from Joe McDonald of ESPN,

ESPN.com spoke recently with the Bruins team president about the upcoming Winter Classic and the state of his team.

JM: Speaking of growing the game, what are your thoughts about expansion in the NHL?

CN: Well, you want it to be right. As far as enough players, I guess it could be debatable. Can an expansion team be a competitive team early in its expansion? It's hard to say. It has to be right and that's why the league has taken its time because they want to make sure it's right. It would be nice to have balanced conferences, I can say that.

JM: What was it like having that conversation with Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs about all the offseason changes, and telling him he had to be patient with the new plans?

CN: First of all, [hopefully he] had the confidence that maybe these guys know what they're talking about, or at least hopefully about that. You look at the core group, we still have a world-class goalie [Tuukka Rask], still have a real difficult shutdown defenseman in [Zdeno] Chara, we still have [David] Krejci, [Patrice] Bergeron, [Brad] Marchand and we've seen Loui [Eriksson] improve again last year, so we still felt we had really good components to a good team. The amount of times I've talked to Mr. Jacobs is on a regular basis, so it's not necessarily just one two-hour conversation; it's conversations over a period of time.

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