NHL STANLEY CUP FINALS: HURRICANES v RED WINGS

June 5, 2002

Paul Maurice

COACH MAURICE: He brought an instance expectation level from the time he entered our team. Most importantly, I think he said to me once that he expected 70 very, very good games out of himself a year, 70. He thought there's going to be one a month that you are not real happy with, but that's a quite a high standard in practices like that. He didn't skate today. Whenever Ronnie skates he skates hard and that's great. We're at the point in the season where you see more and more optional skates. And so now what happens, come out and skate hard or they don't come out. That's really what Ronnie has brought. He has a certain preparation professionalism, if that's a proper statement. He prepares very hard when he is supposed to, takes very good care of himself and he has a calm about him. As things get either more difficult or more, intense he seems to relax more and more. I think he just enjoys it. The big games for him are the most exciting. That's probably his true greatness, not the fact that the big games are more exciting.

COACH MAURICE: This year really - and he taken some heat at the start - we'll go back a little bit, he only played two series prior to this year. First one Ron Francis got hurt, he was on the line. Jeff became a centerman, at the time and was kind of limited in what he could do. Next series we played the New Jersey Devils and they are not a real easy team to fire it up on, but halfway through the Montreal series this year -- he actually played with Vasicek and John, scored a big goal, won the faceoff for the overtime comeback win, and from that point on, he took off. And then his true greatness, he took the shot in the eye in Toronto and scored the overtime winner. That game, for me, was the best game he played in all of the Playoffs.

COACH MAURICE: Arturs' personality fits our team very well, even if he wasn't getting the number of starts that he wanted to. He played 70, what 75, 77 games a year before. Played in 41 consecutive games, played back-to-back nights. We played in Phoenix and L.A. two years ago. I didn't play him in L.A. and he was pissed. I mean, he was so mad. So what he did is the next day he stayed on the ice for two and a half hours to prove his point of how mad he was. When Arturs came out of the Playoffs, I said this before, when he came over to the New Jersey series I had not lost confidence in him. He was not getting the breaks, he was getting bad bounces around the net. When he came out of net he wasn't a goaltender that lost his confidence, it was two different things. He still felt real good about himself. He should. Game 4 when he came out, he gave up a goal, it was a bad bounce, 4-on-4, top shelf, just -- it wasn't a great goal, but it wasn't a bad shot. I think it got deflected a bit. Made two great saves in between just to break the flow. We weren't playing very well, we took him out. When he went back in he didn't go in as a shady goaltender, he went in confident. Arturs got that-- his work level never changes. We have tried to get him to scale it back; in fact, he has. But his work level really never changes.

COACH MAURICE: Interestingly enough, from the same hometown, we went to the same high school. But that was the first time I had met him. It was in Carolina when he came down and it was very brief, kind of, hello, how are you? The next time, about two weeks later, got a chance to sit down and talk and by the end of it I was just absolutely amazed at his understanding of the game. I know that sounds crazy. Sure he understood the game, but he spoke like a coach. He took the two systems apart. They had played Pittsburgh, had played Montreal in the series -- in the season before and lost in the Playoffs and they were very similar systems except for about four or five minor variations. And he knew exactly what they were and what line -- it was amazing, because after he did that, I went back and looked at some of the tapes because, I mean, you don't watch the series the same way as you do if you are playing. He was exactly right. It was amazing. For what Ron Francis has meant to this team, has also meant the same to me as a coach. As well as he handles any of the other players, he handles the coach just as well. He knows exactly -- I have a tendency to get a little grumbly sometimes. He knows to kind of say, it's a pretty good day today, let's go have a good time today. He knows exactly the right words to say to me. Just like with you, he never throws his greatness in your face and that's what makes him -- he's invaluable for the coaching staff. Talk about powerplays or penalty kills, he sees things on the ice that sometimes as a coach you wait to see on video. He just picks those things up. He's an incredibly bright hockey man.

COACH MAURICE: (Laughs) Well, the way he's playing, me.

COACH MAURICE: No, I think it's been pretty accurate because I think the number of times I had been fired in the Toronto Series was about 374 times in a given week. In the first three years of my coaching in Hartford, I don't think people understood what had happened when I got the job except what are they doing, you know. I was not evaluated in the same manner that any other coach in the NHL is not held to the same standard. It was not -- that takes a lot of courage for your GM not to point the finger at the coach. We have also never had a disastrous season. We were always in that Playoff hunt and always getting a little bit better. Our team got a little bit better. The last four years we have had winning seasons. No, I mean, certainly don't call for a parade, I think we were to only a handful of games over 500 first three but this year and I think maybe last year, I think I had been evaluated in the same manner as other coaches have been and we made the Playoffs last year put a pretty good fight up against a good team. We have had a pretty good season this year. So it never really bothered me a whole lot. Early on the rumors were not based on the situation. Lately the rumors were a continuation of what everybody expected had to happen sometime, or -- and there was also more internal pressures. We felt, I think this year, they were more real than any other year because when we went back to 500 in December, that was not good enough for our team and rightfully so. I had no problems with the rumors. I thought we were fatigued. I thought we were tired. Our schedule was brutal the first two months of the year, but that's not an excuse we were not getting it done.

COACH MAURICE: We're saying the exact same things, and it is one game. There are things in that game that we have to do better. Our powerplay has to be better. I think we passed up some shots; didn't get a lot of opportunities to shoot and when we did, we passed those up. And there are a couple of other things that we have to do that I am not going to mention, but there's room for improvement. I thought we were nervous at the start of the game and I think you should be. I wasn't upset about the fact that we had the jitters. I had the jitters. Everybody was nervous. I mean, like I said last night, I think Vasicek's line came through the neutral zone in the first period; all three of them skated right over the puck. They were all trying to get it they just couldn't get the handle on it. Yet they settled, down an became 5-on-5, maybe our most productive line of all-time in the game, two young kids. So some of what we think we can do better we're hoping were left in that first game; a lot of it was nerves early on and we'll have a little bit better jump and a little bit better sharpness later on.

COACH MAURICE: Fairly same actually. This one I thought from the bench felt like it looked like this morning when you take the emotion out of it. It was just a hard game to really assess because of the lack of flow with all the powerplays and penalty kills. We're a 5-on-5 team. That's what we want to play and a lot of nights you leave the rink if your special teams have got it done for you, you think you played a better 5-on-5 than you did if special teams did not get it done for you. We would rather, at the end, assess our teams in terms of how well it performed, based on our 5-on-5 play. It's difficult to get a sense of that after a last game.

COACH MAURICE: Confidence only goes so far based on what you have done. You have to have some confidence going forward. I think it was important that we were able to do some of the things that we had planned on doing, not all of them. There's some areas there that we're real concerned about being vulnerable that just a pass that got missed or something like that. But yeah, to be confident you have to have success and you have to continually have success. You cannot -- it is like a goal scorer, you know, that's the great line, coach has got to find a way to the give this guy some confidence. If he scores goals for -- there's only one way to get confidence and that's to put the puck in the net. You can do everything you can to put him in position to put the puck in the net, but until it starts going in the net, confidence is not coming. To stay confident in any series, whether you win or you lose, more importantly you have to have confidence that your game is there to be successful, and just get a small piece of confidence, I think as much as you should take out after win; no more.