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Driven to win It's Pierre Lacroix time. More succinctly, it's time for all of the rest of the teams in the National Hockey League to wonder just how the Colorado Avalanche General Manager finds a way to make a couple of strong trades every year about this time -- enough to give his team a chance to advance deep into the Stanley Cup Playoffs. And he's done it again this year, acquiring defensemen Bob Boughner and Kurt Sauer from the Carolina Hurricanes and Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, respectively. "Pierre is obviously an action person," Mighty Ducks GM Bryan Murray told me after making several deals with Lacroix throughout the years. "He's not afraid to make a move because it might backfire. He just goes after it. He's definitely proactive." No trade package is complete without an anatomy of a trade story that follows a deal from start to finish from both sides of the deal along with the personal information of the key player involved. This time, however, I thought it might be interesting to put you in the mind of perhaps the most proficient trader in our time -- Lacroix.
While New Jersey Devils GM Lou Lamoriello, the only other individual who has built a franchise that others try to copy, has told me he studied the best parts of a combination of successful teams like the New York Yankees, Green Bay Packers and Montreal Canadiens and then put his math and economic backgrounds to work, Lacroix, a former player agent, spent his energy drinking in the successes of his hometown Canadiens and used the pluses and minuses of sitting across the table in contract and business meetings from the likes of Glen Sather, Bill Torrey, Cliff Fletcher, Scotty Bowman and the other great architects this game has seen throughout the years. Lacroix went from father figure and babysitter, at times, for 25 or more clients to using his shrewd proactive approach to shake up the hockey world. The first time I met Lacroix, I was told he often reaches in his pocket for miracles -- more precisely he rubs a 2-inch replica of the Stanley Cup attached to his key chain for luck. A friend gave Lacroix the little Cup the day he was named general manager of the Quebec Nordiques, telling him he could start small and work his way up to the big Cup. Spend 15 minutes with Lacroix and you know there is no luck or miracles involved in the success he has had, particularly since the team moved to Denver and immediately won one Stanley Cup in 1996 and followed that with another championship in 2001.
"As players, we have seen Pierre bring in players like Patrick Roy, Claude Lemieux, Sandis Ozolinsh, Theo Fleury, Ray Bourque, Rob Blake and others, you can't help but bust your butt to try to win it all every year," defenseman Adam Foote said. "I remember thinking this guy is a genius when he acquired Patrick from Montreal. But then he goes out and gets Ray and Rob as well. "What is so uncanny about that is that we are around him all the time and it's like he's a magician, pulling these future Hall of Famers out of a hat all the time." The only sports executive I can think of to have such a decisive approach in wheeling and dealing is former San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh, who shared the same attributes when it came to moving up in the draft, trading off prospects for a key player and just sort of seemed ahead of the curve when everyone else was trying to figure out just what the curve was. I remember meeting with Lacroix before the 1996 Finals and asking about his mindset coming into that season. It was intriguing to me to learn that his analysis of the situation he was in charge of was the same as I wrote before the season when I predicted the Avalanche could win a Stanley Cup if they acquired a power forward, a defenseman to quarterback the power play and a solid No. 1 goaltender.
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