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.

Spend 15 minutes with Lacroix and you know there is no luck or miracles involved in the success he has had. His ability to add impact players like Ray Bourque to his team's roster over the years without upsetting the squad's chemistry is what makes him so good at what he does.

"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.

"I remember thinking this guy is a genius when he acquired Patrick [Roy] from Montreal. But then he goes out and gets Ray [Bourque] and Rob [Blake] as well," defenseman Adam Foote said.

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.