McPhee has an office two doors down the hall. There's been a path beaten between these doors. McPhee is a methodical man and panic isn't in his lexicon. He's calm and measured. He's got his hockey ops folks in a boardroom to the right of his office and then Lugerner to the left. Hockey ops tells McPhee why a player will or won't fit on the ice. Lugerner explains the financial implications. When he feels he's got the required info, McPhee pulls the trigger on his decisions.
"With the Expansion Draft, there's certain requirements in terms of number of forwards, number of defensemen, number of goalies, you also have the salary cap you're looking at in terms of, so if we take a big number over here, then we might not be able to take the big number over there," says Lugerner, who has a math background he used in an education career before getting his law degree and moving into hockey. "Making sure we hit all our boxes in terms of the cap floor, the cap ceiling for the expansion draft, making sure we hit the minimums on forwards, defensemen and goalies, and just basically complying with all the rules. It's my job to always keep an eye on where we're at in terms of those rules."
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Lugerner said he didn't expect the Knights to be a cap team in Year 1 but added, "you never know what's going to be thrown at us, but at this point, there's just a lot of moving pieces, so there are different options that we can go and routes we can go in terms of how high our cap number will be."
McPhee has gone on the record as saying he doesn't think he'll be in the business of taking on bad contracts from other teams.
"The only reason we're going to take on any bad contracts in the expansion draft is because someone is paying us something that's worthwhile for us to do it," said Lugerner.
So, how does a Maryland guy find himself in Las Vegas working for an NHL franchise?
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"I was always a hockey fan growing up and when I looked at all the jobs lawyers can have, working for a hockey team was the best," said Lugerner. "As a good mentor of mine likes to say, you can't win the Stanley Cup working for a corporate law firm. There's not a lawyer that has a better job in the world than I do. Over the next 10 days, there's not a lawyer with a more exciting job than mine. You get to use all different parts of your brain, your legal part, I was a math teacher before I went to law school, so that always plays in obviously with the cap. When I was in law school, I interned with the Washington Capitals when George was there and helped them with player arbitration cases over the years. It's a great privilege to work for any NHL team and I think the Vegas Golden Knights, we've been given everything we need from a resource standpoint to be successful and I am encouraged with where we are now, where we're going. "
Lugerner has studied the expansion rules for almost a year and run endless computations. The rest of the NHL will give the Golden Knights protection lists on June 18 and 72 hours later on June 21, McPhee will announce his selections.
