We did it a year in advance, and we didn't get any credit for it.

Going to the tournament and talking to him about the decisions he made and asking him how he put it together gave me a sense of his abilities. I talked to him (about the Wild management job) before this year's tournament and he said he couldn't talk about it until after the tournament.

We have a number of players who are third-, fourth- or fifth-year pros. It's their time. We're not sure what they're going to do, but we need to find out.

Teams are more comfortable now taking on the risk of development of players than they were three or four years ago. More teams are realizing young players aren't a detriment. To me, there's no difference between a player at 19 and someone who's 21.

I wouldn't have believed it. We are on a roll. But if you had told me that our team would be competing against all the teams that we played to date, yes, I would've believed that. Or that we would be playing hard -- yes. Or that they'd be close games -- yes. I think the difference is that all of those things have happened and some of those close games have gone in our favor.

There's somebody who's going to say, 'I don't want to lose this guy so I'll put him out in four or five days' because they want to see what people might acquire.

He's trying to identify quality people and people who have won. He got it (leadership) in a package with those two.

I think he's going to be able to be better with these changes. Where he probably has an edge is with his speed. So if transition means you can go to the far blue line very quickly, there's probably very few people in the league that can get there as fast as him.

And he'll give his overall opinion on the state of the team.