Going to the tournament and talking to him about the decisions he made and asking him how he put it together gave me a sense of his abilities. I talked to him (about the Wild management job) before this year's tournament and he said he couldn't talk about it until after the tournament.

And he'll give his overall opinion on the state of the team.

I wouldn't have believed it. We are on a roll. But if you had told me that our team would be competing against all the teams that we played to date, yes, I would've believed that. Or that we would be playing hard -- yes. Or that they'd be close games -- yes. I think the difference is that all of those things have happened and some of those close games have gone in our favor.

Teams are more comfortable now taking on the risk of development of players than they were three or four years ago. More teams are realizing young players aren't a detriment. To me, there's no difference between a player at 19 and someone who's 21.

There's somebody who's going to say, 'I don't want to lose this guy so I'll put him out in four or five days' because they want to see what people might acquire.

We did it a year in advance, and we didn't get any credit for it.