Schmidt Gets Arbitration Award With Golden Knights

As per CapFriendly, today's arbitration award to defenseman Nate Schmidt is the only hearing that made it to the awarding process of the 30 players that filed and the Vegas Golden Knights immediately accepted the award, closing off the whole arbitration process for the summer.

The award was a 2-year, $4.45 million deal, which will take the 26-year old Schmidt into unrestricted free agency when the deal is done.

Schmidt played the 2017 season with the Washington Capitals, playing in 60 games, scoring 3 goals and 17 points, which was tied for the last spot in the pool worthy list, finishing 106th in defensemen scoring.

The Capitals lost the defenseman at the expansion draft, where the Golden Knights made Schmidt one of their 30 picks in the process.  By the look of their projected 23-man roster below, he should be one of eight defenders to make the team out of camp... in theory!

Forwards	Cap	Defense	Cap	Goalies	Cap
David Clarkson	5.250	Jason Garrison	4.600	Marc-Andre Fleury	5.750
James Neal	5.000	Luca Sbisa	3.600	Calvin Pickard	1.000
Mikhail Grabovski	5.000	Clayton Stoner	3.250
Reilly Smith	5.000	Nate Schmidt	2.225
Vadim Shipachyov	4.500	Brayden McNabb	1.700
Cody Eakin	3.850	Jon Merrill	1.138
David Perron	3.750	Deryk Engelland	1.000
Erik Haula	2.750	Colin Miller	1.000
Oscar Lindberg	1.700
Pierre-Edouard Bellemare	1.450
William Karlsson	1.000
Alex Tuch	0.925
Jonathan Marchessault	0.750
Teemu Pulkkinen	0.700
William Carrier	0.680

The Golden Knights have two players that could qualify for the Long Term Injured Reserve, if needed this season, but as it stands, with Schmidt now on board and two players added for the injuries in red above, the Golden Knights still have $6.3 million in unused cap space today.  Since the Golden Knights will be looking for more assets through the year, there is a fine chance that they could take on another bad contract or two for more assets and still be well within the spending limits of the league.