Expansion Draft Ideas

At this year's draft, we voted to expand the league after this season to 14 teams. Dale and I were tasked with coming up with ways to organize that expansion draft, but we haven't had time to get together about it. In the interest of getting things started, I've drafted these four options up on my own and am submitting them for discussion and consideration. Nothing official yet, just spitballin'. Each suggestion is purposefully divergent but of course can be tweaked. Don't feel pressure to take one off the shelf, but for the purposes of debate, I tried to make them substantively different from each other.

The first three of these ideas work from the idea that all 14 teams will start the regular draft in September with 8 keepers and 15 draft picks (we voted to increase our roster size to 23).



The "Radical Equality" Option
This option is designed with the intention of starting the 2012 season with as much parity as possible, while still respecting that owners may have built their fantasy teams to reflect their own hockey interests and biases and that it's no fun to lose your favorite players.

* Note: No team can have more than one keeper taken from it. Once your team has lost someone, you simply pick the rest of your keepers and you're done.

First, all existing teams are ranked according to their combined win-loss record over the last 3 seasons. Keepers are to be selected from them in order from top performers to bottom. Why does that matter? This is how they are selected:

- ALL Existing teams keep 2 players
- New Teams each take ONE player from existing teams (total teams affected: 2)
- Existing teams keep 1 (total keepers: 3)
- New Teams each take ONE player (total teams affected: 4)
- Existing teams keep 1 (total: 4)
- New Teams each take TWO players (teams affected: 8)
- Existing teams keep 2 (total: 6)
- New Teams each take TWO players (teams affected: 12)
- Existing teams keep 2 (total: 8 keepers, everyone lost one)
- New Teams take last two keepers out of draft pool (including upcoming rookies) prior to the actual draft (total: 4)

- At Draft, New Teams alternate selecting 1 and 2 at the start of each round.

PROS
The benefit of this option is that the expansion teams will start with some very good keepers and also the best teams in our league will lose some depth, bringing our league even more parity. It protects the auto-teams from the first season who continue to struggle to get high-end keepers, while some of the dominant teams may lose high end keepers. Imagine Andrew losing one of Backstrom, Ovie, Letang or Eriksson, or Sarah losing one of Giroux, Seguin, Doughty or Brad Richards. Teams that have better keepers and thus better records will be targeted first and teams with worse records will be able to keep their group more intact. For example, the top two teams will lose their 3rd best player, while the worst 4 teams will lose their 7th best players each. Nevertheless, we all only lose one keeper. The expansion teams will have 2 or 3 good keepers and probably at least 6 that are of acceptable quality. The result will be more equality starting Oct 2012 - we avoid the problem of having 2 new teams that can't possibly win a week.

CONS
The downside is that we've all worked pretty hard to build these rosters over several years and it would really suck to be one of the first 4 teams to lose a guy. Also, it may put a strain on this year's standings as teams may look to tank to get out of the way of losing a solid keeper. That could mean bad trades and drops of supporting cast players only to enter the 2012 season as a dominant team. This could be avoided by changing how we decide who the best teams are. We could measure it by average score of top 8 players at the end of the year instead, but then teams with keepers who have injuries or off years get the same advantage.

The "Fuck You, I Got Here First" Option
As a group of mostly white, North American and European men, it might seem tempting to ignore our own genesis as being arbitrary and facilitated. We might choose to stick it to the new comers for being so dumb as to give us their money. Also, in the history of hockey, expansion teams have taken YEARS, decades even to become competitive because of how the expansion draft is organized. So it's not unprecedented...

- All Existing teams keep 6
- New Teams each take 6 players (one from each Existing team) in whatever order they choose
- All Existing teams keep 2 (total:8)
- New Teams each take 2 player from the Free Agent pool (any non-keepers that are already in the league, no upcoming rookies)

- At Draft, new teams alternate selecting 13th and 14th in each round.

PROS
Well, we get to keep all of our teams together and we probably get some easy wins for a few years. Also, it really isn't our responsibility to make them good. This is a bit of 'boot straps' test for them, and our draft structure is such that they should be able to collect some good young keepers over time (see: Hall, Eberle, Seguin - all taken in the draft two years ago and high-end players at their positions today).

CONS
I would bet that this actually hurts the original auto-draft teams the most. That may sound crazy, but if they lose out on the chance to get those good young keepers out of the draft as a result of there being two worse teams, their chances of getting high-end players kinda dries up. They end up in that permanent limbo of not good enough to win money against the teams who had 6 great keepers to hold on to during expansion, but not bad enough to get the Taylor Hall's of the world either. The result could actually be a three-tier hierarchy. Also, our new teams may hate us and quit after two years of giving $50 to us to watch a terrible team lose every week.

The "Compromise" Option
Saw that coming, didn't you?

As always, we all only give up one keeper, so no team can be selected from twice.

- All existing teams keep 4
- New Teams each select 4 players (teams affected: 8)
- All existing teams keep 1
- New Teams each select 1 player (teams affected: 10)
- All existing teams keep 1(total: 6)
- New Teams each select 1 player (teams affected: 12)
- All existing teams keep 2
- New Teams each select 2 players from the Free Agent pool (anyone that's not kept and not an upcoming rookie)

- At Draft, New Teams select 13th and 14th in the first round, and then alternate 1st and 2nd every round thereafter.

PROS
We all get to keep the core of our teams while the new teams get a few decent players from those of us who are very deep with keepers. Through natural selection, the teams with worse keeper groups will be able to keep a larger corps together, and those with better groups will lose their 5th best player.

CONS
This may seem like an ideal solution, but I think if we ask the autodraft teams, we'll find that it only makes a team slightly better to have 4 players who would be the 5th best player on someone else's team. All of the players they get will be flawed in some way - getting older, question marks about role or injury, a potential star, or some other variant of a story that makes them your 5th best player and not your 4th. The result will be two more teams that are pretty bad and have years of rebuilding to do in a league where the best teams are still the best teams.

The "Re-Draft" Option
This might be the truly radical option.

- Everyone re-drafts all 23 players with 14 teams.

PROS
We can forget about our struggles with the first auto-drafting debacle, and new teams can never complain that we didn't do this fairly. Also, we get a fresh slate and some new toys.

CONS
The only major con is that it's a real let down after 3 years of doing a keeper pool. Why have those three years if we're just going to re-do it? We definitely learned some lessons, sure, but a move like this essentially erases our history as a league and starts anew. Also, what do we do the next time we want to expand? Do we re-draft again? Or do we have an expansion draft for those teams?

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Those are four ideas for our expansion draft this upcoming summer. I obviously lean toward the 'Radical Equality' option, and I haven't made much attempt to hide it in this post. That said, you're all smart enough to make up your own minds and make a case for what you believe is best for the league and your own team. Sound off, people. Let's get talking about this.