Islanders Lose Jordan Eberle In Mock Expansion Draft

Every team has submitted a list of players protected from the expansion draft happening this Wednesday. There were some surprises around the league, including the New York Islanders with who they decided to protect.

Lou Lamoriello decided to leave both Josh Bailey and Jordan Eberle unprotected in favor of Matt Martin and Cal Clutterbuck. It was pretty shocking, to say the least, but with all that said I wanted to do my own expansion mock draft.

Thanks to our friends over at CapFriendly, I decided to make my selections as if I was the GM for the Kraken and this is what I came up with.

Forwards

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From the New York Islanders, I have Jordan Eberle going. Yes, there may be a side deal here in place to prevent Seattle from taking him but this draft was done with no trades. Most of the guys I selected don’t have much term, and that was done purposely more on that in a second, but Eberle is a stable top-six piece for this team.

The reason I went with so many short-term deals was so that these guys can be trade bait either before the season or at the deadline. It’s rare that you see a team come in and be a dominant force right away, Vegas is the outlier, so I wanted to give myself room to work and establish the core.

Colton Sissons is locked up for five more years as one of the core pieces of this Seattle team. He’d be my first captain in team history.

Defense and Goalie

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Again, we have some guys with one year left on their deals who can become trade bait at the deadline and some key younger players as well. Vince Dunn’s name has been brought up in trade rumors a ton recently but he’s someone I’d love to build around.

Gostisbhere is still young and could probably use a fresh start with Calvin de Haan and Kevin Shattenkirk as the veterans holding down the blue line in the short term.

As for in net, Ben Bishop was too good to pass up. I know he didn’t play last year but similar to Marc Andre-Fleury he can provide stability in net and a veteran presence. Casey DeSmith is a fine backup and Kaapo Kahkonen is waivers exempt which is key for a third goalie.

The Cap

Obviously, I have some contracts to sign with some key RFA’s but I left myself with $17.2 million in cap space to play with. If you’d like to check out the full terms of the roster I’ll link the CapFriendly exercise here.

The Lineup

Niederreiter – Domi – Eberle

Killorn – Namestnikov – Donskoi

McCann – Donato – Blackwell

Sheary – Sissons – Athanasiou

de Haan – Shattenkirk

Gostisbehere – Dunn

Butcher – Miller

Bishop

DeSmith

Scratches: Appleton, Lauzon, Wallmark

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It’s not a perfect lineup but for an expansion team, I’ll take it. If you’re interested in doing the exercise for yourself you can do that here and we’ll see what happens for real in just three days.