Washington Capitals: T.J. Oshie likely to be lost in NHL Expansion Draft

Don’t even think about it Seattle. Washington Capitals fans love him.

The other day we wrote about the top 3 players from the Washington Capitals that could get taken by the Seattle Kraken, the NHL’s newest franchise. Before we break down why T.J. Oshie will be the likely player they’ll select I’ll remind you of my protected list.

The protected list: Alex Ovechkin, Nicklas Backstrom, Evgeny Kuznetsov, Tom Wilson, Jakub Vrana, Lars Eller, Carl Hagelin, John Carlson, Dmitry Orlov, Brenden Dillon, and Ilya Samsonov.

Oshie is from Mount Vernon, Washington and is a diehard Seahawks fan. They happen to play the Washington Football Team this Sunday. Wonder who he’s cheering for.

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Oshie was asked during the July training camp his thoughts on the Seattle hockey team name. Via Ian Oland of Russian Machine Never Breaks, Oshie told reporters, “I was hoping they would go with the Totems. Kraken’s different.”

Oshie will turn 34 this month and will enter the fourth year of his eight year, $46 million deal. Like Alex Ovechkin, he has defied age. He has consistency in his game and has scored 25 or more goals in four of his five seasons with the Caps. He’s the type of veteran any team would have and would make a great captain for the Kraken.

Having said that, I still don’t want to see Oshie get taken in the expansion draft. I’d rather them go with Jonas Siegenthaler or Richard Panik from my exposed list. But one sign that they could take him was when they tweeted his face on a blog post.

As you can imagine, the replies from Caps fans showed how unhappy they were that they included his face in a tweet, perhaps teasing us all that they could take him. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence because he’s an American born player. The post talked about US born NHL players on the rise.

It’s unclear who General Manager Brian MacLellan will protect from the current core of players. We’ll know more based on how everyone does in the season when they play it all out. Oshie’s cap hit is definitely not cheap but he’s shown since signing that extension that he was worth the money.

In my honest opinion, extending Oshie helped save the championship window from completely shutting and we saw the results nearly a year later from that contract extension. Now with the window once again closing I’m going to enjoy watching the two O’s (Ovechkin and Oshie) while it lasts.