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NHL WESTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: FLAMES v SHARKS

May 17, 2004

Ron Wilson

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA: Game Five

Q. Confidence level surrounding the team between games 2 until now?
COACH RON WILSON: Obviously when you win you feel confident, you feel good about yourselves. But it's all right to feel good now and it's how you prepare for the game. We have to again come up with a same kind of effort if we want to have any kind of chance to beat Calgary. They have been an unbelievable opponent up to this time. Now we have gone four games, it's gotten to the point where it's a real battle for every inch of space on the ice. And we have gotten some breaks. We have gotten great goaltending. We have kind of settled down and gotten back to playing our game and we have to make sure that we come out here tonight and not be too excited or jack up by the crowd and settle in and play a smart game.
Q. It's been awhile since you won a game on home ice. Is it still home ice advantage?
COACH RON WILSON: Oh, yeah, certainly it is. When you have the crowd on your side, if something bad happens, they can pick you up. Most crowds will have a somewhat of an intimidating affect on the opposition team. It seems that Calgary is an excellent road team. I think they're 7-2 on the road, which is pretty good. And a lot of that has to do with their resilience and their work ethic. They just keep grinding it out and pounding away and making every inch of space difficult. They have done a great job in the two previous series and obviously in this one. So we have got our work cut out right now.
Q. The second period, not just in this series but throughout the playoffs, you guys seem to be a different team.
COACH RON WILSON: Yeah, the regular season where you're not playing all the best teams every single night, you're able to jump on some people and maybe they're not quite as prepared. It's a little more difficult in a playoff series to expect to catch people with their pants down in the first 10 minute of a game. Early in the playoffs we actually did that. At least in the first two games of each series at home. It's been a little more of a struggle on the road. But you usually try to play a little more patient on the road and wait for a break. And we have managed to do that.
Q. Every team's a little different about playing desperate. Some play desperate really well and use that as motivating factor, others don't. And correct me if I'm wrong I think you said you weren't crazy about that sort of desperate idea. How do you prepare your team for this game, the line between getting them jacked up enough or is it more important to play careful the X's and O's in this game?
COACH RON WILSON: Right now I don't have to do much motivating because you're only two victories away right now from playing for the Stanley Cup. And I think we just have to be careful of what we throw at Calgary in the first period. If we think that we have got to win the game in the first five minutes, which was a lot of times our tactic early in games throughout most of the season, as we have seen the teams are prepared. We have kind of backed off on that. And I, more than any team we faced so far, I knew -- the only way Calgary could get to this point, just like us, is to be prepared. To beat the teams that are regarded as maybe a little bit better, you better be prepared. So that I really respect about Calgary and that's one of the reasons why we haven't scored in the first period. They're ready to play. Some of the other teams where you felt like, well we'll just show up in the first period and take them out in the second or third. And in the playoffs that's a difficult attitude to have. So we respect that they're going to be prepare. Obviously you would love to score in the first five minutes of the game and really jack up the decibel level. And the same token we knew going into Calgary that we couldn't allow that to happen again as it happened in the first two games. So they took our crowd out by having ahead in the first period and we didn't want them to even put their fans more into it by grabbing an early lead on us.
Q. I know it's totally out of your control but do you have any thoughts of having to go back to back, to play one night and play another night in the playoffs?
COACH RON WILSON: Well, it's not fun. That's the way it used to be in the playoffs when I played earlier in my career you would be playing best of fives or best of threes and you had a lot of back to back games. But it's just building availability and so we played back to back in the St. Louis series, but both games it was game three and four and in St. Louis. They won game three, we won game four. But the traveling part -- this is just not travel, it's travel over a long distance, a time change, and Customs and immigration that you have to go through. So it's quite a hassle. But part of the game, both teams have to deal with it, nobody has an advantage. It's probably harder for the media than anybody else, because we're lucky enough to fly on charters and you guys have to take two or three flights to get here and back.
Q. Can you talk about Kiprusoff. There was a lot of talk about him coming this into this series and how well he played. What's your confidence level like after solving him at least for one game?
COACH RON WILSON: That's all it is is one game. Kipper and Nabby have gotten a lot of attention, and rightly so, because they're great goaltenders but even more so because they were teammates at one point. And both have been kind of raised by the same goalie coach in Warren, so there's a lot of probably out of proportion focus on either one of those. And I don't think we have solve him any more than they think they have solved Nabby. It's the ebb and flow of a playoff series. Patrick Marleau had gone a few games without goal and what's wrong with him. I didn't think he was playing poorly, you just look at the numbers. And I would say the same thing about Kipper. He's going to get some unfair criticism like Nabby did because four pucks ended up in the net behind him. And sure it would be easy to say it might be somebody or his fault, but there were a lot of mistakes on some of those goals and just like we had made a lot of mistakes on the goals that Nabby gave up.
Q. (Inaudible.)
COACH RON WILSON: Well, Vinny's that type of player. You're not in the top 30 or 40 in points overall in the NHL for nothing. So I would really hope and expect Vinny to raise his play. I've had Adam Oates doing the same thing and Paul and Ty, the best players elevate their game at this time of year, that's what makes them so special.
Q. Seems like the biggest moments in games though he's there. Five game winning point so far.
COACH RON WILSON: It's usually on the powerplay and Vinny is our best powerplay forward. So I would kind of expect that. I would just like Jarome Iginla seems to be behind every Calgary win.
Q. What has been the reason for your success in Canada so long?
COACH RON WILSON: That's just the whole, our defense in general, it's the same as the St. Louis series and Colorado. We have -- I would still say it's underrated because none of our defensemen made the Canadian team, but we have a very good defense. One of the best in the league. I've been saying that all season long. That we were more than a goaltender or anything, we have got one of the best and most mobile defenses in the NHL and it's relatively young. It's going to be even better for years to come.
Q. Do you have a theory on how the first goal seems to be a factor overall in the playoffs it's 5-18 for the team that scored first.
COACH RON WILSON: Well, it's so hard to score, it's just -- well, you get the one goal lead and your team relaxes just a bit and the other team realizes they have got a much steeper climb and starts to press. And if you do it right, you break the other team into playing one-on-one hockey. And we have managed to do that. Likewise, if we have been scored against first, it's just such a psychological blow it's hard to overcome. I can't explain it any better than that. Other than also teams are so good defensively they really put the clamps on you, I mean the clamps, not grabbing, but just play so hard defensively, everybody willing to block shots. Last night I believe we had 34 or 35 blocked shots in that effort. And that's a phenomenal number. Everybody sacrificing their body. And you really see that at playoff time. In the regular season I still think it's a 70 percent winning ratio for the team that scores first, and it's pretty amazing.

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