	products recent interviews FastScripts archive about ASAP Sports

Our Clients:

Browse by Sport

Find us on

Subscribe to RSS

Click to go to
Asaptext.com

View our
e-Brochure

NHL WESTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: FLAMES v SHARKS

May 13, 2004

Ron Wilson

CALGARY, ALBERTA: Game Three

THE MODERATOR: Questions, please.
Q. Can you talk about Evgeni tonight? Seems to have bounced back quite nicely.
RON WILSON: Yeah, he had a great game. We knew we'd needed some solid goaltending. You got to give our defense credit, too. They weren't getting any rebounds. That's kind of almost a typical road game for us: bend but don't break, pressure when you can. We had some pretty good shifts out there.
You know, going into the third period, you're basically going to sit back a little bit. We wanted to be aggressive, and at times we were. But all in all, it was a much better effort, a little bit more focused, and I think our team finally relaxed a little bit. That was a nice thing.
Q. Took quite a bit of heat after the first couple games. Do you think that was unwarranted?
RON WILSON: Yeah. Again, we say the goalie gets too much credit when you win and gets too much blame when you lose. He can't score, and neither can Miikka Kiprusoff, all you can do is stop the puck. When goalies get credit for the wins, they can't win a game. Unfortunately, they're going to get tagged with all the losses. Their most prominent guy out there, red light goes on. Even if it's not a mistake, everybody looks at the goalie. Nabby came up huge. That was great.
Q. You shuffled the deck a little bit. Obviously you have to be happy with the way it worked, especially with Korolyuk.
RON WILSON: Yeah, Korky has been great, as he's been for most of the playoffs. We had a little bit more balance. I thought Marcel Goc, for a 20-year-old kid, playing in a hostile environment like this, had an excellent game. We didn't play him much in the third period, but I thought he played really well.
Having a young kid play with that much poise is also -- you got veterans going, "Gee, if he can play with that kind of poise, doesn't bother him, it shouldn't bother me." We knew after those other couple of games that he's played in, that we've got a cool cookie here. Whatever happens, the future of our franchise is pretty bright, with people like that coming up.
Q. You talked about a little less pressure, a little smarter. Did you change your forecheck in any way?
RON WILSON: Not really. We pressured when we could. We did some different things off of faceoffs that allowed us to get more pressure going on a loss draw in the offensive zone.
We really talked at length before the game -- I mean, this is our 105th game when you add up pre-season, regular season and playoffs. How can we all of a sudden forget what we're doing and what our identity is? Just return to the good things that we've been doing and smarter reads up the ice, and be aware.
We didn't have anything to prove at this point. Obviously, the pressure's kind of off in the sense of who's going to win the series. Everybody's kind of shoveled dirt on us. We just had to -- at that point there's nothing to lose, just go play. We're still in that boat.
Q. Can you talk about how important Vinny's leadership has been through all of this? He was saying that he's seen crowds like this, he's not fazed by it.
RON WILSON: I'll say it, the crowd wasn't anything that I haven't seen before. In fact, I've seen worse. I always thought Winnipeg was loud. You could never replicate Chicago Stadium. That was always incredible. Playoff series in Phoenix when I was with Anaheim was as loud as it gets, too. Just about every building can replicate that. That wasn't the problem.
But from Vinny's point of view, he has seen everything. He's a calming influence. He's saying the right things on the bench. He's echoing what the coaches are saying. That's always nice. You feel good as a coach when you say something and then it gets repeated a few minutes later from one of your better players, a veteran guy. It's not like, "Don't listen to him, he doesn't know what he's talking about," anything like that.
Vinny's been there. He understands that it's going to take little things and commitment to get ourselves out of this hole.
Q. Can you talk about what happened at the end of the game with Simon?
RON WILSON: I'm not going to talk about that. There's enough people from the league who can address the situation. Again, I don't think there's any reason for that to be in our sport. Moment like that, you can have 59 and a half minutes of great hockey, then you get a black eye at the end literally, but that's what Mike Rathje has right now, a black eye. But that's also a black eye for the game.
That hopefully doesn't spoil what was a great hockey game. Sure, we won. Whatever. I would have said the same thing had we lost. This has been an exciting series with two teams that want to prove something and move on to the next round. You don't need crap like that.

End of FastScripts...

ASAP Sports, Inc. | T: 1.212 385 0297