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NHL STANLEY CUP FINAL: PREDATORS VS PENGUINS

June 9, 2017

Peter Laviolette

Nashville, Tennessee - Practice Day

Q. Peter, what kind of adjustments do you need to consider and look at to counter the speed that the Pens have been bringing in their rushes into your zone?
PETER LAVIOLETTE: Well, speed would be one of it, right? They were quicker. There were some things that we talked about internally in the room. We'll look to make those adjustments tomorrow.

But we've got to play a better game, generally speaking, but I'm not going to go into too much detail about anything we went over here today.

Q. In the larger team rivalry that form, in these sort of situations individual matchups and head-to-head battles also form. I know that P.K. and Sid have garnered a lot of attention. Can an individual battle like that have a heavy influence on the series, especially with two players that are very important to their respective teams?
PETER LAVIOLETTE: They could. I mean, I think P.K. has played against some pretty tough players in the playoffs here to get to this point. Whether it's Malkin's line or Crosby's line, he's still faced with big challenges. I think he's done a really good job. He's a competitive guy.

Last night their team won a hockey game. They won the battles. They won the speed, as mentioned earlier. And we've got to look to be better.

Q. Peter, I know these guys won three potential elimination games last year in the playoffs. If you look at this year, some of the bigger losses (indiscernible) pretty well, too. Can anything be gained, I guess, especially from those playoff situations last year when you faced elimination and won?
PETER LAVIOLETTE: A couple things. On the question, I think you can gain experience. You can recall on experiences that you've had in the past and try to use those to build moving forward.

Just with regard to our team not playing well, we've had a real honest group in here, and when the game that we played isn't the game that we're looking for, there's usually a good response.

I said it last night, and even after meeting with the guys today, we've got a lot of confidence in our group to be better, to get better, and to play a good game. I don't think that there's any searching going on in there on how we're going to do this or what needs to take place. We need to play a better game. We've proven that we can and we have in the past, and there's a lot of confidence that we will in a couple days.

Q. Peter, just wonder about the tone as a head coach that you set the morning after a game like that? The video session, whatever, just if it's important to be calm or what kind of a tone you set?
PETER LAVIOLETTE: I think it's important to fix things, especially today. That's the good thing about having a couple days is that you get an opportunity to look at things and present things and talk about things that maybe need to be better. We did that. We'll talk about things that we've done well moving forward. This.

Game's behind us. We're focusing on the next one now, and I think we understand what we need to do to be better. Right now is about, I think, getting the guys ready for that game that's coming up in a couple days.

Q. Peter, a couple of guys just mentioned that it's June 9th, sort of how great is it that we're still playing? Does that make it easier to flush a game like last night? And is it okay to flush a game like last night?
PETER LAVIOLETTE: You know, the thing about the playoffs, if we win Games 3 and 4, then for sure we're going to win Game 5, right? And it just doesn't work that way in the playoffs. You know, every game is its own chapter. It's its own slice of the pie, and you've got to go out and fight for that slice every day and be ready to write that chapter. Last chapter doesn't have anything to do with it.

You know, I think our guys will be ready to do that. They get a couple days off here, what happened in Game 5 is gone. We know what we need to do in Game 6. We know how we're capable of playing, especially in our building here, and look to get ourselves a big win.

Q. Two things. One really quick, you're not going to tell us anything about Ellis, right?
PETER LAVIOLETTE: No.

Q. Different question. Is this different than coming back here after losing the first two games there, or is it the same approach?
PETER LAVIOLETTE: No, it's the same approach, I think. We need to win a hockey game. Came back losing two. I said at that point that there's a lot of confidence in our group on how we play the game. We've liked a lot of what we've done in this series.

We don't like the way we played last night. We're all ready to own that. We're ready to admit that, and we're ready to move forward from it.

But, again, I think that there's an awful lot of positives that we've taken from this series, as well. Last night we didn't have it going on. Pittsburgh did. And we'll look to flip that.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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