Chances slim for immediate success for Seattle NHL team

The best story going in sports right now? It has to be the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights.

Vegas is an expansion team that’s currently up 1-0 on the Washington Capitals in the Stanley Cup Final, an unthinkable accomplishment for a first-year team. Given that it’s happening with a backdrop of the Route 91 Harvest music festival mass shooting in Las Vegas, which left 58 dead just prior to the start of the season, makes it all the more powerful. And as someone who lived through the expansion Everett Silvertips’ run to the WHL championship series in 2004, I know exactly how exhilarating something like this feels.

Meanwhile, hockey fans in the Pacific Northwest, ogling the Golden Knights’ achievements from afar, are salivating like Pavlovian dogs at a doorbell convention. With Seattle seemingly in line for an NHL expansion team for the start of the 2020-21 season, local hockey fanatics are eagerly anticipating a similar level of immediate success.

However, I’m here to temper the expectations of supporters of the Seattle Metropolitans, Totems, Kraken or whatever the heck they’re going to be called. There are two chances Seattle’s expansion team will have similar success to the Golden Knights: slim and none.

The main driver of Vegas’ success was the expansion draft. The Golden Knights were given the most liberal expansion-draft rules ever seen in major professional sports, as the league’s other 30 teams were only allowed to protect a maximum of 11 players, with that number in some cases dropping to nine. Vegas took full advantage, using a combination of intelligent picks and shrewd draft-day deals to craft a roster capable of competing immediately.

What was the effect of those rules? Let’s look at how some of the Golden Knights’ best players were acquired.

Star goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury, a three-time Stanley Cup champion and three-time All-Star, was acquired when the Pittsburgh Penguins gave Vegas a second-round draft pick to select Fleury instead of another player. Two-thirds of Vegas’ top line (Jonathan Marchessault and Reilly Smith), which has been arguably the league’s best line in the playoffs, was acquired from Florida when the Panthers gave the Golden Knights Smith (a 25-goal scorer two years earlier) so that they would select Marchessault (a 30-goal scorer last year).

The third member of that line, William Karlsson, joined the team when Columbus bequeathed Vegas first- and second-round picks to sway the Golden Knights into taking Karlsson. Marchessault, Smith and Karlsson are just entering their primes, as Marchessault and Smith are 27 and Karlsson is 25.

With deals like that, one can argue that this has been no Cinderella run, rather that Vegas was given loaded dice to roll.

Seattle seems all but certain to be the next city granted an expansion franchise by the NHL. The Oak View Group has submitted an application, KeyArena renovation is set to begin later this year, and an avalanche of season-ticket commitments have already been made. Everything is aligned for Seattle to join the NHL in 2020.

On Monday NHL commissioner Gary Bettman reiterated his stance that a potential Seattle franchise would be granted the same expansion-draft rules Vegas received. Because of the Golden Knights’ success, the expectation is that the Seattle franchise will start like a thoroughbred breaking from the starting gate.

But I wouldn’t bet the farm on that just yet. Given the reported $650 million expansion price tag, one can argue that a team deserves to be competitive right away. However, unless OVG got the expansion-draft assurances written down on paper in gold-flecked ink, I suspect the NHL’s owners will at least re-examine that decision.

And even if Seattle is given the same rules, the team won’t be dealt blackjack in the expansion draft the way the Golden Knights did. That’s because the NHL’s general managers have learned their lesson.

When the Vegas expansion draft occurred, the league’s teams were operating in the dark. Not only was it the first time the NHL used these expansion rules, it was the league’s first expansion since Columbus joined the league in 2000. Having now been through it once, and having another two years to prepare, the general managers won’t make the same mistakes.

One piece of fine print that left the general managers hamstrung was the requirement that players with no-trade clauses in their contracts be protected. That forced some teams to protect players they otherwise would have been happy to leave exposed. You can bet that between now and 2020 teams won’t be giving players no-trade clauses unless they’re on the path toward the Hockey Hall of Fame.

General managers won’t allow themselves to be extorted the way they were by Vegas, either. Teams ponied up big chunks of their chip stacks in order to avoid losing certain players, and in some cases they got burned bad. My guess is the next time around teams are more likely to protect the maximum number of players and take their chances.

This is not to say a future Seattle expansion team is destined to be hopeless. Even if every team protected the maximum number of players, that’s still the 12th best player off each roster. That’s better conditions than Everett received in its WHL expansion draft, when the Tips got about the 15th or 16th best player from each team. Everett still found a way to reach the WHL finals.

But remember the venerated saying: Lightning never strikes the same place twice. And it just so happens that the NHL expansion lightning rod resides in Las Vegas, not Seattle.

Follow Nick Patterson on Twitter at @NickHPatterson.