• I try to keep things civil. That’s how I like it. I haven’t had anyone come in with an ultimatum—you have five minutes, take it or leave it. If I ever heard something like that I’d say, ‘I’ll leave it.’ And then I’d hang up. You have to do things in good faith. If someone went around trying to fleece [other GMs] we’d stop taking his calls.

• If the buyer offers a player on his roster as part of a package to me, I get my pro scout on the line right away. I’ll look at his [past] reports on the player and on the team that I’m talking to. And if it’s a fit, he’ll zero in to see the player who has been offered and anyone I might be interested in to close the deal. It’s a little different if the player offered is in the AHL or Europe. A little more is riding on your pro scout and scouting director—that’s a tougher conference call.

• If a buyer offers a kid in junior, we’ll go to our reports that have been filed over the past two or three seasons and I’ll get on the line with our amateur scouting director and our regional amateur scout who knows [the kid] best. Because of the timing—just after the world juniors—we’ll have a pretty good read on a lot of the top juniors. And it’s pretty fresh in your memory as well.

• We’ve done pretty well with our background checks on AHL or junior players we’ve traded for. We still have the information from their draft years. Our amateur scouts know the players they liked the first time around. And if they liked them then, they’ve probably been watching them even after their drafts pretty closely.

• I was in a position of being in an auction, three teams bidding on a player. Happened just once—I know people think that it happens all the time but it really doesn’t. It was pretty straight forward: Three teams bidding up with draft picks. It started with an offer of a fourth and it ended with a high-second and another asset. I could only tell the teams that I had a better offer on the table—I didn’t tell who I was dealing with, just that I had a high third, a middle second or whatever.