DON’T GET TOO CLEVER WITH THOSE EXPANSION DRAFT DEALS

An expansion team will get approached with all sorts of trade offers even before it has any actual players. That’s because other teams will be worried about who it might take in the expansion draft and will offer side deals to keep it away from certain names.

Sometimes these deals work out great. For example, there’s the infamous Mike Craig transaction between the expansion San Jose Sharks and the Minnesota North Stars. That was a complicated situation, one that also involved a partial split of the Stars franchise, a dispersal draft and a weird double expansion draft in which Minnesota was picking players even though it wasn’t an expansion team. It was weird.

But as part of the whole thing, the North Stars wanted to hold onto Craig, a top prospect. So they sent the Sharks a first- and second-rounder in exchange for not calling Craig’s name. That was a nice haul in its own right, but it set off a ridiculous two-decade long series of transactions that netted the Sharks Sandis Ozolinsh, Owen Nolan, Joe Thornton, Dan Boyle and many others. That’s good, Vegas. Do that if you can.

Then again, those sorts of deals don’t always work out so well. In 2000, those same Sharks had a prospect of their own they wanted to protect. So they paid off that year’s two expansion teams to leave him alone. It wasn’t anywhere near as expensive – the Sharks gave Jan Calhoun, a ninth and a conditional pick to the Blue Jackets and Andy Sutton, a third and a seventh to the Wild. The two expansion cousins took the offers and left the kid’s name off their draft lists.

That prospect? Goalie Evgeni Nabokov. Hindsight is 20/20, but he probably would have helped the Jackets more than a ninth-round pick.