Hilary Knight, Sarah Nurse among PWHL players exposed to expansion teams

Boston Fleet captain Hilary Knight, original Toronto Sceptres signing Sarah Nurse, defender of the year nominees Claire Thompson and Sophie Jaques are among the players PWHL Seattle and Vancouver will have the opportunity to add during the expansion process.

Each existing team was allowed to protect three players to start with, and those protection lists became public on Tuesday afternoon. The existing teams will lose four players each throughout the expansion process.

Seattle and Vancouver can begin talking to and signing unprotected players and pending free agents on Wednesday morning, as they build their rosters in preparation to begin play in the fall. Over five days, Seattle and Vancouver can each sign as many as five players.

The expansion draft is set for Monday at 8:30 p.m. ET. Seattle and Vancouver will end the process with 12 players each.

Only three goaltenders were protected during the process: Boston's Aerin Frankel, Montreal's Ann-Renée Desbiens and Ottawa's Gwyneth Philips, who was named the playoff MVP. All three are nominated for the league's goaltender of the year award.

Many teams prioritized veteran leadership. The Minnesota Frost, for example, protected both the team's captain Kendall Coyne Schofield and assistant captain Lee Stecklein, in lieu of players like Thompson and Jaques. Taylor Heise was also protected by the Frost.

WATCH | How the PWHL's expansion process will work:

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"The situation that we're in right now with the league is there could be more expansion," Frost GM Melissa Caruso said earlier in the week. "So it's almost like we're planning for very short periods of time right now knowing that we're going to be experiencing change again coming up in