The Vancouver Canucks may be staring at an expansion-draft problem in 2029, and the outline is already taking shape.
The NHL’s next wave of expansion looks increasingly real, and Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly told David Alter of The Hockey News in an exclusive interview that the league’s newest franchise could "be able to begin play as early as the 2029-30 season." Daly said Houston is the priority market, with Austin as the alternative if the league goes in a different direction.
That puts Vancouver on the clock, at least in a long-range sense. An expansion draft would force teams to make some tough decisions, and even though 2029 is still a few years away, the Canucks’ projected protection list is starting to come into focus.
Under the rules from the last expansion draft and based on Vancouver’s current contract picture, only one player is definitively tied to protection right now: center Elias Pettersson. He carries a no-movement clause for the 2029-30 season, which means the only way he could be left exposed is if he waives it.
Beyond that, the Canucks’ likely protected group is built around the younger core the organization expects to have in place by then. That group includes Zeev Buium, Tom Willander, defenceman Elias Pettersson, Marco Rossi, Braeden Cootes, Liam Öhgren and Nikita Tolopilo. None of them are signed for the 2029-30 season at the moment, but they are projected pieces of the roster.
The veteran side of the equation is where the real squeeze shows up. Brock Boeser, Jake DeBrusk, Filip Hronek and Kevin Lankinen are all signed through 2029-30, and each has a no-trade clause.
The biggest call among that group is whether Vancouver would protect Boeser or Hronek. Both matter, but Hronek is viewed as the more likely choice.
If the Canucks follow the same structure used in the 2021 expansion draft, the club would most likely go with eight skaters and one goaltender. That projected protected list would look like this:
Forwards: Elias Pettersson, Marco Rossi, Braeden Cootes, Liam Öhgren
Defencemen: Filip Hronek, Zeev Buium, Tom Willander, Elias Pettersson
Goaltender: Nikita Tolopilo
For now, it’s all projection. But if the NHL does move ahead with another franchise in 2029, Vancouver already has a rough map of who it would probably try to keep.
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