A trade between Vegas Golden Knights and Florida Panthers has been confirmed.

Trade Details
Florida Panthers Acquire: 2018 4th round pick (VGK - #123 - Jack Gorniak) Expansion Draft Considerations Sum: $0$0$0 Change: -$5,000,000 Change: -$5,000,000 Change: -$6,000,000	Vegas Golden Knights Acquire: Reilly Smith · $5,000,000$5,000,000$6,000,000 Sum: $5,000,000$5,000,000$6,000,000 Change: +$5,000,000 Change: +$5,000,000 Change: +$6,000,000

cap space is a good thing.

vegas definately won this one but lost out to winnipeg and calgary very bad choices from both of them and emelin wow sure hope there is more behind the scenes
we have heard yet.

I have no idea who or what Florida didn’t want Vegas to touch, but erm, thanks

Vegas win

who won this trade

Florida because CaP sPaCe

This’ll go down as one of the most lopsided trades in recent memory. To make matters worse for Florida, the guy that was basically “Expansion Draft considerations” won the Conn Smythe against them.

This same guy beat them in the finals

If that’s not poetic justice, I don’t know what is

Until Ben Chiarot became the 31st pick plus Ty Smilanic which will become Granlund plus the 14th pick according to theathletic mock draft which will become Mikhail Gulyayev whom wins Norris trophies.

Did Florida really have a choice when they made this trade? Dale Tallon was really poor with cap management.

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.