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Q&A with Marc Crawford

Question: So, nothing but meetings since the season ended?

Crawford: Yeah, it’s pretty much consistent throughout the league you have exit meetings with the players and you also have end of the season meetings with the staff and of course management people.

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Question: Can you walk me through a typical exit meeting with the players?

Crawford: The players that are not going to be back, you know the unrestricted free agents, the ones that are moving on – or at least you are pretty sure they are not going to be a part of the organization next season – with them you are looking to gauge input, maybe give them the chance to reflect. And I think there are lots of opportunities to learn from those situations, because let’s face it, the players that aren’t going to be back it’s because one side or the other doesn’t want to be back, and any reflection that you can gain from those, areas where we can improve, there’s a definite possibility in the exit meeting that that stuff will come to the forefront. It helps to get a better handle on where you went right and where you went wrong and all that sort of stuff.

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Question: I’m joking of course, but go ahead and tell us what Dan Cloutier had to say in his exit interview.

Crawford: Well of course he is under contract for another year, so it is different with that type of player.

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Question: How so?

Crawford: With the players who are coming back you’re giving feedback on areas you’d like to see improve. We talked a lot about conditioning issues and programs for improving conditioning and of course they go into greater detail with the strength coach. And of course we go over their agenda that they are looking to do over the off season.

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Question: Getting back to the exit interviews with guys who are perceived to not be coming back, was there any consistent theme coming from their answers about things that could be improved in the organization?

Crawford: Nothing that I’d be willing to share with your readers (laughs). A lot of what we talk about are personal in nature, because you are looking more at the personal make up of the player and his personal performance. I guess on the other side we’re looking at their interactions with the coaching staff and evaluating strengths. You know, strengths are talked about a lot. I think there’s the impression that every time you come into the boss’ office that you’re always being dressed-down and that’s really not the case. It certainly isn’t in sports. We have far more positive reflections to make than negative. I’m not saying that there aren’t negative reflections that are being made, but by percentage it is far greater in the positive reflections.

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Question: Dean Lombardi has said that it was his expectation that the team was expected to compete for a playoff spot this season. Did you share that feeling and assuming you did, at what point in the season did you realize that was not going to be the reality?

Crawford: At the trade deadline, with the sell-off and we knew that we were basically sellers more than buyers that it signified to everyone that we were building for the future. For a coach it is always different. You are charged with the task of trying to win every game and that never changes. Whether we had the group we had at the end of the season or the group at the start of the season, our approach is always the same. You try and fine ways to make the team better and to be more competitive game in and game out. You try and find ways to improve upon your last performance. There is a consistency in the way you approach each game, but we’re human and we’re realistic too. Looking back and reflecting on the team, we were a .500 club to the end of November, and we were just over a .500 club from Christmas on and you look at that and try and figure where we played poorly and it was that three or four week period in December. We played a lot of games and we were 2-12 in that frame there, and obviously if we were better in that period we would have been challenging for a playoff spot.

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Question: Looking back at that point in time when the team slumped so badly, was there anything that you could have done to right the ship or do you have any regrets about any coaching decisions you made?

Crawford: You always look and try and find ways to improve. My approach has always been introspective and to challenge myself to be better and to challenge our staff to be better. We’re not excuse-makers, but I do think there are facts though. We lost our goalie and when he came back he wasn’t at his best, and I don’t think it was until the end of the month that he really started to feel comfortable again, and I think if you talk to Jason he’ll tell you exactly that. Having said that, I thought that our goaltending wasn’t good in that period and we played too many games, so you are dealing with two factors; fatigue, and if you are a team that is playing a very stringy style you are going to get very fatigued, and one where you need to have your goaltender win you games. And that just didn’t happen. If you look at the two games that we won, we had two games with incredible offensive outputs. We’re all disappointed with how we played in that particular time period. We lost a lot of close games during that time, some time you end up on the right side of those games and some where you are on the wrong side of it, but there always factors as to why you are on that side.

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Question: Is one of those factors the team’s perceived lack of toughness?

Crawford: I don’t know who is making that criticism, so it is hard for me to comment on it. I think we can always improve in our mental toughness and we can always improve in our physical toughness. If you compare us to say, San Jose or Anaheim, yeah, they are physically tougher teams. They are bigger and stronger and they have more experience, and they have more experience in big games. From the standpoint of saying did it cost us games, our physical or our mental toughness, no, I don’t think it did. I thought we recognized the type of team that we had in the summer and we knew that we were going to have to be the kind of team that didn’t take a lot of penalties to have a chance. And we did that. Our penalty killing is still suffering because we don’t have a lot of good, experienced penalty killers. We are developing our penalty killing and it can be painful when you do that. At the same time, you look at it and there were 13 teams that gave up more power play goals than us this season, so we made a good adjustment in what we did there and how we played. We were the second least penalized team in the league this year, so you have to deal with what you have, and that’s what we have. On the other side, we drew a lot of penalties this year and I think we were in the top five or six and at one point we were the leading team in drawing penalties, and consequently we were giving ourselves better opportunities to be in games and to win games because we were getting more power play opportunities than giving up, which is in direct contrast to the way it we were the year before when we were among the league leaders in penalties taken.

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Question: The players are obviously held accountable for a 29th place finish, but I suppose as the head coach, you are at the top of the list of those accountable. Do you feel like you personally did everything you could to get this team to win?

Crawford: I think you always have to find ways to keep getting better. And that’s what I’ve always been about and that’s what I will continue to always be about. I am definitely not satisfied with where we were this year. I know that my job is to get this team to win as many games as we possibly can. I am very much concentrating on that as we move forward. This is a very difficult league and the parity is extremely close. You look at this team and you say where they made subtle improvements and I say that our younger players are continuing to get better. So I take a great deal of pride in that. As they are becoming more of the core people for us and we are getting past the point of having to use fill players, players who come in and get you through a gap. We’re going to be filling next year with more and more young guys, like Boyle, Moulson and Purcell to become more of the group. We’re obviously hopeful that the guy is going to be the first round pick is going to be someone who can join in to the group. I don’t want to fall into the trap of saying that we are getting closer. I want us to knock down that door to the playoffs and the only way to do that is to try and win every single game.

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Question: Do you feel like you as a coach shuffle lines more than other coaches?

Crawford: No, I think that is wrong. In this day in age with what you’ve got, and what I’ve always done, and you can look at any team that I have ever coached, most of the time it is twosomes. Very rarely this year did you see Kopitar and Brown get separated. We’d play, whoever with them on the wing, and a lot of the time it was O’Sullivan. We played most of the time this season Cammalleri with Frolov, the same as we did last year, and the center would chance occasionally. If you look past that, beyond our top six forwards, we didn’t have a diversity there and I think there was a lot of interchange with that group, but I don’t think we had anyone in that group that stood out to say, hey I need to be in a third line setting, or I need to be in a specialty setting because my play is dictating that is what I should get. I take offense to the fact that (people say) you juggle too much.