NHL EASTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: MAPLE LEAFS v HURRICANES

May 19, 2002

Paul Maurice

COACH MAURICE: I was very, very happy with the way we played today. We were quite a bit sharper than the first game and battled very hard. That's why you get that bad feeling when you give up an empty netter. It's a tough play and I thought we played a really strong game. So your concern, and we felt that we deserved to win the game but Malik is the secret weapon. In the overtime we were real cautious. There's that sense that you felt like maybe we deserved to be in the game and we tied it late and a little tension there, but as that period wore on, we started to get back to a forecheck again, in the first seven or eight minutes they carried the play, and then we did at the end.

COACH MAURICE: Well, you go in and you say what you can, but there's no -- I can't give you the exact quote for family newspapers, but like I said, I thought we played a hell of a game and thought we got a bad break. We had to make sure that we got the chins up and went back out there and played as hard as we could, but it took a few minutes for us to get back going again. It took us a few minutes going in that overtime to get our legs under us again and once we did we got back.

COACH MAURICE: It's frustrating with seven seconds left and they tied it and you've had your best offense of the series, albeit only two games, but you had so many chances to make that game 2-0 and an empty net opportunity to make it 2-0 and you didn't. And you've seen that we have pretty regularly done things the hard way and very rarely done things the easy way, and from the looks of it, we were going to have to do it again and to the guys credit, after they got their legs under them a bit in the overtime period, we got back to playing again.

COACH MAURICE: It's our 31st or 32nd overtime game. We spent a lot of minutes in overtime, and all of the ones that we didn't get in and the seven ties we are starting to get now.

COACH MAURICE: I believe he had one. And he's got two overtime winners. Nic has got a good shot. Last year, I think he played 36 games; so in a lot of ways, this season was his first season, and he was in and out of the lineup. We inserted him and took some players out down the stretch and he played very well, and he's gone in and played. I think that he's a guy that's going to have a pretty good career here. There's a lot of good things, he's a defensive defenseman, but he does have a good shot. He made a real nice read on the play. It's because he was getting barked at on the bench pretty bad for his first pass. Just prior to that he had a chance to pound it and he went through the crease and we ended up getting possession back, I don't know if anybody heard, but there was some foul language coming with the fact that he passed up a shot but he did it again on the right play, he backed down to Brind'Amour and moved to the hole. I think he does have some sense and some offense there and he came off the line and got himself a.

COACH MAURICE: He is also one of those guys you'll have an opportunity to meet him, but he's one of those guys in your room, like Kevyn Adams scoring in overtime, everyone is so happy when he scores. It's almost better than he scores than Francis in some ways, because you kind of expect that. When Niclas gets one of those goals the guys love it. He's one of those guys on your hockey team that the players give him a hard time, and he takes it with a smile on his face and seems to enjoy coming to the rink and you're happy for him when he gets a little success because he's not going to get star billing coming into this, and he's been a big part of our.

COACH MAURICE: He played well especially in overtime. We did a good job of limiting their offense, but the chances they did get in the second period, the best chances were Sundin's. But there was not a lot for him to really control, I think he had a shot and Mogilny had a shot, but he's playing just like he did in the first two series. He really is playing just like he did earlier, just getting breaks around the net when he needs them.

COACH MAURICE: The way the puck drops. They are going to be happy with a split now, came in and got home ice advantage, and rightfully so. We're going to be real happy with our game and the fact that we fought back to Tie it. It will get played that way until the puck drops.

COACH MAURICE: Not particularly. It actually was a great crowd. It was the way it should be. There were the visiting team fans and they probably got the home team fans cheering, too, and it really got the room going, I thought. It was good.

COACH MAURICE: Well, we've been good on home ice in these playoffs. It's important to us. We played .500 on the road and we were a very good road team during the course of the season. But this late in the playoffs, I don't know. I'll tell you after the next two.

COACH MAURICE: And that's the way it's going to be. I thought we were better mentally prepared for that grind today than we were for the first game. We came off a completely different style of game. That game that we played today was almost identical to the New Jersey series games. When you get to the front of the net for both teams, it took a lot of hard work. There were not a lot of clean shots and easy rushes for either team because they both commit so hard to playing good defense. It is going to be a grind.