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NHL STANLEY CUP FINALS: FLYERS v BLACKHAWKSJune 8, 2010Jeff CarterMike RichardsPHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA: Practice Day Q. For Mike, Blackhawks came out Game 5, obviously they talked about having kind of an edge and a chip on their shoulder. Do you need to have that same sort of element to your game for Game 6 tomorrow? MIKE RICHARDS: Yeah, probably. I think the edge that they got was almost us giving it to them and not playing our best hockey and allowing them to come at us and give them all the credit in the world. They came out hard and played hard and carried that throughout the game. There were times in the game where we played well, but not on a consistent basis enough to have success at this time of year. Q. If both of you can just take a quick swipe at this. Chicago comes out, they make a bunch of line changes, shuffles things around. I imagine the temptation is there for your coach to try and figure something out. Is it a matter of tactics and line changes and this and that, or as players, to you is it more about trying to execute what you want to do better? MIKE RICHARDS: I don't think we're playing poorly. I think we are getting a lot of great looks at the net. We're just not scoring goals. Confidence is such a big thing in hockey, where if you have it you're almost unstoppable. If you don't, it's tough to get anything going. But we're getting great chances at the net. You have to think sooner than later they're going to go in. Let's hope tomorrow night is the night. Q. The line change, potential changes or not -- JEFF CARTER: Like Mike said, we've played some good games this series with a we've got going. I think last game we basically just didn't play our game. I don't think it's a matter of panicking and going out there and changing our lines up. We have to get back to playing Flyers hockey and playing the way we've played to get here at this point. Q. Jeff, how much has your foot impacted your play in the Finals? JEFF CARTER: It hasn't, no. Q. Jeff, you said you're not playing your game. You guys have scored four goals in three straight games. JEFF CARTER: We have. We can score goals. We can score eight goals a game if we played our game for 60 minutes. We have guys that can put the puck in the net. I think we came out last game and they came out fired and we kind of sat back and they pretty much skated all over us. They out-hit us, outworked us. We got it going a little bit near the end of the game, but we have to come out and be skating on top of our toes and get another forecheck when we're playing our game. Q. Danny Briere talked about you won the two games here and you went back to Chicago, and maybe you felt the momentum was on your side a little bit, and that you took that for granted. Is this in a way still a learning process each step of the way in getting that game to even an extra level? MIKE RICHARDS: It is a process. Not everyone has been in an in this situation before. We might have been a little bit overconfident or thought the momentum of our two games at home would have carried right into Chicago. Obviously we were awakened pretty early in that game that it wasn't. At the end of the day, you have to look at it as them just winning their home games. We only have to win one there and protect home ice. So tomorrow night is obviously a big game, but a place where we've played well all playoffs long here and feel confident in our game in this building. Q. For both Mike and Jeff, tomorrow regardless of what happens, it's your final home game of the season. Talk about A, the opportunity to send the fans out one last time, and on the flip side of that, you obviously don't want to have to see a team celebrate and raise a Cup on your home ice. Which of those motivates you more? JEFF CARTER: I think obviously they both do. You never want to see a team come into your building beat you and let alone win the Stanley Cup on your home ice. So a lot of motivation there. Obviously, the fans have been behind us since we began this five years ago, really. It would be nice to come out and get a big win for them in the last home game. Q. Mike, Danny just said that the way they started the last game, he said we sat back and basically watched them come at us. We didn't really react until later. Do you expect tomorrow the first period this team is going to send messages to everybody on the ice? Much more physical showing by the Flyers, the first period? MIKE RICHARDS: Yeah, I expect us to get back to the way we've played throughout the series. Last game was obviously just a blip hopefully. We're going to have to play physical and play hard and relentless and fast-pace if we're going to have a chance to win tomorrow night. Q. Mike, when the puck is not going in for you personally, how do you walk that line of saying okay, I need to score, I want to score, change your game, not change your game? How do you avoid pressing and getting away from the things that do you so well and got you -- that were so successful for you during the season? MIKE RICHARDS: It's not the first time I've gone in a streak that I haven't scored or -- I don't feel like I'm playing bad hockey, doing a lot of good things on the ice, I feel, and looking at the games and tape, getting a lot of opportunities, you're putting yourself in a lot of great opportunities and getting a lot of good looks at the net. Whereas if you start pressing you might get away from that and might not get the opportunities. I don't feel I need to press for goals. I think they're going to come naturally if I keep working hard and keep going to the net. You're bearing down as much as you can without squeezing the stick. They're eventually going to come, hopefully tomorrow night, like I said. Q. In Vancouver you guys were under the gun and won the quarter final, then obviously the semi-final, the gold medal. Now 3-0 against Boston you ran the table. I don't know if you get used to it, but do you get comfortable in these situations? MIKE RICHARDS: Not a situation you want to get used to, but I don't think it's panic time. We've played well the whole series except for last game. I think it would be a time to be concerned if we weren't playing good hockey. Like I said, we're playing well. We're hitting. Obviously, except for last game I don't think we played very well. Their goaltender has made some saves that's one bounce away from kind of breaking the flood gates open, hopefully. You just keep going at it. You can't change too much. You can't get away from what you're trying to do as a team. Just go out there and play hockey. Relax. Try to enjoy it. When you do that, I think you play little bit looser and you get better opportunities and when you do that, you get more pucks in the net. Q. Ian Laperriere was saying some guys played 20 something minutes, some of them are soft minutes. He was talking about you, that all of your minutes are hard. Is it reasonable to think that you can play that way through your career? Or are you going to have to do some sort of veteran adjusting about when to go hard? MIKE RICHARDS: I'm not sure. We'll cross that bridge when it comes, I guess. JAMEY HORAN: Thanks, guys. End of FastScripts |
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