NHL EASTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: MAPLE LEAFS v HURRICANES

May 24, 2002

Rick Ley

COACH LEY: I do not know. I talked to him this morning. He's still in the hospital undergoing further tests. It's day-to-day.

COACH LEY: I think there is a travel concern, but I think anybody that knows him well enough, certainly he'll be pulling out all the stops to be there.

COACH LEY: Yeah, very much so. Because I had talked to him earlier and he said that he would not be there and that he would not be making the trip to Raleigh Durham, and so obviously I was pleasantly surprised and happy. He looked better than he had in quite a while. He was a good voice behind the bench, and we were happy because obviously for health reasons. He looked real good.

COACH LEY: Well, it says a lot. It's his team, and he doesn't want to let anybody down. He wants to be there and be a part of it and show the leadership and the quality of the person that he really is. It's not a personal, personal thing with him. It's just that that's the way he is. He wants to be there and help guide this team through a rocky road.

COACH LEY: No, not at all. I think as we were talking about last night's game, I'm sure the heart machine was fluttering (laughter).

COACH LEY: All I know is we're going to prepare like I will be behind the bench tomorrow night, and hopefully he's there, too. It's just one of those things. I don't know when we'll find out what will happen. You just have to move forward and take it as last night's case, take it hour by hour.

COACH LEY: He definitely won't be going with us today.

COACH LEY: I thought we played real well last night, I really did. So much better than we did the previous game. I thought we had a lot more enthusiasm. We worked at the process a lot better of moving the puck through the trap, and we created our chances. We outchanced them 17 to 8, and four of their chances were on the power play. So five-on-five we outchanced them by a great deal. I don't think that the result -- it wasn't a fair result from our standpoint, but that's the game of hockey.

COACH LEY: Well, I don't think so much it was the bounces. The bounces seemed to be bouncing away from us and rebounds or whatever. But we still didn't create enough congestion around the net, and if we are going to be successful tomorrow, which we're going to be, they have not driven any stake in us yet. The one thing we have to do is we have to get to the net and we have to go in there. It's one of those things where we have to be more determined than them.

COACH LEY: Well, there's two parts to it. One is that their system of play affords them the luxury of good defensive position. Their defensemen are doing a good job of blocking off and the other retrieving. Their forwards are doing a good job of holding up. And it's a lot of stuff during the season that would be called probably obstruction hooking or holding or whatever, but during the playoffs, you get away with a lot more and they are taking advantage of it.

COACH LEY: That's quite possible. Obviously, I think if you looked at the two previous series, how effective Gary Roberts was for us, they probably had a plan in place. They didn't want to let him be the sole difference in the series, so they may have assigned someone to him. It's hard to assign a forward to another forward because what you're doing is you're leaving holes elsewhere. So I think that they are doing a very good cumulative job on him, and of all our guys. I don't think it is just Gary. They have done a good job and they don't want to let us get in and establish a forecheck and rotations, where they have been able to do it to us.

COACH LEY: Well, they have been very good in a lot of ways. Their defensive position has been outstanding, so we have to create -- if we want to break that down, which we did a little bit better last night, but we still have a ways to go. We have to maybe take some different routes. I thinks biggest thing is maybe be more determined.

COACH LEY: We haven't really thought much about that yet. We just want to get the guys here today and get them up and moving and thinking about tomorrow's game. We haven't really had much time to think about it.

COACH LEY: They were in watching the movie Blazing Saddles. So I think maybe they are looking for a little levity in the situation. Like I said, no one has driven the stake in this team's heart. We've battled through a lot of adversity, so there's no reason why we can't do it again. But we have to look at it one game at a time. There's nothing we can do about second games. It's tomorrow's game that we have to be concerned with.