CALGARY — Craig Conroy wants to make it patently clear that he’s not facing an ultimatum of any sort when it comes to the future of Jacob Markstrom.
“He’s never come and said he wants out,” said the Flames GM of his netminder, who has two years left on his contract.
“That’s never been mentioned. He’s never said that.”
That hasn’t prevented many from interpreting the frustration aired by the netminder amidst late-season trade rumours as a desire to move on from the rebuilding club this summer.
And that chatter bothers Conroy.
“It’s part of the game, but it does bother me because it’s always out there — there’s something about the goalie all the time and I don’t think it’s fair to the goalie either,” he said.
“I feel more for him because I’ve been on the other side of this.
“Everyone wants to speculate and throw things out there and I don’t think it’s fair to him.”
Linus Ullmark and Juuse Saros are now subject to similar trade speculation, potentially crowding a market in which only a few teams appear to be serious about spending significantly to upgrade their starter.
Asked how the goalie market has changed since the Flames and Devils held swap talks before the trade deadline, Conroy shrugged.
“I don’t know how the goalie market has changed,” said Conroy.
“Again, it’s all speculation, and as we work through the process you just talk to teams about everything. I don’t know if the goalie market has changed, or is the same, but we work through the process here and we talk about how we make the team better and move forward.”
No NHL team needs goaltending more than New Jersey, and you can bet that’s where Markstrom would like to end up.
The Flames need to cash in on Markstrom at some point, and start giving Dustin Wolf reps as their goalie of the future.
But without options, it’s clear the Flames aren’t keen on giving up their MVP for what the Devils are willing to offer.
And so, the speculation will continue right through to next week’s draft.
Conroy’s comments come as part of a wide-ranging one-on-one interview in which he addressed everything from draft preparations, Tij Iginla and updates on his injured players to the sale of Capfriendly.com and lessons learned from this year’s final:
SPORTSNET: You have two picks in each of the first four rounds, have you finalized your draft list, or could it change on the draft floor?
CRAIG CONROY: I think it’s close. I think you’re still going to have those discussions, could guys move one way or the other? There’s always a little tweaking going on right up until the table. Even when we go back after the first round, when we know who we’ve got, what are we looking for, and if we make both picks, what have we got? Is there a priority?
You don’t want to pigeonhole yourself, and we don’t want to say, ‘this is the list and we’re never going to budge off it,’ because things do change and it’s fluid.
SN: Do you worry about fan backlash if you leave Vegas without drafting Tij Iginla?
CC: Everyone is going to have an opinion.
We pick ninth and I would love for someone to tell me how this draft is going to unfold, because it could go a number of ways.
SN: What are you hearing from other GMs, in terms of the possibility of seeing first-round picks traded before or at the draft?
CC: Last year, most teams you talked to, it didn’t feel like they were going to move their picks, or they weren’t interested in doing that.
But this year I think some teams have actually come out and publicly stated they’d be willing to. I feel more teams are open to moving. If there’s an opportunity to move up or down, what do they get?
This year there are definitely opportunities.
SN: Can we assume you’re interested in collecting more picks?
CC: You’re always looking to upgrade.
As the draft is going along you have your list and if there’s an opportunity to move up because there’s a guy we really like that is still available, you want to make sure you have those conversations.
Some teams are willing to move, but you want to see where everybody is at.
SN: How has Dan Vladar been recovering from hip surgery, and how is Martin Pospisil doing following the injury that ended his stellar world championship showing?
CC: Before Vladdy left he was doing squats, and was moving well, and it looks like everything is tracking right on schedule. So that’s positive.
Hopefully he’ll be ready by the end of August.
That’s why we got it done a little earlier, so he’ll be back, ready for training camp.
With Martin it sounds like he’s good to go. It wasn’t as bad as we worried when we saw it. We got lucky with that one, which is positive.
SN: What have you learned from watching the Stanley Cup Final?
CC: The depth, the goaltending, the defence and the size of the defence. It just shows you how long and physical the playoffs are — you need guys that can battle through. You need a lot of depth.
Last year you saw Florida was banged up and this year Edmonton is banged up.
You need your top players to be your top players, but you also need your support staff to chip in, and Florida’s support staff has really chipped in. That’s been the difference in the final so far.
SN: With the Washington Capitals buying CapFriendly.com and soon to be cutting off public access to it, do you have an in-house resource like that?
CC: We have something similar.
It’s probably not as detailed as Capfriendly was, but very similar.
I would say we have 80 per cent of what they have and there are some tools we don’t have that we will build in.
So we’re good to go.
That was one of the things, trying to get everything in house to where you’re not using outside websites.
I will say, Capfriendly did a great job, and you’d always use them as a resource, comparing it to ours.
