NHL EASTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: MAPLE LEAFS v HURRICANES

May 17, 2002

Paul Maurice

COACH MAURICE: We'll settle for the net first. I would hope so. He should be. He's got production and we all know what he's capable of doing. We expect it to come. I think in the game last night, we had 24 shots blocked and that's something that we saw in the early parts of the Montreal series and the early parts of the Jersey series where we didn't get the puck to the net, and it's not usually a problem for the shooters. It's almost always they are trying to shoot it too hard and trying to pound it too hard and not get the puck to the net and work the front.

COACH MAURICE: A couple of things. I think there's a certain physicalness that we need on that line. I think that -- for the last week we've got that jump, that edge and we've also scored some goals so the confidence is there. Based on the amount of power plays and penalty kills that there probably will be throughout the series, if you've got him on the third line, now you're tearing up three lines to get one power play in and makes it impossible on the bench. We think that this will be a special team series in the end. There's going to be a lot of those power play situations, so we have to try to adjust a little bit too that.

COACH MAURICE: Well, the standard, coming in a little quiet. We talked it out and joked around on the ice and have some fun and come back to work tomorrow. Just try to be a mental day off in a lot of ways. We didn't do any video today. We just moved it around and we'll get back to the game plan tomorrow.

COACH MAURICE: We came out again strong in the first period. We got the goal and didn't continue finishing around the net. Our first period was our best period. Some lessons learned in that series. Some ways after you play a series like Montreal, your expectation level of how you are going to generate offense changes, and really, we didn't get a chance. We got a couple of chances. They are working hard defensively. We are not going to see the same kinds of offensive chances, and so you have to be mentally prepared for that. What we have to keep in mind is not be overly creative and stick to your game plan. We have had enough success and talked enough about sticking to our game plan that it's worked for us and we are pretty confident that we can at least stick to what we are trying to do.

COACH MAURICE: Spent a lot of time on the boards but still generating good chances. We were 20 percent coming into the game, 1 for 8, but I think we generated enough that if it was 2 for 8, nobody would have thought that was unusual and that's 20 percent again. There's a few things we are going to try to do obviously, but the biggest concern you have with the power play, we earned the power plays that we got and we think we are going to generate a number of power plays, but how it affects the rest of our 5-on-5 game, with Vasicek's line not getting off the bench, and I think because of that we came off a little bit slow and not being as quick, being able to feel the flow of the game it really did change. It was quite a bit different than what we were used to in the other two series.

COACH MAURICE: The execution was not quite as well as we'd like to, but we are trying to move it . Against Jersey, there's not that delay time where you can work it back and forth. So just in some series there's going to be time when we are not moving the puck the way you would like to think we could. Really they went to almost a 1-4 out there and there's just not that kind of room.

COACH MAURICE: Just the sense in the first game, they are going to make sure it does not get out of hand. So I think it's just going to be very tightly called.

COACH MAURICE: Whoever scores on the power play, yeah.

COACH MAURICE: Actually, there probably could have been five or six more called. They drew the line where you could, and for our team, we would like to be able to get through the neutral zone without getting held up a whole lot. So we won't have a problem. And at the same time, based on the way they are trying to counter the game, and they are looking for the exact same things. They are some guys that don't want to be grabbed.

COACH MAURICE: And it's out of necessity. The fact is, in many ways, I always felt that with New Jersey when they would have four or five injuries in some ways it could be more difficult to generate offense because everybody is almost being run in the lineup, to shut it down and keep it tight. So they are playing very hard defensively. And at the same time, we got blocked and certainly got to try to hit the net a little better on some of the calls. I still felt most of our offense went inside the post and we kicked it right. We can be a little quicker with the puck.

COACH MAURICE: I think to a degree. I think both New Jersey and Montreal have strong respect for the hockey puck. As far as how that translates to all of the media, that will be up to you fellas. A lot of that perception is how many times -- and that's not a shot that's just reality. The NHL.com title on the Colorado Detroit series was this was the series that everybody had been salivating for or something since the start. So as we move further, we'll get more respect.