If the NHL does move ahead with a 33rd team next summer, the Sabres could be staring at a familiar expansion-draft headache: deciding which pieces of a deep roster they can afford to shield.
That’s the scenario Shayna Goldman of The Athletic laid out in a hypothetical expansion setup, and her protection list for Buffalo is not short on important names. She has the Sabres keeping eight skaters out of reach:
Tage Thompson
Zach Benson
Josh Doan
Jiri Kulich
Rasmus Dahlin
Mattias Samuelsson
Owen Power
Olen Zellweger
Goldman also protects goalie Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen.
That part, at least, could still shift if Buffalo ends up making a goalie trade before then. The same goes for Kulich in theory, though Goldman notes that past expansion drafts have tended to favor protecting players earlier in their careers, which would also apply to Noah Ostlund and Konsta Helenius. That makes Kulich a workable keep for now.
The real sting is what that leaves exposed. Under Goldman’s setup, Josh Norris and Jack Quinn are among the forwards left available.
“The Sabres had four defensemen worth protecting and two key exemptions for Noah Ostlund and Konsta Helenius up front that helped make that decision easy,” Goldman writes. “Of Buffalo’s key forwards, Josh Norris, Jack Quinn, and Ryan McLeod felt the easiest to expose.”
In most expansion drafts, only one player per team gets taken, so Buffalo would likely avoid losing more than one of those names. Still, that’s not exactly a comforting place to be.
Nothing is locked in yet, of course. The league may never add that team, and even if it does, Buffalo would have a full season of new information before any decisions had to be made.
But as a snapshot of where the Sabres stand right now, it says plenty about how much talent and depth they’re working with.
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