Dread it, run from it, another expansion draft arrives, all the same.

There has been speculation about the next round of NHL expansion ever since the last round concluded with the introduction of the Seattle Kraken. And while many would prefer that the league stick at 32 teams – or that it had never grown that large in the first place – money talks, and multi-billion-dollar expansion fees talk very loudly.

And now we’ve got our first real indications that another round of expansion is coming in the near-ish future, and those indications came from an odd place.

Pending UFA Michael McCarron – who had been previously linked to the Canucks, had he actually made it to free agency – instead signed an extension with the Minnesota Wild, who traded for him near the 2026 Trade Deadline. The McCarron extension made headlines for its size at six years and an AAV of $3.33 million, but it was also interesting due to its specific clauses.

McCarron received a no-movement clause in all six years of the deal, but not a full no-movement clause. His particular version of an NMC prevents the Wild from waiving or re-assigning him to the AHL without his express permission, but it does not require the Wild to protect McCarron in any future expansion draft. It’s an expansion-proof NMC.

After this detail was revealed about McCarron’s contract, we learned that a similar clause was included in the six-year, $6 million AAV extension that Charlie Coyle signed with the Columbus Blue Jackets a few weeks back.

The reasons for these specific clauses are obvious enough. The last two rounds of expansion, introducing Vegas and Seattle, required teams to put all players with NMCs on their protected lists unless those players voluntarily waived them, which resulted in many teams losing protection slots they’d rather have used on other assets. The Anaheim Ducks, for example, had to protect a 35-year-old Kevin Bieksa, one year away from retirement, in the Vegas draft. That then resulted in the Ducks losing a young Shea Theodore to Vegas via trade.

And the other obvious reason for all this is that NHL teams, players, and agents all know something that we don’t. Another round of expansion is probably coming within the next six years, at the very least. It’s been hinted at for a while now, and these clauses can be seen as near-confirmation.

All of which raises an interesting question regarding the Vancouver Canucks, their burgeoning rebuild, and how one or more expansion drafts in the next half-decade might impact them.

There’s no way of knowing what the rules of the next expansion drafts will be. But if the NHL is asking for such an exorbitant fee and justifying it by pointing to the Golden Knights as the poster child for expansion, then it stands to reason that the rules will be mostly similar.

In these past two drafts, teams were able to protect either seven forwards, three defenders, and a goaltender, or eight skaters of any variety and a goaltender. Certain players do not have to be protected, including any unsigned draft picks and any players with two or fewer professional seasons under their belt.

Depending on when exactly the next expansion draft occurs, that means that the Canucks will likely have to protect their entire current crop of young players, plus whoever they draft and develop from the 2026 and 2027 Entry Drafts, at the very least.

The Canucks will have to plan on protecting Zeev Buium and Tom Willander from their blueline. The same probably goes for Filip Hronek if he stays around that long, as he is signed for the next six seasons already.

But then where might that leave, say, the younger Elias Pettersson? The Canucks will either have to decide on just three defenders to protect, or go with the ‘eight skaters’ option and lose two extra players altogether.

This all becomes even more complicated if the Canucks select a defender near the top of either of the upcoming drafts. Then it’s that player, Buium, and Willander needing protection, and where does that leave Hronek and Pettersson?

The questions are a little easier to answer up front, where the Canucks are decidedly more threadbare at the moment. We can imagine that current assets Braeden Cootes and Liam Öhgren will be worth protecting, but beyond them, it is tough to say. The Canucks will almost certainly draft at least one forward near the top of the draft in either 2026 or 2027, and so that player gets added to the must-protect list. One has to hope more names will emerge in the interim to protect, because if not, the team will face larger issues than a mere expansion draft.

The goaltending side of it is not worth worrying about yet. Suffice it to say at this point that the Canucks would love to have a goaltender worth protecting by the next expansion draft, and leave it at that.

But we can’t focus entirely on the new, young core when talking expansion. The Canucks do have a number of older players with NMCs of their own, and assuming those contracts included clauses we were not privy to, none of them are expansion-draft-proof. The aforementioned Hronek has an NMC all the way to 2032, as does the senior Elias Pettersson. Brock Boeser has one until 2029.

As of July 1, Thatcher Demko has an NMC of his own for the next three seasons running. If expansion comes within those three years, it could create an awkward situation in which the Canucks have to protect him, especially if a new, younger goalie has stepped up in the meantime. But to have all that happen in just three years seems a little unlikely.

Lastly, we have to mention that the odds of just one expansion draft occurring in the immediate future are quite low. That would leave the NHL with an oddly-numbered 33 teams, and that’s just not going to happen. It’ll be at least two rounds, bringing the total number of teams up to 34, and that means the Canucks will probably have to go through this process twice in the next six or so years.

At this point, it’s hard to foresee too much in the way of complications for the Canucks, but it’s worth thinking about and planning toward all the same. Given the talent already in place on the blueline, that’s got to be the biggest priority. Depending on how successful and thorough the rebuild is from here on out, it’s easy enough to imagine a scenario in which the Canucks have more than three defenders they’d like to protect in expansion, and that in and of itself will force some difficult decisions somewhere down the road.

For now, planning ahead means counting the number of assets as they come in and hit the NHL roster, and maybe considering moving some of those NMC-laden veterans sooner, rather than later.

At the same time, the only real conclusion we can walk away from this discussion with is that any problems the Canucks encounter with the upcoming expansion drafts will be ‘good’ problems. Right now, they don’t really have enough assets worth worrying about. If that changes between now and when expansion begins, that probably means that the rebuild is going well.