2017 NHL Expansion Draft

The 2017 NHL Expansion Draft will take place on June 18–20, 2017 with the selections announced on June 21st.

The expansion draft will take place to fill the roster of the upcoming Vegas Golden Knights for the 2017–18 NHL season.

Background
In the offseason before the 2015–16 NHL season, the league opened a window for ownership groups to bid for expansion teams for the first time since 2000. Two ownership groups submitted bids to the league: one each from Las Vegas and Quebec City.

If chosen, this would be the first major professional sports league to place a franchise in Las Vegas (not counting the Canadian Football League's short-lived and ill-fated Las Vegas Posse of 1994), but the NHL has had a limited presence in the city with annual preseason games, beginning with an outdoor game in 1991 and the Frozen Fury series held each year since 1997.

Quebec City was previously home of the Quebec Nordiques, a team that had moved in 1995 and became the Colorado Avalanche; it has hosted occasional preseason games since that time.

Because of political delays, a bid was not submitted from Seattle despite the presence of three different ownership groups publicly campaigning to start an NHL team; a number of other potential expansion sites (such as Kansas City and Saskatchewan) declined to place bids because of cost concerns.

On June 14, 2016, the Associated Press reported that a Las Vegas team would be approved for the 2017–18 NHL season and that a decision on the Quebec City bid had yet to be made because of concerns over the Canadian dollar's value and geographic balance.

The official decision was announced June 22, at the NHL Board of Governors meeting; Las Vegas's bid was confirmed for 2017 while Quebec City's was "deferred" to a later date.

Rules
The initial proposal for rules for the draft were decided upon by the NHL in March 2016. They allow each team to either protect seven forwards, three defencemen, and one goaltender or one goaltender and eight skaters regardless of position.

Because the NHL wants to ensure the competitive viability of any new teams, the number of protected players allowed are lower than in the 2000 NHL Expansion Draft (which populated the Minnesota Wild and Columbus Blue Jackets) when each team could protect nine forwards, five defencemen, and one goalie, or two goalies, three defencemen and seven forwards.

Under these rules, each of the 30 teams would lose one top-four defencemen or third-line forward per number of new teams.

Only players with more than two years of professional experience (NHL or AHL as defined in the collective bargaining agreement) will be included in the draft.

Teams must submit their list of protected players by June 17, 2017, and they must expose at least two forwards and one defenceman that have played at least 40 games in the 2016–17 season or more than 70 games in the 2015–16 and 2016–17 seasons combined and must still be contracted for the 2017–18 season.

The exposed goaltender must either be under contract for the 2017–18 season or will become a Restricted Free Agent in 2017.

At least twenty of the thirty players selected by Vegas must be under contract for the 2017–18 season, and they will be required to select a minimum of fourteen forwards, nine defencemen and three goaltenders.

Vegas will be granted a 48 hour window prior to the draft to sign any pending free agent (RFA or UFA, one per team) that was left unprotected. If a team loses a player to Vegas during this signing window they will not have a player selected from their roster during this draft.

Teams will be required to protect any contracted players with no move clauses (NMCs) with one of the team's slots for protected players, unless the contract expires on July 1, 2017, in which case the NMC would be considered void for the draft.

Players whose NMCs have limited no trade clauses must still be protected and any players with NMCs would be able to waive the clause and become eligible for the expansion draft.

Any players picked by Vegas cannot be traded back to their former team before January 1, 2018 and any player picked in the expansion draft cannot have their contracts bought out until after the completion of the 2017–18 season.

These rules were imposed to prevent existing teams coming to deals with the expansion team to take on sub-optimal contracts for their mutual benefit.

The expansion team is guaranteed the same odds in the draft lottery as third lowest finishing team from the 2016–17 NHL season for the 2017 NHL Entry Draft; after their first season the team will be subject to same draft lottery rules as the other teams in the league.

The NHL's deputy commissioner, Bill Daly, said that teams that do not follow the expansion draft rules would face penalties, including possibly the "loss of draft picks and/or players."