The 2015 Expansion Draft Protection List- Prelude

By Charles Barnard

It is coming. It will be painful when it happens. We know it is coming and there is nothing that we can do to stop it. It is the expansion draft.

It is always fun when a new team comes into the league. But one of the downsides of new teams are the expansion drafts. On that day that you know you will be losing a player you probably didn't want to lose. With the dual arrivals of NYCFC and Orlando in 2015 there is a very good chance of losing two players instead of one. This expansion draft has another painful little twist to; we know that Coach Kreis will be one of the people involved in picking an RSL player.

What we don't currently know are all the rules that this draft will have. How many players can be protected? After a player is selected can an additional player be protected? Are Generation Adidas or Home Grown Players automatically protected? Many of these questions won't be answered until we get closer to the draft.

The thought of who RSL should protect is a fascinating one. I thought it would be fun to conduct a poll to see who the fans think we should protect. We will create our own protection list. I will then conduct the same poll at the halfway mark of the season and after the season has concluded. It will be interesting to see what changes (if any) will be made to the list between now and the draft itself.

Here are the rules that I am going to go by (I am just guessing on these). You can protect 11 players.  RSL doesn't currently have any GA players so we don't need to worry about that but I am going to guess that Home Grown players will be automatically protected. One quick note on this: Even though Carlos Salcedo did go through the RSL Academy, he did not sign as a Home Grown player so he is eligible for the draft.

Now this is where you come in. Please submit to me the 11 RSL players that you think should be protected. Remember this is for the 2015 season, not this upcoming season. Do take age into consideration but don't worry about things like contract lengths as that information for each player is not readily available.  You can email your protected list to charles@fromtheupperdeck.com or send me your list on Twitter (@ccb1212).
After compiling the results I will post the findings here on the blog as well as my own protected list and reasons behind each pick.

I am really interested in the results of this and think it will be fun to track over the course of the year. I hope that you will all respond so we can get a really good sense of who the fan base thinks the team should protect.

Thanks to Arthur for creating this Google survey. You can now just enter in your picks here.