Four Mock Drafts for the Vegas Golden Knights

Protected lists! They are here! It's Christmas morning!

That is, it's like Christmas morning if you were a bad kid and your parents got you nothing but socks and sweaters to teach you a lesson. Yeah, you need socks and sweaters, but no matter how many packages you tear open, there will not be a Nintendo (or whatever the kids play these days).

Likewise, the NHL is giving fans a new team with the expansion draft this week, but when we finally open it up, it's not going to be what we wanted.

The (Not Las) Vegas Golden Knights have until Wednesday morning to submit their draft list, which must contain one player from each team in the league. The roster will be revealed that night during the NHL Awards show (and probably throughout the day in the form of leaks to the media). The 30-player team must have at least 14 forwards, nine defensemen, and three goalies, and it must also be salary-cap compliant.

In the spirit of fun content, I imagined four different expansion drafts for the Golden Knights, each using its own unique criteria: one team designed solely for tanking, one team for comedic purposes only, one win-now team, and one team that represents the best possible outcome for Vegas. (And thanks to TSN's draft simulator for making this easy.)

In the 1989 movie Major League, Rachel Phelps inherits the Cleveland Indians from her dead husband. Like any sane person, she does not want to live in Cleveland, so she puts together a roster she hopes is so bad that it will drive down attendance to the point she can enact a clause in the lease with the city that would allow her team to move to Florida.

This would be the Vegas equivalent of that team.

Forwards: Jared Boll, Zac Rinaldo, Brandon Bollig, Jordin Tootoo, Matt Hendricks, Shawn Thornton, Dustin Brown, Ryan White, Steve Ott, Cody McLeod, Luke Gazdic, Cal Clutterbuck, Chris Neil, Tom Sestito

Defensemen: Josh Jorges, Eric Gelinas, Jack Johnson, Dylan McIlrath, Kevin Klein, Andrew MacDonald, Brenden Dillon, Robert Bortuzzo, Jason Garrison

Goalies: Anders Lindback, Kari Lehtonen, Cam Ward

Utility: Luca Sbisa, Brooks Orpik, Mark Stuart, Garrett Sparks

Cap hit: $69,135,476
Players under contract for next season: 20

How many games does this team win? If I set the over/under at seven, you probably need to think about it for a while, don't you? Remember: the expansion Ottawa Senators won ten games, and that team was trying.

If we're sticking with the Major League theme here:

Zac Rinaldo is Ricky Vaughn. Rinaldo is probably better suited for some sort of penal league, and it's not hard to imagine his teammates referring to him as Vedge Head.

Brooks Orpik is Jake Taylor. Orpik should be in a league outside of the United States and his knees are shot.

Jack Johnson is Roger Dorn. There's something here with both players being concerned about making as much money as possible at this point in their careers.

Steve Ott retired, but I bet he could be enticed to play one more season centering a line with Luke Gazdic and Chris Neil.

Also in Major League, there's a scene where an Indians fan is looking over the roster and says, "Mitchell Friedman?" It's because no one has heard of those guys. If Vegas went strictly off that philosophy (I swear, this is the last Major League reference here, and this is only because it's been on HBO a lot lately), here's that team:

Forwards: Nicolas Kerdiles, Tyler Gaudet, Justin Kea, Turner Elson, Alex Broadhurst, Mark McNeil, Corban Knight, Andrew Crescenzi, Patrick Cannone, Chris Terry, Ben Thomson, Ben Holmstrom, Daniel Catenacci, Casey Bailey

Defensemen: Linus Arnesson, Tyler Wotherspoon, Dillon Simpson, Brad Hunt, Will O'Neill, David Warsofsky, Dan Kelly, Andrew Campbell, Andrey Pedan

Goalies: Daniel Altshuller, Mac Carruth, Edward Pasqualle

Utility: Mike Angelidis, Liam O'Brien, Ryan Olsen, Jordan Binnington

Cap hit: $18,529,918
Players under contract for next season: 22

As you might have surmised, this team is technically invalid because it falls way below the salary cap floor—but who cares? Mock expansion drafts should be enjoyable and picking these random names (Is Chris Terry the most recognizable name here?) was too much fun. They played a combined 60 NHL games last season!

And what if I told you some of the names on here aren't NHL players and are names I actually made up or grabbed from somewhere in pop culture?

Is Casey Bailey an Ottawa Senators center or a fringe character on Dawson's Creek?

Is Andrew Crescenzi a Los Angeles Kings center or Diane Lane's love interest in Under the Tuscan Sun?

Are Alex Broadhurst and Jordan Binnington hockey players or romantic rivals in Downton Abbey?

I guess we will never know, because you're not looking up these names and we both know it. [Editor's note: We looked up the names, and rest assured they're all actual hockey players.]

Admittedly, I have lost the feel for what the Montreal Canadiens are doing these days—they're big and tough, but they also traded for Jonathan Drouin. That said, all of GM Marc Bergevin's moves in the past year would indicate that he wants his team to win immediately. What if Vegas GM George McPhee decided he needed a playoff team in Year 1?

