[sureLoss]

http://flames.nhl.com/club/news.htm?id=769888

“We interview between 15 and 20 a day for five, four days,” Treliving said from Buffalo. “There’s a lot of kids. I didn’t count the list up, I just noted we’re talking to a lot. We’re talking to a lot.

“Pretty much everybody that’s here. You’re visiting with a lot.”

The interviews, capped with physical fitness testing to close out the combine, are designed to put a face to a scouting report and provide a bit of context into who the player is.

But it’s one piece of a much larger puzzle, Treliving cautioned.

“We’ve highlighted certain areas we need to go and still continue to look at and research and get answers to, but you don’t want to be coming to the combine with a bunch of dramatic shifts and saying we’ve watched this player, in some cases, for two or three years and seen him play x amount of games, have studied and analyzed his game and then we spent 20 minutes with him in an interview and suddenly he’s ratcheted right up or he’s plummeted,” Treliving said.

“You have to keep it in context. In some cases, this is the last dealing, the last interaction. It sticks with you. You have to put it in context. You can’t forget all the other times you watched this player play over the years. You don’t necessarily come out of here and all of a sudden we’re going to forget all we watched and all the work we’ve done leading up to this combine. In a lot of cases, this rounds out the story.

“You’ve got to keep it in context. It can be dangerous if you put too little or too much stock into the combine. This is just another source of information. It helps you round out the picture, but it’s always good to sit down face-to-face with them and get a little insight into who and what they’re all about.”