“I really don’t have a good read on it,” Rutherford said. “It’s not like a trade in the middle of the year where there are only a couple of teams trying. There are a lot of teams trying to make changes, so it’s hard to read when anything can happen.

“I do know we’re trying as hard as we ever have at this point to be involved in acquiring a top player.”

“I’ve felt all along we might have to go the trade route to improve our team,” Rutherford said. “We’re in the mix in a lot of conversations.”

The Hurricanes appear to be one of the teams interested in Rick Nash. They have the 8th overall pick, but will not move Eric Staal, Jeff Skinner, Cam Ward, Brandon Sutter or Justin Faulk in any deal.

“Yeah, that’s a sore spot,” Murray said in the interview, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. “We’ve drafted fairly well the last few years … We rebuilt and you have a young man like Justin [Schultz] coming along who gave us every indication he wanted to play for us.

“There’s a spot there for him on the right point on that blue line. You mention the weaknesses. Our power play has been horrible. And Justin is very good at that. So it’s a huge disappointment. You just can’t replace it. You counted on it.

“…There’s a loophole in the CBA. Some things you just don’t understand. You move on. That’s the way it is.”

“We’ve tried everything,” Murray told the group. ”We’ve offered him everything we could have. This is not a money situation because we actually offered Justin the day before we played Calgary [in the last game of the season].

“We offered him everything we could possibly have offered him to play for us. “He didn’t even have to play that game. He just had to sign the contact from wherever he was and he could have burned a year. … So this is a situation where a young man has decided that he just wants to, as they say, check with all 29 other teams before they sign.”

“It’s especially frustrating, seeing as how when on December [16] … he sat with me in the first period in Chicago,” Murray said. “During the first intermission we discussed the rest of his [college] career and him playing for us as soon as he was done because at that point in time, Wisconsin was not very good and we were not very good.

“So it would have been a great chance for him to play 10, 15 games for us and get a jump start on his rookie season. He said to me, ‘Mr. Murray, I can’t wait.’”