1972 NHL expansion draft
player selection draft
The 1972 NHL expansion draft was held on June 6, 1972. The draft took place to fill the rosters of the league's two then-new expansion teams for the 1972–73 season, the New York Islanders and the Atlanta Flames.
Rules
Each expansion team was to select twenty-one players from the established clubs, three players from each of the fourteen existing teams: two goaltenders and nineteen skaters. Thus, a total of 42 players were selected.
The existing teams could protect two goalies and fifteen skaters. First-year pros were exempt. The existing teams could lose only a maximum of three players, including a maximum of one goaltender. The Seals, Canadiens, Flyers and Blues could exempt themselves from losing a goaltender because they had each lost a goalie in the 1970 Expansion Draft; however, the Canadiens and Blues chose to expose a goalie.
In the first two rounds, goaltenders were selected; skaters were selected in rounds three through twenty-one. After each of the first, third and subsequent rounds in which any of the established teams lost a player, the team in question moved one unprotected player to their protected list.
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This entry incorporates text from “1972 NHL expansion draft” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.