Marc Bergevin on the trade deadline, and the attendant rumours.

RDS has two really good interviews by François Gagnon with Marc Bergevin this morning.  You can use Google translate if you don't read French, there's some good stuff in there.

In this article, Marc Bergevin says that last season he was talking to Garth Snow for a while about Thomas Vanek, but that he wanted too much.  On the trade deadline morning, he says he offered Sebastian Collberg and a second-rounder very early on, in part because he was attending his mother-in-law's funeral in Chicago and would be somewhat detained throughout the day.  He also says that the trade was accepted at around 10:00 hrs, and doesn't know why it took so long for league headquarters to make it official, which I wonder if it isn't a bit of a smokescreen.  Is he trying to protect Garth Snow's reputation?

He talks about how in meetings before the draft they make up a grid of Top 10 draftees, then 11-15, 16-20, and so on, and then evaluate what trade-up or trade-down opportunities will exist at the draft.

He also says the prospects in the organization are constantly being evaluated, and that's what allowed him to offer up Sebastian Collberg last year.  So we now know it wasn't so much an Islander demand that he be included in the trade, but a decision by the Canadiens that they could spare him.

We have another peek behind the curtain in this article.  Marc Bergevin says he's constantly speaking with other GM's, and a lot of it is staying current, taking a pulse, and not necessarily 'goal-oriented'.

Which is why he says he laughs at the rumours that crop up because some team's GM/scouts are at another team's game.  For that, and also because a lot of these scouts are where they are because of travel plans, and teams trying to minimize their costs.  Like he says, if a team is playing two games in two nights, and their farm team is nearby, it's cost-effective to be there.

He says that every GM in the league knew that Evander Kane was headed to the Sabres the week before that trade, all that needed to conclude was the specifics of the trade.  So score one for the Insiders!  They tweeted about it after it happened.

He also says that he had some interest in Jaromir Jagr, but doesn't discuss it beyond that.  Another smokescreen?

He says that he sometimes wants to single out certain rumours and expose them as the ridiculous, nonsensical inventions they are.  He understands that fans and journalists get caught up in the buzz of the trade deadline and want to read entrails based on which GM is seen talking to who, but he hates how unfounded rumours cause turmoil within a team, and how a ten-year old might hear a rumour about his dad being traded in the schoolyard.