Emile Francis remembers the sleepless nights leading up to the NHL's trade deadline and he doesn't miss them for a New York minute.

Francis was the general manager of the New York Rangers for a decade, but it wasn't the stress of stocking his roster that kept him up at night. Rather, the trade deadline was 3 a.m. (Eastern time) when Francis was a horse trader compared to the 3 p.m. bewitching hour teams face today.

"When you were dealing with those West Coast teams, it made for sleepless nights," says Francis, who was GM of the Rangers from 1964-65 to 1974-75. "You would be up to 4 and 5 o'clock in the morning contacting players, getting guys out of bed to tell them to get on the next train or plane out of town.

"We'd be up all night, especially because you would be dealing with Oakland or Los Angeles. They were always active in the trade market. I remember working on a deal right to one minute before 3 in the morning. It was kind of goofy."

The NHL was a much different league then. Francis hails from an era when the NHL was a six-team league.

Francis played 95 regular-season games with Chicago and the Rangers and he became known as "The Cat" because of his slight frame and lightning-quick reflexes. Francis, who was an avid baseball player, also is credited with developing the present day catching glove used by goalies. He began experimenting with a first baseman's glove by adding a cuff to protect the rest of his hand and wrist.

Prior to 1967, talented players were often relegated to long careers in the minors because team rosters changed little from season to season. Each of the NHL's clubs also had a feeder system that included a handful of pro farm teams, one or more junior clubs and sponsorship agreements with juvenile or community teams. The six NHL clubs had divided Canada into territories from which each club was entitled to protect the best young players.

According to Francis, it was a miracle that Rod Gilbert ended up in the Rangers' system rather than with the Montreal Canadiens, who owned the rights to most of the good Quebec-area players at that time.

"At one time we had 125 players under contract. We had the Rangers, Buffalo in the American League, Omaha in the Central League and Vancouver in the Western League," says Francis. "So you needed 125 players. After we expanded they put a rule in that you could not have more than 50 players under contract.

"We had four pro teams we had to stock. And with each team, you had two sponsorships and we ended up with 16 sponsorships – that was when we could own the junior teams – and we owned about 1,200 players. There were no computers and you had to keep track of all of them."

"You would go to Quebec and you would see a midget game and a kid you liked and you wanted to move that kid out and back to Ontario and put him on the list of kids you had the rights to and it seemed that every good midget team in Quebec was run by the guy in the town who owned Molson's distributorship and they all went to the Montreal Canadiens. How we got (Jean) Ratelle and (Rod) Gilbert out of Quebec was a miracle. They (Montreal) had so many players they lost track of them."

The sponsorship system changed when the NHL added six teams for the 1968-69 season. The old system was impractical.

Francis was a busy on the trade front during his tenure as GM of the Rangers. He says the best deal he ever did was getting Tim Horton from the Toronto Maple Leafs in March, 1970.

'The Cat' was never on the prowl in Boston or Montreal