NHL STANLEY CUP FINALS: HURRICANES v RED WINGS

June 3, 2002

Peter Karmanos

Paul Maurice

Jim Rutherford

PAUL MAURICE: I think so. We took couple days off the ice and skated at a pretty good tilt for two or three days, and feel rested and ready.

JIM RUTHERFORD: Well, when we added Ron Francis it was very important to our franchise because we needed to learn how to win and have that character, and then Rod Brind'Amour and then at that point we could start to change our philosophy and started adding our young players. We knew we had some good young players. They had to be developed. Ron Smith has done a good job developing those players, then they started to fit into the puzzle at that time. And those players that Sheldon Ferguson drafted a lot of guys taken in the middle of the draft, third, fourth round, like Vasicek and Cole, Svoboda, those guys, Nic Wallin, they become real good players for us.

JIM RUTHERFORD: I am glad it's Pete doing the firing and not the media because then we wouldn't have made it this long. (Laughs) but anyways, I mean, you have to ask Pete that. He's a very loyal guy and he does it in all his businesses. But I think with what we went through moving a franchise, playing in another city, 70 miles away and dealing with more adversity than any other franchise has dealt with, the stability of the franchise was important. If you keep moving around and you keep moving people in and out, that would make it very difficult moving forward and be successful. The fact that not many people at the management level were moved around, stabilized the franchise and gave us an opportunity to get to where we are at today.

PETER KARMANOS: Jimmy is a little too modest there. One of the reasons why it's easy to remain loyal to Jim and Paul was because they demonstrated that they are about the best in the business, so it's really easy to stay local to that type of thing.

PETER KARMANOS: I am planning to have pizza. When it's down here it's going to be Little Caesar's pizza. There isn't any animosity between us. The only thing that we have all done together is spend millions of dollars in youth hockey in the Detroit area, and we have turned it into an area that produced very few hockey players to an area that produces more than it's share in the National Hockey League. Talk about the changes of Hedican and Hill coming into your blue line.

PAUL MAURICE: Both men are good fits on and off. Sean Hill personality lends itself to our room as well. He's a great talker. Brett came in and unfortunately got injured as soon as he arrived, so it really delayed it two or three weeks. His game, I think, has flourished in our style that he doesn't feel the pressure. Where he had said before maybe felt it to be offensive and put up numbers, and here, certainly we like him to join the rush and he scored a great goal against Toronto off it. But he feels he's able to just do one job. Sandis is a very good player. He's proven that in Florida. It goes again finding the right pieces - not that he's not in the League, he's on our team. Sandis felt a lot of pressure to put up offensive numbers to create things from our back end and we play a little bit more of a five-man game on the ice and so it just -- for what we were using him for at the time, it didn't fit. Fortunately the trade worked out extremely well. Kevin Adams is the guy that doesn't get talked about in that trade but he has been great. We also got a really nice young prospect in Mike Zigomanis who's been practicing with us for the last couple of weeks and we're real excited about him.

JIM RUTHERFORD: Old part is right, we got that right. We have been friends for a long time and especially when we go to the meetings, the general manager's meetings and things we sit together and I do think that we think about this game a lot the same way. And it's interesting because sometimes you enter these series and you don't have quite the same feelings for your opponents, but I have a lot of respect. He's a good friend.

PAUL MAURICE: Intimidating is not the right word. It is a good word, by the way, but I had an opportunity when I was coaching juniors here, Mr. Bowman came in here to watch and sneak into practice and see a lot. He's such a great command of the game, and a great command of his team that you are in awe, I think maybe is the word, when you look at the -- statistically the two of us, (laughs) when our records and our games and experiences are put side by side, it will be very noticeable, his fantastic career and rightfully so. For me it's going to be a pleasure. This is part of that dream that when you get to the Stanley Cup Finals that the guy on the other bench would be Scotty Bowman.

PAUL MAURICE: It was Shanahan, O'Neill and Emerson, Nelson Emerson was the other player on that line. I remember Brendan coming to the bench one game after Jeff O'Neill had scored a goal and he said this was -- Jeff was very young at the time. He said that kid is going to score a lot of goals in this League. And Jeff was still young, and still developing but he saw that natural talent in a lot of ways that Brendan has that great shot, that great release, he saw that, I think in Jeff O'Neill and he was right.

PETER KARMANOS: I will have as many conversations with Mr. Ilitch as I had with the owner of Toronto, the owner of Montreal and the owner of New Jersey, which is zero. (LAUGHTER).

PETER KARMANOS: Are you -- what is your title these days?

PETER KARMANOS: Oh, okay.

PETER KARMANOS: Yeah, that's pretty simple, as a young kid growing up in Detroit you played baseball in the summer and you played football in the fall and you played basketball in the winter. And you watched hockey on TV and you watched people like Gordie Howe and Ted Lindsey and Terry Sawchuk, and if you had any sense of sport at all, you realized you were watching something special. And that generated an interest in hockey that has never died for me. I like playing the other sports. I love watching ice hockey.

PAUL MAURICE: No, you work that underdog angle when you don't think you are and we really did not feel in the first three series we were. I don't think most of the media picked us to win any of them. And that was an advantage for us, and Toronto tried to work it. They had the injury angle, certainly they had some injuries, but we are the underdog. So really no point working at it; that's already been done.

PAUL MAURICE: I really can't comment on the pressure on the Red Wings not knowing the room. We have not felt any pressure other than the internal pressure that the players put on themselves in any of the series. And I don't think that changes. I don't think that there's less pressure on our team going into the series than we felt in any of the first three. You want to keep pressure -- pressure is not a bad thing. That tension that nervousness is not a bad thing. We want to feel that pressure going into this series.

PETER KARMANOS: Well, it's very rewarding, took an awful lot of criticism over the last few years about where the team was playing, and how we were building the team. Was watching TV at the start of the Playoffs and saw some yo-yo tell me that on his program that he was quite sure that we weren't going to win a game in the Playoffs. I have watched very carefully to see if that person would ever say they were wrong. And it's nice when things work out the way they have worked out. We have got four more games to win and we are going to try real hard to do it.

PETER KARMANOS: I think a very small percentage would be rooting for the Hurricanes. Most of them would be rooting for the Red Wings. They are all traitors, or they will be.