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NHL WESTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: FLAMES v SHARKSMay 10, 2004Ron WilsonSAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA: Practice Day THE MODERATOR: Questions, please. Q. Can you talk about the play last night of the Ricci line? RON WILSON: Yeah, they did what they normally do. They get a lot of forechecking opportunities and situations. They hem the other team in. Unfortunately, they were the line that committed the bad change in overtime. But other than that, their play was flawless and they had a number of scoring chances. They're a line that is very difficult to defend against because of their tenacity. Q. Would it be fair to say they typify your game last night, but one small mistake? RON WILSON: Yeah. I mean, I think our whole goal is to maintain the tempo that we played at and to eliminate a couple of the mental mistakes that we made, maybe in being overly aggressive. That's certainly not a mistake you make when you're overly aggressive. That's probably a mistake due to fatigue, getting caught changing the way we did. But some of the other mistakes we made, turnovers just at or inside our blueline, not placing the puck where we should, allowing people who are fast to skate into it and apply pressure, those are things that we can fix. I was happy with how we approached the game. We were aggressive. Considering a little bit of a layoff, they did, too, but we played the game at the tempo that we wanted to play at. Unfortunately, we fell short. Q. Is there a concern with Nabokov playing overtime? RON WILSON: No, not at all. I mean, he didn't have a chance in the Colorado series. Last night, you've got a guy walking right down Broadway. He did as best as he could. He made a couple good saves. That's just the way it goes. You know, you're going to have a great save percentage if you're getting whacked or out shot by a great margin in overtime. I mean, our philosophy isn't going to change. It was somewhat different how we approached this overtime than the previous two. We were a lot more aggressive. We went for the win. Kipper stopped everything that we threw at him. So you got to tip your hat to him and move on, bury this game, move onto the next one. Q. What about guys like Krzysztof Oliwa? RON WILSON: What can you do? You know, that's just one of those things that happens. We've had contributions from everybody. Every player who plays on our team's had a point. I wouldn't expect Calgary to feel any different about anybody they put on the ice. You go out there and you try to do your job. I mean, the only thing I was disappointed in, he probably should have gotten a match penalty in the second period or first period for a head butt on Kyle McLaren, that somehow was missed. We'll move on from that and hopefully nothing will happen. I know ESPN showed it two or three times, and Hockey Night in Canada never showed it once in the replay, so... Q. What was the point of today's skate? RON WILSON: Going to the net hard, finishing off around the net. That's all basically we were doing. Not that we didn't go hard to the net last night, but we didn't quite finish the chances that we had. I don't know if we can safely say we expect to get 50 shots again. I'm sure Calgary will have a better game plan in place or might make some adjustments to negate our speed. But nonetheless, the only way you're going to score on Kipper, most of the goalies right now, is to have some traffic in front of the net, go there, be willing to pay the price. For some of our guys, it's still a little bit of a learning experience the price you have to pay in the playoffs. We've got obviously some guys who have been there and we've got some guys who are still trying to figure it out in terms of producing goals with the regularity they did in the regular season. Q. Strict interpretation of the goalie interference thing, is that a learned thing? RON WILSON: You just can't skate into the paint. The referees and supervisors and the league has made that quite clear. I agree with that. Goalie should be allowed to do his job. I don't think they should be open season when their focus is on the puck, not worrying about defending themselves from a body check. You saw what happened, the league did the smartest thing it ever did in that Calgary-Detroit series by suspending Nieminen for blatant cheap shot on a goalie. I think everybody's on the alert for anything like that. We don't need that in our game. Let the goalies do their job. You have to find different ways. You can crowd the goalie, keep him in the paint, have traffic so he's having a tough time seeing the puck, or create some sort of distraction so out of the corner of his eyes he sees somebody coming really hard to the net, maybe in the back of his mind he thinks he might get run over. We've got to go right to the edge of the cliff without falling over. The falling over would be running into the goalie and take a bad penalty. Q. You mentioned a couple minutes ago you changed the way you played in overtime yesterday. RON WILSON: No, we just went for it. We attacked. We weren't waiting. I think we had five scoring chances in overtime. That was the only one they had. They happened to score. We just have to finish some of our chances a little bit better. But we were aggressive. We had our D jumping into play, our D were pinching. We had our full force forecheck going like sometimes we dominate first period. That's what I was talking about. We weren't sitting back. The guys who have sat back, we made sure we kept reminding them, "No sitting back. Safe is bad. We're going for it." I mean, we had no problems until we were caught in the middle of a bad change. Q. Is there a difference between Todd Harvey sent to Cleveland in early October and the one you recalled in early November? RON WILSON: Well, I wouldn't necessarily say Harvey is a mainstay. He manages seven, eight, nine minutes during the regular season, a little bit more in the playoffs. He wasn't in shape when he came to training camp. We had a clear message or mandate, everybody over the course of the summer, you better come to camp in shape and you better improve in your physical fitness from last year's results to this year by at least 10%. Harv was probably 20% worse. I don't understand, he says, "Well, I didn't think I was going to make the team." If you want to play on another team, then you should -- The thing was, if you want to play, if you're not going to make our team, make sure you're prepared when you come to camp. If you think this coach or management has already made their mind up, you're going to play on another team in the NHL, you're going to have to go through waivers. That's exactly what he did. They saw what he did at training camp and nobody wanted to touch him. He went down to minors. He literally worked his rear-end off. I'm painting an ugly picture there, but he did (smiling). He came up and he's done everything we've asked. The nice thing about Harv is he's had a great attitude. When he went down to Cleveland, he worked as hard as anybody, was a true leader on a very young team - I think the youngest team in the American League. There was a little bit missing from our dressing room in the sense of Harv's personality, the fact that he worked hard. He came up, he blended right in. He was like the right spice for the soup at the time. Q. How do you explain guys like Steve Montador coming out of nowhere playing at such a high level? RON WILSON: I don't hardly even know Steve Montador. Q. Any player in general. RON WILSON: It's something you dream about your whole life. You get those opportunities, you're prepared. He's played a little bit more than people would assume. The fact that we made the mistake that we made allowed him to rise to the occasion, and he did a great job. Playoffs are always filled with guys you didn't really expect to be a playoff hero, but are. I mean, Marcel Goc, his first game with us, he has an assist, and his second game he scores the winning goal. His assist was on the winning goal. Every team has people. They get caught up in the flow of everything, and probably play a little bit over their heads or unexpectedly play over their heads. Q. You looked at the tape. How many of the 52 shots were chances, good chances? Have you figured that out? RON WILSON: There were a ton. I figured it out. I'm not going to put that out. That's our own stats. Share our stats with you. Q. I'll watch the tape. RON WILSON: You can watch the tape, but I don't think you would know or classify what scoring chances are compared to what we do, so... It's safe to assume we out-chanced them by more than two to one. There's games when you get out-chanced, like Calgary, you get out chanced two to one, although we haven't been at that point in the playoffs so far, and you win a game. Bottom line's trying to win. Yesterday we didn't. But if we play the way we did yesterday, we'll more than likely win a lot of games.
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