From ESPN's Craig Custance's Insider-only blog entry, discussing possible expansion draft rules:

With the expansion fee expected to be $500 million, the belief among GMs is that these will be the strictest expansion draft rules yet, so that Las Vegas or Quebec would immediately be a competitive team and maintain the league’s parity.

There will likely be limits on how much salary a team can protect, and GMs are anticipating that good players will be lost from their rosters.

“I’m assuming the worst,” said a Western Conference GM. “They’re coming in at $500 million. The league is going to give them every advantage they can.”

So a full transactional year is probably the bare minimum GMs need to get in order to do an effective job protecting their most important players.

“If that’s what the rules are, you make them work,” said Penguins GM Jim Rutherford on Sunday. “We’d all like more time, but we’re aware expansion is possibly coming and the commissioner has given us a heads up for a couple years that it could possibly happen. So be prepared for it, it’s not like it’s coming out of the blue.”

Custance continues, and TSN's Bob McKenzie shared the following on Twitter: