George McPhee imposes deadline for teams looking to trade

By Jesse Granger

Monday, June 19, 2017 | 1:15 p.m.

George McPhee’s phones have rung constantly for five days inside the Golden Knights’ offices in Summerlin.

Tonight, they’ll go silent. Or, if they don’t, McPhee won’t be picking up.

Since the expansion draft started Sunday morning, McPhee has been negotiating with teams that want to protest exposed players.

“What we’ve told everyone is that today will be the last day we will have those discussions,” McPhee said this morning. “We are going to pick our team tomorrow.”

The deadline for the Golden Knights’ selections isn’t until 7 a.m. Wednesday but McPhee and his team want to be early in case of complications.

“We will have a discussion with the league tomorrow night about what our team is going to look like and make sure we meet all the requirements,” McPhee said. “If everything is ok then I will sleep on it, and just send it in the morning.”

The team must take a minimum of 14 forwards, nine defensemen and three goalies but the requirements are much more complicated. At least 20 of the players have to be under contract for the 2017-18 season, and the selections must have an aggregate value accounting for 60 to 100 percent of the salary cap.

“This is a complicated process,” McPhee said. “One of the reasons we want to finish the dialogue today and pick the team tomorrow is because it will take us awhile to pick the team. One change in this matrix affects everything – our cap now, our cap going forward and everything else.”

For today, the Golden Knights will continue to make deals.

“There has been a lot of inquiries about players on other teams, and all the general managers have looked at (other teams’) lists and asked us, ‘What it would take for you to claim that player for us?’” McPhee said. “Our response is we are either going to claim that player and keep him, or the value you give to us has to be better than what we would have gotten.”

There is no time to waste at the Golden Knights headquarters. Not only will the team make its 30 expansion draft selections on Wednesday, but Friday is the NHL Entry Draft in Chicago where the team will likely have multiple first round picks.

“We’ve got another office in there preparing for the entry draft,” McPhee said. “We are doing most of the expansion stuff during the day, then when everybody’s tuckered out we go do the amateur stuff.”

Jesse Granger can be reached at 702-259-8814 or [email protected]. Follow Jesse on Twitter at twitter.com/JesseGranger_.