Initial comments from Lombardi

The quality of the audio was terrible, so here’s Dean’s first comments on Hickey.

“He does things that are very hard to find. Not only is he a good skater straight ahead, he’s an east-west skater and he can get up the rink in a hurry. In today’s games, the guys who can make plays and get it out of your own end, that’s critical.”

“We think that with Hickey and Jack Johnson, we have two players who have the potential to be top-four players, similar to when we got Stuart and Hannan (in San Jose).”

“He had started moving up on the boards, and it was becoming clear that in that 8-11 spot, there were teams that were strongly considering him. I had two or three deals that would allow us to move down and get another pick, but I didn’t want to move too far backward.”

“He started out slow and in January he started taking off again. He averaged a point per game then started to get better.”

“You can’t do what everybody thinks. You have to put your work in and do what you think is best. We’ve got a good group of young forwards. You add Jack Johnson and a kid like this, at a critical position. I’m pretty excited about this.”

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