General manager Dave nonis and it feels like deservingly so this should be a podcast with a tage Thompson themed to it. I mean, you score 5 goals in one NHL game aside from when ray was ravishing the NHL back in the 80s. I guess ravaging would be the ravaging, more appropriate. So St. Louis wins a Stanley Cup Dave, obviously with rhino O'Reilly after that trade with the buffalo Sabres, which landed the Sabres tage Thompson. There's no way Doug Armstrong on the blues knew that tage Thompson was going to develop into a budding superstar, which is where he is at. Today, in saying all that, though, is this that rare win win, where, like I said, I mean, you know, saint Louis got what they needed in that deal. They end up winning a Stanley Cup. And now Armstrong is watching Dave Thompson just follow up a tremendous year with a spectacular start to this season. So from army's perspective, is it win win? Definitely. Doug Armstrong makes that trade every day of the week. He does because he's got a ring to show for it. I mean, if it didn't turn out that way, I think he could look back and say, you know, this may have been a mistake. No one, I don't think anyone thought page Thompson was going to do this. You know, I think everyone thought he had some God given ability and sides on his side. Yeah. But the way he's turned into a skilled power forward, I don't think anyone saw that, but Doug Armstrong makes that makes that deal of. If he can get a Stanley Cup, he makes that trade. In all of these deals now, certainly going back to pages deal and there was a first round pick and then there's another pick and how do you value a first round pick because it seems like teams need them to be good. The other teams want them, like how much collateral can you hold back and when do you decide that, okay, now is the time I get a blow to first round pick. Now's the time. Yeah, you have to really think that you have an opportunity to win. I mean, if you're trading first round picks to hopefully get one round into the playoffs, it's not a very intelligent move long term for your franchise. But if you have a chance to win, I think that almost every general manager will make that move and trade that pick. You're also talking about, you know, usually moving picks towards a deadline now, you have a pretty good idea where you're going to finish. Most teams now are protecting if it is an earlier part of the season to protecting those picks of what they're not top ten. So I'm not saying that they're not going to worthwhile because Thompson wasn't a top ten pick and look what he's turned into. But the fact is that we feel that the boss of bruins, for example, if they continue on this tear, I guarantee you that dawn Sweeney will do what he did last year and try to add to his team to give himself the best chance of winning. When you say about, you know, no general manager would make that deal if it's just a win one round. One of the great pressures in management is the pressure from above and the pressure from below. How do you, when you sit in the middle and the pressure coming from the ownership, you know, because they're like, we want to get in the playoffs, and you're like, yeah, but we're not good enough yet. Like, how do you, how do you make that work? Well, that's a pretty good point. I mean, there is pressure from above in certain situations, and you have pressure from the fan base, but I think if you're in fairly solid footing, I think you have to make the decision that's best for the team. And sometimes that's hard to do when you have to stand up to ownership and explain to your fan base when you didn't jump on a deal. But the worst place you want to be is 7 11. I mean, you're just getting in it, you know, 7, you're 11th. You're in that band. You probably don't have a chance to win. So you have to, I think, look at the long-term prospects for your team. Draft picks are important. You can go back to cliff Fletcher's draft shaft, you know, years and years ago, that was in the era of being able to sign as many free agents as you want without a cap. You need good young players on your team if you're going to be able to retain your older players as they start to become more productive. So the draft is still one of the biggest components of building a franchise. So I was a bit bored on Tuesday preparing for insider trading, which is seldom good for anyone, right? So I get poking around. And we know the oilers as an example are a team that needs some help on the blue line. I know that there's at least some interest in entertaining the idea of what Eric Carlson might need to be pulled out of San Jose. Now number one, is Eric Carlson going to wave to go to Edmonton. If you're Kenny, do you even entertain possibility because of, well, the cap for starters, right? You know, you're going to have to make it work. San Jose is going to have to eat money, or you're going to need a broker, all of those things. So it's easy for me from the outside to say that generally GM's lack creativity, right? Because of the worry that cap and the assets you have to give up. When is the right time when you're looking at a team and you've got superstars, like McDavid and draisaitl, where you start thinking about the creativity. Or even before that, luring petrology is a free agent, right? Now there's a difference between Vegas and Edmonton, but when is the right time to get as creative as you can be in trying to make a big splash. Well, Kenny's got two of the best players in the world. And I know he doesn't want to just let them die on the vine and, you know, not have a parade in Edmonton with them at some point. So creativity is going to be important if they're to add anybody. You look at their cap situation. It's not great. So they can't just the can't just add people. There's really nothing there. So how do you become create creative enough to add a player that makes 11.5 for four more years after this one? I think it's going to be impossible without some miracles from above for someone that makes it that much money. So I think that he'll be looking to do something. I just don't think Eric Carlson is going to be the guy that they end up end up using your creativity on. I think it's just going to be too difficult to put in that deal. You mentioned you mentioned earlier in the year earlier in the interview here about when you have to decide whether you get a chance to win, whether you don't. When do you decide it's time to punt on a season and you know what? Not now. I've got to start exploring maybe deals that I can't make today, but maybe I can make, I don't know in 6 weeks or something. Is that just a gut feel? Is that just looking at the standings or is it a bit of both? It's a bit of both, you know, I can tell you from personal experience when my last year in Toronto, we had we were in a playoff spot about two thirds of the way into the season. And things started to slide. At that point, I could see the direction we were going. I started trying to make deals or set the table for deals right then, and some of that comes with just making phone calls. So when it comes to having face to face meetings, I remember flew to Nashville to meet what they would boil to talk about moving a couple of players there and that was weeks before the deadline. So when you see which direction and you really feel where your team is headed, whether it's up or down, you'll start making deals either trying to add or calls to set the table to either add players or to move them. It's going to be almost even if you want to punt now that you can't get anybody to take your players anyway. Nobody's got any cap space. No, this league has become a trade deadline league. It really has. You know, you get the deals that the draft and the off season. And then most teams have set up for the year and that within a million bucks of the cap or they're in LTIR. So the deals early in the season are few and far between. Teams need player salaries to be paid down. And if they have any room of their own, they need that room to grow. So if they've got some money, the start of the year, even if it's a million bucks, that does grow to a significant number at the trade deadline. That's why we see so many deals then. Dave, let's go to the Toronto Maple Leafs here. Mitch Meyer is on a torrid pace, right? We establish a franchise record in a point scoring streak. He extended that earlier this week against the Dallas stars. Part of the group that drafted him fourth overall in 2015. I mean, is there anything about how this young man is developed into the player that he is now? I mean, a rock solid two way player with I'm going to use the word creativity. I mean, oozes out of his veins, but is there anything at all surprising to you about how he's developed as a player? I wouldn't