Vancouver Whitecaps Reveal Protected List for Expansion Draft

The Vancouver Whitecaps have released their protected list for the upcoming expansion draft, basically 11 players other teams will not be able to get their grubby paws on. According to the Whitecaps official news release, they’ve decided to protect the following 11:

Christian Bolanos

Christian Dean

Jordan Harvey

Erik Hurtado

Andrew Jacobson

Matias Laba

Kekuta Manneh

Nicolas Mezquida

David Ousted

Tim Parker

Kendall Waston

The Whitecaps also have their homegrown players on the automatically protected list, meaning Sam Adekugbe, Marco Bustos, Alphonso Davies, Kianz Froese, Ben McKendry, and Russell Teibert are off limits. So is Marco Carducci, even though the club declined to pick up his 2017 option.

That means the following players can be selected by other clubs when the expansion draft goes Tuesday.

Fraser Aird, Giles Barnes, Marcel de Jong, David Edgar,. Deybi Flores, Masato Kudo, Brett Levis, Pedro Morales, Cole Seiler, Jordan Smith, Cristian Techera, and Paolo Tornaghi. Blas Perez is also on the list, even though technically he’s already out of contract with Vancouver.

The Expansion draft goes at 11 am on Tuesday and will be live-streamed on the MLSSoccer.com website. New clubs Atlanta United FC and Minnesota United FC will each select five players from the pool of players that have been left unprotected. Once a player is chosen from a team, that team can’t lose any more.

You can see the news release here.