Edmonton Oilers GM Steve Tambellini speaks with Boston Bruins GM Peter Chiarelli after Edmonton was awarded the first overall pick during the NHL Draft Lottery Drawing at the TSN Studio April 13, 2010 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.Abelimages
Oilers GM Steve Tambellini:
"It's such an important step for us to have the ability to take the first overall pick, especially where we are with our cycle of development. We're more into a reshaping, a rebuilding mode right now. Everybody's clear about that. This will be a wonderful building block to add on to some of the other draft choices we have in place now.
"Very, very excited for us and the city of Edmonton."
Taylor or Tyler?
"That question has not been answered yet. You listen other general managers' and their staffs are debating the same thing."
"It's an immediate impact that people get to see and it's exciting. The attention and the pressure with this player that comes to Edmonton is obvious, but that's part of the decision-making process also. Can this person handle being the first pick overall?"
"I'm sure there's lots of teams that have ideas how to make our team better. I always have to listen. ... We're focused right now on the No. 1 pick. For us to move that pick at this point, I can't think of what it would have to be."
"When it comes right down to it, your stomach is churning a little bit. Is there a chance not to get it? Yeah. I just tried to keep the positive thoughts happening."
"This is a huge opportunity for this organization going forward. I think it perfectly fits the moment of where we are as a hockey team, as an organization. We're in a rebuild type of this phase with this group. This is a huge building block."
"Where else can you attain those high impact players? If you look historically at the top end of the draft, those are players you can argue whose better from year to year, but most of them are impact players that play in the NHL for a long time.
"You know you're going to get a good player and it's very important in this system."
Bruins GM Peter Chiarelli:
Did you know pick would be this high?
No not really. We had a range in mind, we had to choose between the Leafs and a couple other teams, and we kind of had a range in mind, but not this high, no.
If we decide at the end of the day that we want to try and move up, I'm sure we'll have discussions with Steve and see where it goes.
I'll be keeping this pick. If anything, I'll try and move up.
I don't really look at trades as a win. In the context of this trade, Toronto got a really good player -- like a 40-goal scorer, right now. So we're going to get a really good player this year and who knows what's going to happen next year?
It's well publicized -- I think we're the second lowest scoring team in the league, so knowing that we're going to have a shot at one of these two guys, I was pretty happy.
First and foremost, it'll give us some more goals, which is nice. It adds youthful energy, youthful enthusiasm, it adds to our forward group. I'm going to make the bold assumption that we're going to take one of those two players.
I know which one I prefer but we have to go through the process and we're still, we haven't decided internally. I haven't seen them as much as all of our guys though -- we'll see where that goes. We still have a number of meetings left, we've got the combines coming up, after that we'll meet again and decide.
It's so close for us, it's really close, so yeah, it could change.
When the three pick comes up I'm thinking I didn't want to see a Bruins logo. When I didn't see a Bruins logo, I was happy -- and after that anything else was gravy.