NHL STANLEY CUP FINALS: HURRICANES v RED WINGS

June 4, 2002

Paul Maurice

COACH PAUL MAURICE: Well will take it in this series. Obviously we are comfortable there and we have had some great success.

COACH PAUL MAURICE: Ronnie Francis was our MVP over the course of the season. The thing that always stands out that I have noticed over the four years is the bigger the game, the better Ronnie Francis plays. So many times we have played critical games during the regular season over the last four years when we have been in that dogfight to make it into the Playoffs. He always played his best game when we needed it the most. Real happy for him. He is no Nick Wallin in overtime, but he's pretty good.

COACH PAUL MAURICE: We know over the course of the series we're going to have to win one game in here, no question about that. I thought we were nervous in the first period. Didn't think we played badly, we overskated some pucks and we were trying to do some things, but that was a good thing. You want to see your guys come out with some jitters, and the Vasicek line, for me, played a great game. All three of them skated over a puck in the neutral zone in the first period, thing didn't move, but they got that out of their system. I think as a team we did as well, felt more comfortable as the game went on.

COACH PAUL MAURICE: We were aware from the conference call that happened yesterday that the standard was going to be held high in this series. It was called very, very, very tight.

COACH PAUL MAURICE: Hopefully both teams will be able to adjust and it will be for our team against Detroit obviously we would rather play 5-on-5. We don't want that powerplay out there. That was the big area of improvement that we are going to make is to get our powerplay moving quicker. We would much rather play 5-on-5, but at the same time, we're comfortable I guess in a lot of special team games our penalty kill has been very good for us.

COACH PAUL MAURICE: The key to it all is that the coach doesn't and the players do. And in our meetings over the course of the week we didn't have any great motivating -- we didn't draw a lot of attention to it. Ronnie Francis said a few words about it. Rod Brind'Amour did on Saturday, that was it. We knew we were an underdog but there was no point in making the mountain any bigger than it already is.

COACH PAUL MAURICE: Well, they were mostly F-bombs and it wasn't a lot to be said on the bench at that point with only originally 18 seconds on the clock then 19 seconds on the clock, I think we felt pretty comfortable starting the overtime that we would be able to kill that.

COACH PAUL MAURICE: No, that was after the Toronto series. Trying to have some fun.

COACH PAUL MAURICE: We played a good team game. I was just making light of the fact that we had been underdogs in the first three series and we felt that those times the two teams were close enough in each of the series. I have said this before. I was just having some fun. We got a bunch of good players playing a committed game to each other.

COACH PAUL MAURICE: They control the puck so well on the offensive zone, they rarely gave you an opportunity to be aggressive and everyone wants to be aggressive on their penalty kill. But you know, if you run at anyone of those guys they are going to make you look real bad. So we're going to try to get as aggressive as we possibly can without putting ourselves out of position and we are going to try to stay out of the box. That's part of what we are trying to do here. We don't take a lot of penalties during the regular season and you know, we took more penalties tonight than I would have hoped, no question. We will address that but we have got to play a physical enough game that we are involved. It's really going to be a bit of a tight rope there figuring out what is good and what is not.

COACH PAUL MAURICE: Absolutely not by design. We prepared our team this week in the exact same manner that we had in the three series leading up to it. We said the exact same things over and over again to the point that I am sure they stopped listening to me about four weeks ago, so there's nothing new coming out of my mouth in that locker room, and when you have the Ronnie Francis factor, you don't have to come up with anything brilliant. He does. I will leave all that stuff up to him.