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.

"A week before the deadline, I had three defensemen hurt in one game in Pittsburgh, so I had to plug the hole real quick and that's when I made the deal with the Toronto Maple Leafs. It was a plus to get him and I had to work fast to get him on a Sunday night around 11:30 at night."

Jean Ratelle was one of the cornerstones of the Rangers' teams during Francis' tenure as the organization's general manager..

And Francis says the shrewdest trader was Montreal GM Sam Pollack.

"We never traded with him. The only trade I made with him I got Cesare Maniago (in June, 1965), but we used to stay away from one another as well as Boston. The Rangers, Boston and Montreal made very few deals. We stayed away from one another."

Francis is asked whether there was one deal he wished he was in on, and by this time he was GM of the St. Louis Blues.

"Jack Kent Cooke owned L.A. and Jack always had a habit of calling either Sammy Pollack or myself. So Cooke calls and says he's thinking of making a deal with Boston. ‘We really need a goalie and I'm talking about getting (Ron) Grahame from Boston.' I said what will you give up for him and he said a first-round pick because he never believed in keeping draft choices. I said don't trade Grahame for a first-round pick; don't give your first-round pick to them for Grahame. I am not even sure if he could play in the NHL.

"'Oh,"' he said. "You think that would be a bad deal?" I said I sure do. Guess what he did. He traded his first-round pick and guess who Boston ends up with? Ray Bourque."

Although Francis spent less than a handful of years in the NHL at a time when trades were infrequent as compared to today, he was on the other side of the transaction at one point. Instead of making the deal, he was part of the trade.

He was playing for Chicago at the time and the Blackhawks were struggling.

"Charlie Conacher was our coach and we had been on a three-game road trip, Montreal Toronto and New York. We were on our way back and we traveled by train then and he called me to into his compartment. The coach always had a compartment. He said, ‘I just want to let you know that I think you are playing well and you do not have to be concerned about being traded.' He said there were all sorts of rumors about our goaltending and I said 'That's nice.'

Ratelle, one of Francis' best finds, played 16 years for New York before being traded to Boston during the 1975-76 season.

"So we got back to Chicago and I sent out my laundry and my dry cleaning and about two hours later, I got a call telling me I was traded to the New York Rangers. I said, ‘Hey I just sent out my dry cleaning and laundry' and he said 'Pick it up next time you are in town.' The next time I came to town was with the Rangers and we shut out the Hawks 3-0. And to the right of our bench, that's where (the Hawks GM) always sat and at the end of the game I have him the thumbs-up signal, if you know what I mean, and that cost me $250 and it was worth it."

Francis is a member of the Hall of Fame and he lives in Florida and keeps close tabs on the game he loves. He says he's not surprised by how the arms race heated up prior to the March 9 deadline.

"The trade deadline will be hectic this year. Teams are loading up early. But they won't be sitting there at 3 in the morning. I sat there at 3 and I was goofy."

Those were the days.