Coyotes' Maloney has "lots of irons in the fire" on trade front

Coyotes GM Don Maloney was on Arizona Sports 98.7 on Wednesday morning.

On if he’s a little busy right now:

“Well, yeah. There’s certain times of the year where you get real busy and this is certainly one of them with the trade deadline in a couple of weeks and lots of irons in the fire and hopefully we can do something that’s going to be good for us long-term.”

On how he’s handling the Antoine Vermette situation, what the timeline might be, and how he as a GM handles the aspects of a major a trade:

"Well, there’s a certain ebb and flow to it. Through experience, generally the best deals come at the deadline. We have a clear price in mind for not only Antoine, but any of our people here. We know we’re having a difficult season. We need to bring some young assets in. We want to introduce more youth and speed into our lineup, which is what we plan on doing going forward.

“So really guys, it’s timing every day. We started this conversation out by talking about how busy things are, but you’re on the phone. You’re talking to people. Obviously we’re trying to extract more for all of our players. Right now, there’s a lot of teams that would like to pay less.

“So as we get close – there were a couple of big deals in the last week, guys. Winnipeg and Buffalo made a fairly significant deal. Toronto and Nashville made another deal that I think got everybody a little more active, in my opinion.

“We haven’t been in this position here in Arizona since really Wayne Gretzky’s second year as a coach, right before Dave Tippet came in, where we’re in a reset mode as you call it.

“So we have good assets. We have good people that other teams would like to acquire. We’d just like a little bit more than is being offered right now.”

On how much competition other teams that have tradable assets give him, and if that impacts his timeline on getting deals done:

"Well, it all goes into the pot when you analyze (trying to) acquire players or trading out players. I know what we can get for almost every one of our players, in the sense of the players that we're most focused on moving right now. To me, those deals are going to be here right at the deadline.

"So it's almost like you have a bird in the hand over here - now can we do better. That's sort of where we're at right now. We've made it very clear over the last month or two that we are in a mode of acquiring assets. So I feel confident we're going to help ourselves. Can we do a couple of great deals? Who knows. Maybe.

"But the deals we do will help us moving forward. We know looking at our this year we know we have to be quicker. We have to have a lot more energy into our group. We need to defend better. So all of those areas are going to be addressed. Hopefully a little bit right now at the trade deadline, but certainly in the offseason we think we can do some things to make us certainly a lot more entertaining next year."

Source: Arizona Sports 98.7/ Transcript: Nichols on Hockey

Nichols on Hockey

Nichols on Hockey

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Nichols on Hockey

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