Don Sweeney called in to WAAF this morning. I tried to transcribe the call as accurately as I could but there might be a bit of paraphrasing:
"Could we have pushed practice back to 3, 4, or 5 o'clock and held the press conference later on? Possibly. But, that would have had tight turn-around the next day for practice again and would have disrupted what I felt was an important practice opportunity. But, you know, we'll always look at things and take the criticism accordingly."
"I had made a decision over the weekend (to replace Julien with Cassidy) that that was the direction that we were going to go. I wasn't comfortable announcing it during the Super Bowl, right after - because the players weren't there. Sunday/Monday (were) scheduled days off. Once I made the decision, I wasn't going to just dance around, I needed to face that music. You have to meet those things head on. You just do."
"We've been 'bridging' to a longer-term vision. I'm trying to bridge the area that we're in, but build from within. Where we've sort of taken a step back from, and I need people to understand is, we needed to re-attack from the draft perspective. We do believe that we've deepened the talent pool. The trajectory is always up to the players themselves. The opportunity should be there. So, in order to improve the talent and where we are, I wasn't trading certain players. David Pastrnak, Brandon Carlo - players that we feel are going to grow just like Bergeron and Marchand, players that went on to win the Cup."
"Moving forward I just wasn't ready to commit (to Julien) with regards to integrating the young players. Therefore I felt every win and loss was unfair to Claude at that particular time, to say 'well, it's on you." It's on us. It's on the whole group going forward. It starts with me. It starts with the players."
"Where we are now and where we're going with the younger players, I felt there needed to be a change - a new voice. Whether that remains to be Butch, Bruce Cassidy, going forward, that's what these next 27 games will represent - an opportunity to evaluate which of our players can move forward with our core group and whether or not the coach and the coaching staff is going to be part of that as well."
"We had a chance to have a couple days of practice and allow Bruce and Joe and Jay to sort of implement some of the things that they feel that we might be able to change. Structurally, we won't change that much defensively."
"We had some trouble scoring goals some periods of times when Rask was playing extremely well in the early part of the season. And vice-versa with the pressure we've put on Tuukka and our backup situation. He hasn't been able to play as well and probably the workload has caught up to him. Our schedule was just very challenging. We started to score goals, but we were giving up a little more. So, trying to find that consistency that everybody's really spoken about. Even our home record from that standpoint, last year being under .500, really made it hard to make the playoffs. And we're just below that watermark this year and that's why we're in the middle of the mix of trying to get in."
"From Bruce's standpoint, he's a very straight-forward guy. He wants structure and accountability. He wants to play and practice at a higher pace and carry that forward in all parts of the game for sixty minutes. Can he sustain it? Do we have the talent level? Those things will be determined. He's had a lot of success at the American League level. Will that translate in his second opportunity (at the NHL level)? That remains to be seen. I think that the younger players will have a very clear message. They'll have an opportunity, if they don't do it, they know they'll have to earn their ice time. We've got one line that's carried a lot of the load offensively. We're trying to see if some other players can't be ignited a little bit."
"I played for nine different coaches. I told each of the players that they should feel some form of responsibility, and if you don't feel some level of responsibility then you're in the wrong business because you have to take ownership of situations like this. But also you will move forward because that's your job. You have another opportunity to go and play and prove that we can be a better team and I believe this group has the capability of that."
"(Backup goaltending) has been more than an issue. Anton got off to a bit of slow start, he had broken his hand, so he lost some rhythm is his play. We tried both younger goaltenders. You're trying to make sure that players have the proper development time before they're put in the National Hockey League level. We've been developing and been patient in terms of Malcolm. We wanted to create some internal competition. We had great familiarity with Anton, he was here previously and had a lot of success. That's the path we chose. It hasn't played out the way that we had hoped, certainly. A lot of that falls on ourselves as well as the players, but again you've got to protect Zane and Malcolm and they need experience. They need to go through it and it's tough to go through it at the National Hockey League level when you're trying to win each night and the pressure is there. The onus will fall on Anton to come back here and recollect at this point and time. But, it won't stop me from trying to improve (the position) and I won't stop trying to do that."