How would that team look?

Forwards: Alex Burmistrov, Matt Moulson, Lee Stempniak, Mikhail Grigorenko, Benoit Pouliot, Jonathan Marchessault, Trevor Lewis, Eric Staal, Tomas Plekanec, James Neal, Michael Grabner, Jordan Weal, Bryan Rust, David Perron

Defensemen: Sami Vatanen, Trevor van Riemsdyk, Jack Johnson, Dan Hamhuis, Thomas Hickey, David Schlemko, Nate Schmidt, Martin Marincin, Colin Miller

Goalies: Petr Mrazek, Michael Hutchinson, Andrew Hammond

Utility: Cedric Paquette, Reid Boucher, Troy Brouwer, Beau Bennett

Cap hit: $72,172,143
Players under contract for next season: 30

This was tricky. I originally scooped about $83 million in contracts on my first pass and had to make some hard decisions about where to spend and where to save (sorry, Bobby Ryan). Everyone is under contract for next season so no one can escape McPhee's clutches as he builds the most mediocre ship possible.

And Jim Rutherford doesn't have any agreement in place with me, so he can keep Marc-André Fleury.

Here are potential forward and defense combinations:

Perron-Staal-Neal
Moulson-Weal-Marchessault
Pouliot-Plekanec-Grabner
Boucher-Paquette-Rust

Johnson-Vatanen
Hamhuis-van Riemsdyk
Schlemko-Miller

Mrazek
Hutchinson

This team suuuuuuuuuuuucks! The forward group is fine enough, but once you get past Vatanen, it's just terrible on the back end. This is why McPhee can't get caught up in appeasing fans off the bat with the idea of a winning team, because it'll be a bigger disappointment when the team is bad—and there's no way of getting around this team being bad. If it's going to be bad, at least have it be bad with potential going forward.

There's no point in even drafting Vatanen and Neal (more on this when we get to my amazing team), because they can be the Norris Trophy and Rocket Richard winners next season and this team still isn't cracking 70 points.

And if you're wondering how Johnson can be on both the tanking team and the win-now team, think of that as insight into how general managers view Johnson versus his actual value.

So what is the ideal Vegas team?

We know we can't win now. We know this is going to take forever. So we want to sprinkle the roster with motivated veterans at the end of contracts and young players who have long-term value. How will this team, which is just as bad as any of the others, look?

Forwards: Jonathan Marchessault, Alex Chiasson, Andrej Nestrasil, Mikhail Grigorenko, Lukas Sedlak, Benoit Pouliot, Carl Hagelin, Colin Wilson, Jacob Josefson, Brock Nelson, Michael Grabner, Jordan Weal, Nick Shore, David Perron

Defensemen: Josh Manson, Zach Bogosian, Trevor van Riemsdyk, Jamie Oleksiak, Matt Dumba, Nikita Nesterov, Chris Wideman, David Schlemko, Jason Garrison

Goalies: Petr Mrazek, Michael Hutchinson, Louis Domingue

Utility: Reid Boucher, Martin Marincin, Nate Schmidt, Malcolm Subban

Cap hit: $51,489,940
Players under contract for next season: 30

Years from now, you'll hear stories about how someone like Joe Thornton was a member of the Golden Knights and you'll wonder how it happened. It will be because Vegas wanted nothing to do with that roster, so they drafted a player who wasn't under contract and who they knew wouldn't join the Knights to avoid taking a bad contract or wasting a roster spot.

For my terrible roster with potential for helping the franchise down the road, I'm assuming I have blackmailed the Ducks and the Predators out of high picks to not take Vatanen and Neal. If the Panthers want to blackmail me out of Marchessault, too bad. He's mine. You can't have him.

I'm sure if this were real life, I'd do more blackmailing, but the point is this: I want draft picks. I want them now or I want them at next season's trade deadline for rentals like Grabner or Perron. I would assure every veteran that he was on display for a trade to a contender next season, so don't half-ass it because you're miserable. Bust your ass for 20 minutes a night and hit the tables at the casino later. It's impossible to be miserable in Vegas.

With just about everyone else, I'm looking for long-term potential (Weal) or players who can do more in bigger roles (Josefson) who I can also swap. I do not—I repeat, I do not—want Bogosian, but he's a young right-handed defenseman and I think we can pump and dump him to some other team later.

I'm also taking all players I have under contractual control. Would I like Antti Raanta? Sure, but I'd rather take the 30-goal guy on the cheap contract I can flip either immediately or later and then maybe take a run at Raanta in free agency.

This team would still finish dead last next season, but I'd have like, a thousand picks in the draft. I'm trying to lay a foundation in Vegas and that foundation doesn't need Vatanen, who will be a million years old by the time the team is good, and it doesn't need Brown's contract, because getting to the cap floor is easy.

This team is going to stink no matter what, but it will stink on my terms.