2 Shares Share Tweet Share Email

Elliotte Friedman was on Calgary’s Sportsnet 960 on Tuesday afternoon.

As part of a larger discussion on his Steven Stamkos post on Sportsnet.ca from Monday evening, and on Stamkos trade rumors specifically:

“The other thing that’s part of that blog that we haven’t talked about yet is the trade rumors. I’m still confused about a lot of that.

“It’s funny. Sometimes, as you know, you write something, you say something and then people call you and say, ‘Well, you didn’t get this,’ or ‘You could have written this,’ or ‘There’s a little bit more about this.’

“After a few hours of that happening – almost 24 hours now… – I’m still not 100 percent sure what exactly happened there.

“One thing I do believe is it wasn’t really too close, but I’ve found that around the league there’s varying degrees of belief about how close it was or wasn’t.

“So I don’t think it was that close, but I think there were definitely some talks.”

On the delineation between trade rumors and teams simply calling to inquire about a player’s availability:

‘There are some teams who believe that it was simply teams calling and asking and saying, ‘What are you doing with Stamkos? Nothing? Okay.’

“But there are other cases – and one of the teams I mentioned in the piece is Buffalo because I think obviously Tim Murray is a guy, he was very aggressive last year. He got Evander Kane. He got Ryan O’Reilly, who was heading into the last year of his deal.

“I think that there are some people who believe that the talks with Buffalo went far – I don’t know if far is the right word, but they went somewhere.

“And there’s other people who believe very strongly, including a guy who’s been a really excellent source of mine, who said that he believes it didn’t get that far.

“And so it’s hard to tell. And Tim Murray and Steve Yzerman aren’t talking, so it’s not like you really know one way or the other.

“At the very least, there was something. But like you said, some of that might have been teams calling and saying, ‘What are you doing with Stamkos?’ ”

Source: Sportsnet 960/ Transcript: Nichols