Expansion Draft Time

St. Louis is joining MLS next season, which means its time for yet another expansion draft, and yet another set of protected player lists.  So, time for me to take my best swing at who I think we'll protect.

The rules are the same as last year.  Teams can protect 12 players, and their homegrown and Generation Adidas players 25 years old or younger are automatically protected.  Teams can lose at most one player in the 5 picks St. Louis will make, and anyone who lost a player to Charlotte is not part of this expansion draft (Colorado didn't lose anyone).  Teams must protect at least 3 international players unless they have less than 3, then they must protect all but 1 (and auto-protected HG's/GA's don't count).

So for the Rapids, first our auto-protected players:

Seb Anderson, Cole Bassett*, Michael Edwards, Aboubacar Keita, Ollie Larraz, Phillip Mayaka, Ralph Priso, Abe Rodriguez, Yaya Toure, Jackson Travis, Darren Yapi

* - I assume Bassett's homegrown status means he's still automatically protected.  If he's not for some reason he clearly becomes one of our 12 protected players.

So after that group we have to protect 3 internationals, and honestly I only want to protect 3:

Max - As disappointing as he was, it would be stupid to give away a million dollar asset.

Brain Galvan - He's an exciting young player who will hopefully bounce back from his ACL injury

Jack Price - I mean, duh

That leaves us with 9 more slots to fill:

Lalas Abubakar - He may be frustrating at times but he's our best central defender and would be an easy choice for St. Louis if he were unprotected

Michael Barrios - I don't want to pick up his option, but if we could bring him back at a lower number I'd want to have his rights

Jonathan Lewis - Too much potential value to leave unprotected

Anthony Markanich - He's a young player that showed a bit of potential

Keegan Rosenberry - Obviously

Diego Rubio - Duh

William Yarbrough - Another obvious choic

After this group there's two open slots, but not two obvious players I want to protect.  So I'm going to go with these two but only for lack of a better choice:

Gustavo Vallecilla - Just to protect the money we put into getting him

Gyasi Zardes - I've heard that the payment to the Crew if we re-sign him only kicks in (or maybe only kicks in at 100%) if we sign him to a 3 year deal.  I'd consider re-signing him for a 1+1 deal at sum $1M if he'd take it, so we should protect our opportunity to do that if that report is accurate.

With this the unprotected players are:

Bryan Acosta, Steven Beitashour, Lucas Esteves, Felipe Gutierrez, Clint Irwin, Drew Moor, Sam Nicholson, Collen Warner, Danny Wilson

I don't seed anyone in that list St. Louis is likely to select that would hurt us if they were claimed.  Some of them would actually help us if St. Louis picked them up.