For about five hours on Wednesday, Bruins general manager Peter Chiarelli believed he had just landed the most-coveted player on the trade market, Jarome Iginla.
At around 12 p.m. ET on Wednesday, as the B’s were preparing for the Canadiens at TD Garden in Boston, Chiarelli was told by Flames GM Jay Feaster that he had “won the Jarome Iginla sweepstakes.”
Chiarelli, who told the media on Thursday that he was not given permission to speak with Iginla throughout this ordeal, then became skeptical when things “went silent” around and after 5 p.m. ET.
“We were told at noon yesterday that we’d won the Jarome Iginla sweepstakes. We believed that we’d had a deal,” he told the media on Thursday.  “We brought up Torey [Krug], scratched [Alexander Khokhlachev] and [Matt Bartkowski] — we relied on the fact that we had the deal.”
By midnight, Chiarelli had received a call from Feaster, explaining that the longtime Flames forward had chosen the Penguins over the Bruins.
“Now, these things happen all the time, more than you know, about deals going south for whatever reason,” Chiarelli said. “We believed we had a deal. We operated on the premise that we had a deal. In my experience, when things go silent, things are going screwy from your end, and it was. So later that night, around [11:45 p.m.], I got a call from Jay saying that it was the player’s choice and he opted to go to Pittsburgh, so we were out.”
Chiarelli confirmed that Khokhlachev and Bartkowski were included in the deal and he has yet to speak with either player as of Thursday afternoon. He also confirmed that the first-round draft pick included was a firm first-rounder, not conditional.
