The Vegas Golden Knights expansion draft took place on June 21, 2017. That night, the league announced ten trades that the Golden Knights had made with expansion draft considerations in mind, but they weren’t done there. Over the next two weeks, they completed seven more trades to fix the roster construction. After all, an expansion process usually doesn’t leave you with a perfect mix of players, and free agent frenzy had also provided some opportunities to add to that initial group.

Starting with Trevor van Riemsdyk, the Golden Knights shed the extra defensemen they selected in the expansion draft, collecting a number of draft picks in the process. There was van Riemsdyk, David Schlemko, Marc Methot, and Alexei Emelin to move, since they simply couldn’t keep all the NHL defensemen that were targeted in the draft.

The Seattle Kraken, now nearly a month after their own expansion draft, have made three trades. One of those was to send goaltender Vitek Vanecek back to his original team, while Kurtis MacDermid and Tyler Pitlick were also flipped for fourth-round picks. But the problem that Vegas faced four years ago now faces Seattle as well–there are still just too many defensemen.