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NHL WESTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: FLAMES v SHARKSMay 17, 2004Ron WilsonSAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA: Game Five Q. Is it exasperating to have your boat sunk by a couple brain lapses? RON WILSON: Yeah, very. You could ask the same questions and I can give you the same answers as after game two. Where that performance came from, I really have no idea. It wasn't one or two guys, it was almost the whole team struggling. You have to give Calgary some credit, but we really did a pretty good job of shooting ourselves in the foot with some very elementary mistakes. And I really felt, too, that a few of the opportunities, early Kipper didn't really look very sharp. He was struggling like heck to stop the puck. But that aside, we just didn't have everybody on the same page or anybody on the same page. It looked not even in the same chapter of the book. Q. Any theories as to why? RON WILSON: No. I really don't know why. But the positive is, we have done this before and now we get to bounce back on Wednesday night. It's going to be awful difficult. Again we seem to be finding away to make this as difficult as possible, but we have no other choice now. Q. Facing elimination for the first time, do you think that jolt will just push things back into place? RON WILSON: Well, yeah, that would. You would hope it would. And as most coaches would say, I know finishing off a team is the most difficult task. So I would expect everybody to be ready. Q. You've been pretty good at reading your team. Did you see this coming at all? RON WILSON: No, not at all. Yeah, two minutes into the game I could see everything. There's not much you can do once you let the horses out of the barn. You would expect that people would see what was going on and simplify everything, but we started the same way we did in games one and two. And we talked at length before the game about playing exactly the way we did in Calgary: Ignoring that we were at home and play as smart, fairly conservative period and go when we had opportunities. And it all starts a shift or two in, where we're not dumping the puck, turn it over at the offensive blue line and putting our defense on their heels a little bit. And same thing I said after game two, our D didn't pass the puck quickly and worth a damn tonight. Holding onto the puck and -- but if the series holds true, we just got to go into Calgary and play the way we did there the last couple times and we can come back hopefully on Friday and find a remedy to this struggles at home right now. Q. Does it make it all the more exasperating that the first goal came on a power play, a short-handed one? RON WILSON: Not really, they should have scored before that up to that point. They were outshooting us 7 to 1. Not that they had a lot of great scoring chances, but they were pressuring us and had kind of control. Just before that power play, Todd Harvey had a great opportunity and hit the butt end of Kipper's stick. He beat him and but it hit the end of his stick, and we got the power play and we just went out there and a couple guys obviously made some horrific mistakes. But we're going to have to move on now. Can't worry about this. Now our focus has to switch immediately into going into Calgary, and winning there again and we're 2-0 there. So there has to be some confidence that we can play there. And it will be even more difficult because their fans will be riled up, and their team would probably, you would think, be smelling blood and want to go for the knockout. They don't want to come here for game 7. Q. From Calgary's third goal, was that really a case of Kyle McLaren just showing some frustration there? RON WILSON: Probably. You should ask Kyle, but it didn't really matter. We weren't going to score tonight. You could almost sense that after halfway through the second period that we just didn't have, it seemed, the energy to mount much of an attack. Game two, we had a number of scoring chances and got it to 2-1 and got beat basically later in the game. But tonight the damage was done in the first period. We had a couple decent shifts in the second, but really not much to hang your hat on. Q. Can you talk about the play of your goaltender, especially on the first goal? RON WILSON: Well, there's not much he can do. He's trying to make a poke check and you guys -- this is ping-pong back and forth which goalie stinks. And that's not the case at all. It's not Nabby's fault. I have the utmost confidence in him. Q. Your decision to play Dimitrakos and your -- RON WILSON: Well, he's like the leading assist scorer in the playoffs. So he hasn't been competing hard enough and so we threw him in and he made a really bad play on their second goal. And again we have some decisions to make. That's all. Q. Is there anything you as a coach can do? RON WILSON: Well, we'll go right back to the drawing board. We do the same things we did last time. Q. Was there any fatigue factor, do you think, on the quick turnaround? You had -- RON WILSON: Well, they didn't seem fatigued. Some of our veterans sure seemed fatigued. I was a little disappointed there. I'm sure some of their players were fatigued as well. You've got to dig deep and get the job done. That's about it. Okay. Thank you.
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