For months fans and analysts have been speculating who the Golden Knights will take in the expansion draft, but finally the wait is essentially over.
Wednesday night at the NHL awards, the Golden Knights will announce their roster to the hockey world.
The rumours seem to be increasing every hour as more teams reportedly try and make a deal with Vegas so they don't take one of the players they didn't protect and that alone is causing so much buzz in the hockey world.
Luckily for fans, now that the protection lists are out, they've got a clearer look as to how the Golden Knights may look when the dust settles and it's a lot easier to attempt assembling the team.
There are many ways one might assemble the Golden Knights, but the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective easily had the most unique way of selecting players for Vegas' team.
The formula Mitchell Pleasure used to pick players involved both math and stats, and the simplest way to sum it up would be point shares weighted for salary cap hit to compare players.
Essentially it's an efficiency formula that compares "points per dollar" of players and even that sounds complicated so it would probably be best to read Mitchell's piece fully to understand why he selected certain players.
Along the way, Mitchell did run into the problem of not reaching the salary cap floor which forced him to substitute more efficent and less expensive players for less efficent and more expensive players.
When it was all said and done, here's what the roster for the Golden Knights looked like:
And for those wondering what the info in each column is, here you go:
The one thing that will immediately catch the eye of fans is the goaltending situation as Dell, Budaj and Khudobin are probably the last three goalies anyone would think Vegas would take.
All three are viewed as backups, but one would have to shoulder the load in Vegas if this was the route they went.
Furthermore, another thing that might surprise fans is that Darren Helm is the highest-paid player on this hypothetical roster.
At the end of the day, though, from an efficiency standpoint, this roster is Golden, but it probably won't be close the Golden Knights' actual roster, which they reveal Wednesday.
