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NHL EASTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: HURRICANES v PENGUINS

May 26, 2009

Paul Maurice

RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA: Game Four

THE MODERATOR: Questions for Coach Maurice.

Q. You guys scored first. Seemed like things were going your way, but it also seemed like this was a series where that next break was never out there?
COACH MAURICE: Never came.

Q. What do you say to your team in the first intermission, second intermission when you see the way things are going?
COACH MAURICE: Well, actually I thought the fight was a little better tonight. You know, we just talked about staying in it as long as you possibly could. You're down one, you're down two. Didn't want to get it to three. Thought we could come back. Just keep fighting. Then there are technical things, but it was just the message.

Q. It's a little early to kind of put this season in perspective and you coming back to Carolina. But how do you feel this team will be remembered?
COACH MAURICE: It's always so early, so fresh after that you remember the last two weeks. That is the most prominent part of your season. As you get further out, you allow yourself to go back a little further.
But I still think that's a ways away for me. It will take a while.

Q. I was going to ask you about the second goal. How demoralizing was that going into the period?
COACH MAURICE: Yeah, I mean, that was almost like you're looking for a point, especially when you get to desperate times you're almost looking for that sign. You're trying to manufacture it. And we've seen some of those.
So they said all the right things on the bench. They fought. They kept trying to stay in the fight. Pittsburgh played very, very well. I don't think we had a lot left in the tank, to be honest with you. We had gone to the well a lot of times. We'd spent a lot to get here and earned the right to be here.
But just in reading faces and they're coming back to the bench. And even when you score goals to tighten it up, we'd spent an awful lot.

Q. Can you talk about the play of Staal tonight? How inspired he played?
COACH MAURICE: Yeah, I thought he was great. It's a really good sign for his career and for this franchise. It's almost, for me, it was almost his season in a series. Early on when we first got here we had a player that cared so much and had taken the weight of the team on his shoulders.
He was trying every shift to be the difference for the hockey team and feeling that pressure and not having it work for him.
He then really settled into his game as a leader. He was simpler, harder, faster. He played a better quality game for the remainder of the year, and all of a sudden starts scoring and starts playing. The series for him was almost like a -- well, even as a hockey team, almost revisited the start of the year again. Pushing for offense at times. It's not there. Having it burn you. You feel your effort is there, but some of the things that were happening you just couldn't explain.
Yet I thought he settled right back down again tonight and played a real smart, smart game. Didn't try to beat everybody all over the ice. Looked stronger, looked faster, made better changes, made better decisions with the puck, pushed at the right time. That's a really important thing for the leader of this team. To be able to do that. To be under the most pressure of the season and settle his game back down and bring his best at a critical time.

Q. Could you tell us your thoughts on Cam Ward's play throughout these playoffs? And then also this series, this being the first time he's lost in a series?
COACH MAURICE: I'm gonna trade him (laughing). No. He's just spectacular. In the first two series, he was, you know, the Eric Staal of defense. He was our leader back there. He made huge saves in critical times. The save at home before the win in New Jersey in overtime, Game 3. Game 4. He was just so strong.
And another player that I think you know, the season was almost the same thing for him. He settled into who he is as a goaltender here and how important he is to our franchise. He played an awful lot of games. He learned how to -- for me, it's almost an accepting of the role of a dominant number one guy.
We pushed him really hard in a lot of games. And though he wasn't feeling great, probably, and I don't know. It's a 28-game marker. Whatever it was we ran him. And he was a little -- he wasn't feeling fresh this series, but he fought through it.
Again, you know, your two most important guys in your locker room played their best hockey when this team needed it.
We've been under the stress of this push, and we will be next year as well. For five months, six months now. They've pushed hard for us it started probably the third week in December when we started running Cam hard right from the middle of January once we felt his groin injury that he was fighting healed up. We just ran him. And Staal the same way.
They both found their way. They both found their way to lead this team and carry this team, and that's, you know, a sign of great maturity and acceptance of sometimes the burden of leadership. They played their best hockey at a critical time. Because there's pressure in the playoffs, but in some ways there's more pressure when you're in that march that we were on for so very long.
You make the playoffs you've got a chance to win the Stanley Cup. You don't make the playoffs and all is wrong with the world. It's a completely different kind of pressure, and I think that they handled it very well.

Q. What does it say about the resilience and the character of this group of guys that you were essentially playing playoff games for the better part of three months and you went to the well over and over and over again and it always seemed to come up and always found a way to pull through?
COACH MAURICE: And that's what's the difficult part of tonight. You know, the finality of it. That this team has been playing in playoff mode for an awful long time and that's your days, that's your life. Tomorrow it's not going to be there.
But I thought there was so much emotion in a lot of what we did. And guys who played through injuries. Ray Whitney broke his finger this year, never missed a shift. Then he had it operated on at the All-Star break and they put a spike in his finger, and didn't miss a game.
Then he had it operated on again to pull the spike out and didn't miss a game and was scoring. And you can't say anything about it because he's got it in his glove and people would find a way to get to it.
But we had a lot of those. Every team does. But a lot of guys that had a couple of broken bones and couple of guys, one guy or two guys didn't miss much at all. Pretty impressive to watch. That's why it's so much more painful to have tonight happen and to lose. It's easy if you don't invest anything, but there were a lot of people that really put a lot into this.
But, as I said earlier, there are no flukes in a seven-game series. They deserved to win.

End of FastScripts

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