Hey SHL!

Your lovely Head Office here to bring you this announcement. We've been hard at work to come together, with help from our GMs to see if SHL was in need of expansion. We collectively came to the decision it is time to expand the SHL by 2 teams following the S55 season.

With this, we will be posting applications for two Head GMs for the 2 expansion franchises, by the end of this week/early next week. We are hoping to get GMs in place with plenty of time to organize, brand, launch, and have a successful expansion. More information to come on this with the posting of apps.


Now for the rules. This is what we are going for.


- Teams must submit a protected list of 7 F, 4 D and 1 G OR 10 protected players total. All players drafted in the last 2 drafts (S54/S55) are automatically protected and do not use a protection slot. Protection slots cannot be traded.

- If a team exposes a pending FA and that FA is drafted by an expansion team, that FA will be unable to return to the team that exposed them via free agency for one full season.

- Each team will lose no more than 2 players in the expansion draft. Expansion GMs are not limited to 1 pick per team and may use 2 picks to pick from one team.

- GMs and coGMs must be protected, and they cannot waive their protection unless their player is retired. Players with NTC are automatically protected unless they waive their NTC.

- Expansion GMs will have equal lottery odds to the 3rd highest team (20 balls). If neither team wins the S56 Draft Lottery, expansion teams will pick 4th overall and 5th overall respectively. The team with the 1st pick in the Expansion Draft will take the latter of the two picks.

- Expansion GMs will use expansion picks to select themselves AND their coGM, if they choose to elect one before expansion draft, regardless of either GMs contract status. These will be the last pick(s) of the Expansion Draft.

- Expansion Draft will be done in the snake draft format.


As with any of this, we know there will be questions, we hope we can answer them accordingly. One thing, all expansion GM apps MUST NOT include naming a co-GM. This will be considered tampering, we are not looking for tandem apps from GMs. Apps will be based on an individuals merits and application alone. We felt this necessary to call out in this post.

Thanks for listening and thanks to the Head Office for doing all this work.