(This has been obviously a weird summer with everything that's happened. I know you sort of want to take some things one at a time and throw some thought into them rather than go off willy-nilly. Do you feel any sort of pressure from the outside such as, 'Hey I've got to do this or do that?')

"Well I say multitasking. It's more like ... obviously, it's all started (when) you get your direction from ownership. Clearly this is the way you want to go. Boom. OK, that's clear. You get through all the budget issues. OK, and it's not just with this year's budget. Where do you see the budget. Where do you see the budget (down the road)? That's a huge, key meeting and preparation in itself to put a three-year monetary plan together, and then get direction from ownership.

"Do they say, 'I want to win a Cup?' They could have said, 'You know what, we've got to get into the playoffs here.' And that revolved around our second pick. I can make this deal. I don't think he'd do it. But if you tell me I gotta get in and do a short-term fix, let's do it. It's not what I recommend.

"But that meeting takes a lot of preparation.

"Secondly, unfortunately I felt I had to make a coaching change. Then, you're going into arguably a critical draft. I think all drafts are critical, but this one probably took on a little more significance given where the franchise is at, the number of picks we had and where we were picking.

"It's a second-year (front office) staff, together. People forget, you can prepare and prepare and prepare, but until you're under fire, particularly if you're trying to move like we were moving ... We had a couple situations late in the second round, we weren't as good as we need to be. We got through it, but that's an example of the importance of staff being together, and being able to think clearly and concisely under pressure. And we've already talked about it. We got through it, thank God, but we weren't sharp.

"So all the preparation that went into it, I said this before, I probably adapted a long time ago. A lot of teams never moved at the draft, and we used to say why not? Get the guy you want. It used to be they'd sit there, 'Well, our guy didn't fall to us. I liked him, but he didn't fall.' ... Well, if you like the guy, let's go get him. And that was a (Dallas) Cowboy model that I'd seen, 15 years ago. So I guess development was kind of speared by baseball, but the drafting was the Cowboys.

"At San Jose when I first sat with my scouts they looked at me like I had three heads. I said, 'Here's how we're gonna move.' And it started with Scott Hannan, or it started with moving down, picking (Brad) Stuart and getting (Jonathan) Cheechoo. Some things worked, some things don't. But that takes a process. So that's a lot of preparation. You don't just go to the draft and take the picks. They ran through hypotheticals, they ran through the layers ... But then as much as you're able to prepare, you've got to be able to think on your feet. I thought we were good, but we can be better.

"Again, you've got to prepare for that, and that's 12 hours a day sitting in Toronto (at the draft combine). One guy's, 'My head hurts, but I love this.'

"So you do that. And then secondly, like I said, with free agency, our whole game plan was we had to move those two guys (Michael Cammalleri and Lubomir Visnovsky). So you say about the pressure to do it. Yeah, I'm doing it, but we're doing it and we're going to do it right.

"Then with free agency, just because we didn't get any free agents, don't think we weren't frickin' looking at them. But we gotta stay within these guidelines, stay within this plan.

(Looking at the grease board in his office) "That's the defense I envision up there. You don't have to look at it, but that one on the right gets me excited. That's as good as any. Now turn your head away because I don't want that on the screen. ... That's the one two to three years from now, all the kids. All six of those guys are 26 and under."

(Note: I won't give away all of his secrets, but the names on that list include Jack Johnson, Drew Doughty, Colten Teubert, Alec Martinez and Thomas Hickey.)

More to come ...