Panthers risk losing Brad Marchand if NHL expands

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If the NHL chooses to expand to a 33rd team, there comes some risk for teams that have a lot of talent.

Expansion drafts require a certain amount of protected players, but then a certain amount of players available to be chosen by the new club.

For the Florida Panthers, that has the potential to be a bit more frustrating than for less talented groups.

The Athletic's Shayna Goldman broke this down in a new article, and her conclusion is that Brad Marchand would be tough for Florida to protect.

If Marchand was left available, he seems like a player that a new team would be happy to take.

"With the depth of Florida’s top nine and top four (and a lot of NMCs), this was one of the more challenging teams," Goldman writes. "A good player was always going to shake loose. In order to save Anton Lundell, we needed to ask one of the veterans to waive their NMC and due to age, Brad Marchand was the choice. The same applies to the defense where the Panthers have four players with NMCs — someone has to waive. Sorry, Niko Mikkola!"

Marchand is aging, so he wouldn't be a massive loss, but he's still the kind of guy Florida would prefer to keep.

An expansion draft isn't a given yet, but this is the list of players Goldman thinks the Panthers should protect in that scenario:

• Matthew Tkachuk
• Aleksander Barkov
• Sam Reinhart
• Brady Tkachuk
• Anton Lundell
• Carter Verhaeghe
• Gustav Forsling
• Seth Jones
• Aaron Ekblad
• Akira Schmid

In most expansion draft setups, a franchise can only lose one player.

But if the player the Panthers lost was Marchand, even next summer, that'd be a bit of a bummer.

More NHL news:​

• 7-foot-1 draft pick is impossibly tall
• Cale Makar is about to become a lot more expensive
• Sidney Crosby trade plans did a 180 for the Penguins
• It's time to ask a serious Matthew Knies question
• Oilers' Frederik Andersen signing is a massive bargain

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