Room for Expansion: Predicting the Vegas Golden Knights' Roster in 2017

The Las Vegas Golden Knights will be playing their inaugural season as the National Hockey League's 31st franchise this coming fall. But before they can do that, they need to select their team.

The NHL Expansion Draft, which is slated for June 18th through June 20th of 2017, will allow the Golden Knights to select one player from each of the existing franchises, based on a predetermined set of rules placed by the league. Before we start, there are a few guidelines that helped lead to the selections that were made on the CapFriendly expansion draft database.

Players with no-move clauses were assumed to be left on their current franchises. If a player is an impending free agent and his team is scraping the top of the salary cap, they were left off the protection list. If a player is an impending free agent who is NOT expected to sign with his current team, they were left of the protection list. Vegas' salary cap was left with room to negotiate with selected players in need of a contract.

The players selected were based on some of the most common saves for each team, as well as some personal choices for each team. It's obviously difficult to predict exactly what Vegas will do, but we'll try our best. We're also going to look at some key statistics for each player, including Corsi For % and Puck Luck (PDO).

So without further adieu, here are some possible picks for the Vegas Golden Knights in the 2017 NHL Expansion Draft.