Joined: Jul. 2021
Posts: 1,052
Likes: 548
Vegas did a great job of convincing teams to give them assets in return for agreeing to pick the player in the expansion draft that they probably would have taken anyway. This isn’t the only trade they made like that. My first thought on these trades was, “who was the guy they didn’t want Vegas to take?”, but I’m not sure there was any such player in this case. Marchessault was coming off a 30-goal season and still had a year left at under $800k cap hit, so he was an obvious choice for the expansion draft, but Smith was coming off a down year and had a 5x$5M extension about to kick in, so I think this was more about Florida dumping Smith’s contract than protecting somebody else from being taken in the expansion draft. It seems that they decided to call it expansion draft considerations only to make it look like it wasn’t just a cap dump.