last time. They won’t be next time.

The teams that twisted themselves into knots trying to protect players paid too high of a price and ultimately would like to have those decisions back. This is the area where Colorado wants to avoid being.

Some teams used the expansion draft as a way of dumping salary while also ensuring they didn’t lose a high-impact player. Those teams lost meaningful assets but accomplished their goals of clearing money without hurting their NHL team. Colorado could be in this camp but it’s a fine line between this group and the one you definitely don’t want to be in.

The other teams sat tight, watched their roster get one player smaller, and moved on. The thing to remember here is teams can only have one player selected. Even if the Avs expose all of J.T. Compher, Joonas Donskoi and Valeri Nichushkin, they can only lose the one. As of right now, this is the likeliest outcome for the Avalanche.

How well-prepared are the Avs for the expansion draft this time around? That’s for tomorrow’s article. For today, there’s plenty we can learn from everything that happened with Vegas and their expansion draft.

We’ll see which lessons the Avs prioritized next summer.