Notes from the interview:

-Talked to all 29 teams, 17 or 18 today. "Some action"
-Tomorrow during the day will be the heaviest action.
-Philadelphia trade changes the game...makes people look more to trade pending UFAs for picks to try and keep prices down.
-May have an opportunity to move up.
-Did not mention trading down from 9, but possible moving 24 or 26.
-Happy about McKee and Brewer contracts given current marketplace.
-First round has 4 top players, then levels off. (editor's note: leads me to believe that they might consider moving up to top 4)
-Loves Jarmo and his work ethic.
-Need forward help, specifically @ center.
-They try to isolate 100 or so players to really look at for the draft.
-They would consider trading down, but also looking at trading up.
-They're willing to spend, but not necessarily looking to.

(3)

The good guys over @ TheBuriedLead tipped us off again to this story....

Jean-Sebastien Giguere has resigned with the Ducks. Terms: 4 years, $24m.

$6m per sounds a little low from our perspective. I would have expected him to get more than that on an annual basis, but I guess he liked staying in Anaheim.

(3)

Apparently Vancouver is salivating at the prospect of drafting Kyle Turris in the number 2 spot. Philly GM Paul Holmgren has said that he would be willing to trade down either for players or picks, so the table is set.

Also of interest is the fact that Holmgren claimed that he's recieved calls from 5 or 6 teams about the #2 pick....so it's likely we'll see some action.

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Of course many of you will read this and first think "Bruce Garrioch = Larry Brooks = John Hadley = A monkey throwing darts"....but there may be something to this.

Keep in mind that Richards is only 27, but due $7.8m per year for the next 4 seasons and coming off of a 70 point season.

It's my personal thought that they're asking too much, as any team with a top 4 pick could sign a Chris Drury, Scott Gomez, or Daniel Briere and get that kind of production for probably less than what Richards is making AND keep their 1st round pick.

(3)

Everyone had their own Mock Draft. We were going to come up with our own as well, but decided it was a bit cliche, so instead we're going to analyze other drafts, in particular picking 10 and doing a statisical analysis on where the players fall.

In doing this we looked at 10 drafts from various websites and only looked at the first round of the draft. We found 49 overall players that were picked as 1st round picks, with only 15 being picked in all 10 mocks.

Each player is assigned a draft place, then the places are added up, divided by the number of drafts and an average draft position number is calculated. Of course with only 15 players appearing in all 10 drafts, we needed to decide how to account for those drafts where a player didn't appear. For those we assigned a value of 31, or one more than the last position in the 1st round of the draft. For instance, Brandon Sutter appeared in 8 of our 10 mock drafts. In the 8 drafts in which he appeared, he had an average draft position of 14.38. But because he didn't appear at all in 2 other drafts, he earned 62 extra draft positions in his overall draft total, dropping his average position down to 17.7.

This means that we're really estimating where players will be drafted in the 1st round, not where they'll be drafted overall.

Without further ado, here are the rankings:

(3)

How can you not like this guy!

(Paraphrased)

Randy Karraker: Is there a player out there that fits the mold of a guy you'd like to get?

Andy Murray: There's this guy in Pittsburgh that I really like. I think he got a whole bunch of awards recently.

Bernie Miklasz: Are you OK with them drafting guys that might take a while to get to the NHL?
AM: If they don't help me, they'll certainly help the guy who comes in after me

RK: Is there guys that used to play in STL that you have an interest in adding via free agency?

AM: Yeah, we do. There's a few. A guy who plays center and some left wing and another who is a forward.

Great stuff.

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