from Mike Harrington of the Buffalo News,

NHL GMs will be meeting this week in Boca Raton, Fla., and the mechanics of replay review are sure to be a hot topic. But the underlying storm brewing in many front offices is the need for parameters for any expansion draft. Teams want the rules but the league’s consistent answer is there will be no rules until a determination is made about expansion.

The most likely scenario you hear of late is a one-team expansion, with Las Vegas possibly getting the go-ahead for play in the 2017-18 season during the NHL Awards Show’s stay in Sin City in June. Teams need to know, among other things, if they have to do more to protect prospects from being poached or if individuals’ no-movement clauses apply to potentially being selected.

In the salary cap era, young players are more valuable than ever with the way teams develop their draft picks – and have them for three years on entry-level contracts. Most teams are going to want to see if they can have a bad contract plucked away (see: Moulson, Matt). The NHL, however, will want a Las Vegas franchise to have a chance to be competitive quickly and not be a scrap-heap collection like first-year disasters in Washington, Ottawa or San Jose.

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IMO, this topic should have been settled even before the expansion talk started.