Morning Hits: Bernier, Read, Luongo, Grigorenko and Nichushkin
  • Pierre LeBrun: Believes that the Flyers and one other team were in Jonathan Bernier talks. The Flyers were offering Matt Read.
  • Pierre LeBrun: Doesn’t think the Islanders went too far down the road with Bernier talks.
  • Darren Dreger: The Canucks are still confident that they will be able to trade Roberto Luongo, even with Toronto out of it.
  • Chip Alexander: If the Hurricanes never traded their No. 8 pick last year to the Penguins in the Jordan Staal trade, they would have taken Mikail Grigorenko.
  • Josh Cooper of the Tennessean (in the USA Today): Would the Predators be wary of drafting Russian Valeri Nichushkin because of the Alexander Radulov situation?

    “There’s no question it becomes a factor in discussion,” TSN draft analyst Craig Button said.

    “It’s just who is available,” Fenton said. “We’re taking the best hockey player that we can. Nationality aside and circumstances that happened — we can’t be that narrow-minded to think that every situation is going to turn out like that.”

    “Every case is different. Certainly Radulov is not a great subject around our organization because he did decide to go back there and leverage whatever he had and enjoys playing there,” Fenton said. “Each case is individual, and Nichushkin is a guy that is telling us he wants to play over here. He’s acclimating, they’ve got him out of his contract and he could be a guy that’s staring us in the face.”