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NHL WESTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: FLAMES v SHARKSMay 19, 2004Ron WilsonCALGARY, ALBERTA: Game Six Q. If you look or look and listen to the Calgary media, this team seems to be preparing for the Finals. Is it motivation to your team to see and hear that? RON WILSON: That's just extra stuff. If you get to this point and you need some artificial motivation, you shouldn't even be here to begin with. That's all stuff you block out. We want to play in the Finals. We want a crack at the Cup. And that's our motivation. Plain and simple. If you need more, how much more motivating do you need than just thinking about the Stanley Cup? That's the way I look at it. I block out anything the other team is saying because it's just baloney anyway. Q. Sometimes you need a little tweaking sometimes, sometimes you need a little bit here and there, little things -- RON WILSON: To be more motivated to win the Stanley Cup? Basically you're saying we're not motivated enough and I think that's wrong. So that's my -- I guess if a player needs to hear that, then good. Then he should be listening to it. But I would hope that we're not in the need of emergency motivation at this point in the season. Q. The series especially has had it's ups and downs and peaks and valleys. It's like a little drama that plays itself out. And here you are facing elimination. RON WILSON: Yeah, how long of this been playing for the Stanley Cup, over a hundred years, this happens to teams and some teams win those elimination games and some teams don't. We believe we have as good a shot as any. I know this organization two or three years ago faced knocking out Colorado in game six at home and lost in overtime, in the next game in Colorado and lost there 1-0. And they were that close. That was the year Colorado won the Cup. So anything can happen and we're looking at this as -- we can't win the Stanley Cup if we don't win tonight's game. And this is every bit as important as the 7th game of the Stanley Cup Finals because there won't be unless we win tonight. Q. Do you feel confident that you won two games here already? RON WILSON: Yeah, just the same confidence that Calgary talked about coming into our building, because they had won two games there. So we believe we can win here and now we just have to go on the ice and execute. Q. Yesterday you talked about it a little bit about the pressure on Calgary because being Canada's team, everyone's pinned their hopes on them. Do you sense that more when you get here or do you kind of feel that everyone's got their hopes pinned, 25 or 26 million people are pulling for one team? RON WILSON: Well, I'm sure in Canada somewhere we have got some fans, but the general outlook would be, yeah, they are rooting. Doesn't that make sense? It does. It's the last Canadian team. In that aspect, we have as many Canadians on our team as Calgary does. But it just seems to be where the team is playing their games and it's Calgary, so everybody's rooting for Calgary, obviously. But there's also the pressure of knocking a team out. If we're playing another American team, it seems the hardest games you face are those games when you're trying to finish off a tough opponent. And I would think that we're a tough opponent, and we'll give our best game tonight. So that's where the pressure is. It's kind of two-fold. Who you're playing for and that can be positive or negative in terms of pressure. And the fact that you're trying to knock out a tough opponent. We had all kind of trouble eliminating Colorado. We had them 3-0, then 3-1, 3-2 and we found a way to do it in game six. So it's tough to knock out a worthy opponent. Q. You talked about motivation earlier, but I guess the energy, there's nervous energy, positive energy. How do you take the chances of the motivation and the energy of this team coming out in a positive manner? RON WILSON: Well, I think we have already done that on the road. The opposing crowd doesn't seem to have an effect on either team. And I think it has at least up to this point shown a little bit of a negative effect on the home team. All that energy and adults or people, human beings, they want to please. And when you have everybody cheering for you, you want to please in the worst way. We want to please them, we want to make sure they have more to cheer about and sometimes that can end up being your Achilles' Heel. Q. Heard you on the Jim Rome show you were talking about getting some good karma? RON WILSON: Yeah, you're right, I'm going to leave here and call him right now. He helped the last time. I got to give Romey a call. Q. Anything else out there? The karma? What do you do? RON WILSON: No, it's got nothing to do with karma, you should know better than that. Is that it? Thanks.
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