CTL: Bowman talks Oduya, Scott, trade market

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After spending most of his time recently working the phone lines leading up to Monday's trade deadline, Blackhawks general manager Stan Bowman joined Chicago Tribune Live to explain how everything went down.

Bowman explained why he believes the Blackhawks are getting a high-quality defenseman in Johnny Oduya and acknowledged it was difficult to say goodbye to John Scott, whom he referred to as "a very popular guy."

The trade deadline was more quiet than normal, and Bowman explained why.

"The difficulty this season, even moreso than in past years, is the standings are very compressed this year," Bowman said. "I think there's not too many teams in the whole list of 30 who are out of the playoff picture, and as a result, only a couple of teams have players they're willing to trade away for future draft picks or prospects not yet in the NHL, so that makes it a tough trade market for a lot of teams.

We're in that category, we don't want to necessarily trade away roster players to try to improve our team," Bowman continued. "There was a lot of talk throughout the league. We were in on a lot of these calls, and the reason they didn't get made is because it was too valuable for them to trade players away and not get roster players in return. We certainly worked it as well as we could, had a lot of discussions but it just didn't work out other than what we did."

At the end, Bowman explained the team's current mental state:

"You have to be positive, I think that's the most important thing here," Bowman said. "We're frustrated that we haven't had better results lately, but I also think that we've got a lot of great players here. We're all working together to try to put a nice streak together and I think we saw glimpses of that when we had those four consecutive wins against some very impressive teams."

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