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Bob McKenzie was on Toronto’s TSN 1050 on Wednesday morning.

On how much a team can go through back channels to find out what a player is thinking, specifically in the case of the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Tampa Bay Lightning captain, and if they would know that if he had decided:

“If he decided, I suppose that’s always a possibility. It’s easy enough to put signals out. But that’s the whole point. I absolutely 100 percent believe Steven Stamkos hasn’t decided anything. Not even close to deciding. In fact, that saga is really, in many respects, just getting going now.

“There’s going to be an incredible amount of pressure on both the Tampa Bay Lightning and Steven Stamkos with each passing day to get a deal done. And it’s going to be very difficult for both parties to go down the road of divorce. Not saying it can’t happen, but especially when the team plays well, and especially when Stamkos plays well. That’s the perfect storm for pressure.

“Because the better the team does, the more Stamkos is going to say, ‘Man, I don’t want to leave here.’

“The better Stamkos does, the team says, ‘Man, we don’t want to lose this guy.’

“There’s even another element of that. The better Stamkos does (and) the better the team does, the more Stamkos says to himself, ‘Not only is the team going great, but I’m going great. Why would I ever want to leave?’

“Now, having said that, there’s no question the reason we’re even talking about it in March is because Steve Yzerman and the Tampa Bay Lightning would appear to have a philosophy of, ‘We’ve got to be really careful here. We just can’t throw around $10 million contracts willy-nilly and expect to build a team with guys like Johnson and Killorn and Palat and Kucherov and all of these young guys at various times over the next one, two, three years, all coming due for contracts. So we need to be really judicious here.’ But judicious isn’t going to get it done.

“But that’s why we’re really at the start line, in many respects, because the better the Lightning do, the better Stamkos does – If they go to the Stanley Cup Final again, if they win the Stanley Cup, how do the Lightning allow Stamkos to walk out the door; even with the premise here that, ‘We’ve got to be careful on how we build our team.’

“And how does Stamkos go out and willingly choose another organization, because he wants to win Cups.

“So there’s going to be a lot of pressure on both sides and what happens the rest of the way – If they lose in the first round of the playoffs and Stamkos isn’t getting ice time, that completely changes the dynamic versus the scenario I just laid out of going to the Cup Final and Stamkos being a big part of it.

“So many things haven’t happened yet that need to happen and that will influence all of this. So to answer your question, Stamkos hasn’t even come close to making a decision on anything. And because he hasn’t, nobody else could presume to know what he’s going to do, including the Leafs.”

Source: TSN 1050/ Transcript: Nichols