Like a soothsayer, Lacroix ticked off all three on the checklist -- acquiring Claude Lemieux from New Jersey as the power forward, Sandis Ozolinsh from San Jose to quarterback the power play and stealing Patrick Roy away from Montreal.

The bottom line here: Lacroix is quick to evaluate and determine what his team's needs are -- and he usually finds a way to fill the voids.

"You have to have confidence in your abilities. You have to take chances if you want to be successful," Lacroix told me in 1996.

He was looking me straight in the eyes, clearly a man focused, decisive and self-assured.

"I threw my business, a business I worked hard at for 21 years, in the garbage for the opportunity to run this team," Lacroix said. "As a player agent, I sat on the other side of the desk from NHL general managers for 21 years. I saw everything a general manager does. I never saw why sitting on this side of the desk would be something I couldn't do. Getting a chance to win a Stanley Cup wasn't the main reason I decided to be a general manager. It was the only reason."

While some may think of the 55-year-old Lacroix as elusive in an interview, the truth is he has no time for someone with a microphone or notepad who doesn't have the same passion and focus for the game that he does.

The fact of the matter is Lacroix is not a risk-taker. He's not a gambler -- two things most fans associate with trading in the NHL. You won't see him making a desperation move right at the March trade deadline or signing an expensive free agent in the summer to throw his salary structure out of whack (Paul Kariya and Teemu Selanne, remember, came to him with a once-in-a-lifetime one-year contract proposal last summer that no general manager could refuse).

Instead, Lacroix is proactive and ahead of the curve. And every year around this time of the year, you can expect him to beat the rush to the deadline by identifying what his team needs and going out and dealing off some of the future chips his scouting staff has acquired for him to give the Avalanche a better chance to succeed in the playoffs.

"Quebec was the pits three years before Pierre came along," Pierre Gauthier, former Ottawa and Anaheim general manager and now a scout for Montreal, told me earlier this season. "The only thing the Nordiques had going for them was the high draft choices they were getting and the players they wound up with (from) those picks.

"And what Pierre did in turning those prospects into the chemistry that the Avs have shown you since they went to Denver in 1996 is amazing."

Players like Peter Forsberg, Adam Foote and Joe Sakic have benefited from Lacroix's shrewd moves over the years, hoisting the Cup two times since the Avs moved from Quebec to Colorado for the 1995-96 season.

We're talking about keeping incumbents like Joe Sakic and Foote and identifying them as the core players he wanted to build around -- and trading chips like Mats Sundin, Owen Nolan, Jocelyn Thibault and, yes, Eric Lindros, even though he was dealt to the Philadelphia Flyers by former GM Pierre Page for Peter Forsberg, Ron Hextall, Steve Duchesne, Kerry Huffman, Mike Ricci, Chris Simon, draft picks and cash.

"The Nordiques couldn't blow that deal,'' then Boston Bruins GM Harry Sinden chirped back in 1996. "They were offered so much, their heads must have been spinning. Why else would they have accepted two trades (with the Flyers and Rangers)? Honestly, I think they were close to saying OK to Chicago as well.

"While none of those players equaled Eric Lindros, all of the pieces they got certainly made the puzzle more clear."

In the meantime, Sinden and others have failed to make big and small trades that have been as important to their teams as Lacroix has (for instance, Lacroix convincing Sinden to trade him Ray Bourque and then winning a Stanley Cup, while the Bruins went nowhere with the players they got in the transaction).

Trading season? In following Lacroix's rule, it's any time of the year when you have the opportunity to improve your team.