Editing Expansion draft (section)

{{short description|Method of creating new teams in sports}}
An '''expansion draft''', in professional [[sports]], occurs when a sports league decides to create one or more new [[expansion team]]s or [[sports franchising|franchise]]s.  This occurs mainly in [[Sports in North America|North American sports]] and [[closed league]]s. One of the ways of stocking the new team or teams is an expansion draft.  Although how each league conducts them varies, and they vary from occasion to occasion, the system is usually something similar to the following:

Each existing team is told it can "protect" a certain number of its existing contracted players by furnishing their names to the league office on or before a certain date.  The expansion team(s) then are allowed to select players not on the protected lists in a manner somewhat similar to an entry [[draft (sports)|draft]].  There are generally a maximum number of players that can be selected from any one team, at least without the team losing the player receiving something in compensation such as a future entry draft pick.

Teams subject to losing players usually tend to put most if not all of the players they truly need to stay competitive on the protected list.  This means that the expansion franchise is often left to choose among players who are old, injury prone, failing to develop as the teams had intended, or perhaps so highly compensated that a team wishes to remove them from the payroll.  For this reason, expansion teams are often noncompetitive in their early years in a league,<ref>{{cite news |url=http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20090319/SPORTS/703199890/1099 |title=Expansion Sounders optimistic about success |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120307162742/http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20090319/SPORTS/703199890/1099 |archive-date=7 March 2012 |work=HeraldNet |date=19 March 2009}}</ref> although the advent of the [[free agent]] system has modified this somewhat. [[Marc-André Fleury]], who won three [[Stanley Cup]]s with the [[Pittsburgh Penguins]], is a notable exception of a star player in their prime being left exposed in an expansion draft, being made available for the [[Vegas Golden Knights]] in the [[2017 NHL expansion draft]] after Fleury was made expendable due to the rise of [[Matt Murray (ice hockey, born 1994)|Matt Murray]] at goaltender.  The rules of the draft can be tweaked by the league to make the expansion team more competitive if that is the business objective of the league's expansion.<ref>{{cite news|last1=Traikos|first1=Matt|title=Gary Bettman arrives at Stanley Cup final to question no one could have expected: Are the Vegas Golden Knights too good?|url=https://nationalpost.com/sports/hockey/nhl/gary-bettman-arrives-at-stanley-cup-final-to-question-no-one-could-have-expected-are-the-vegas-golden-knights-too-good|access-date=29 May 2018|work=[[National Post]]|date=29 May 2018}}</ref>

Most teams seem to try largely to make a team which will serve until it can begin to develop its own talent, although occasionally players discarded by their old teams benefit from the change in environment and become stars, either again or for the first time.

A similar process occurs when an existing franchise is disbanded and the players contracted to it become available to the remaining teams; this process is referred to as a [[dispersal draft]].