Craig Berube addressed the media after his team’s 5-2 loss to the Montreal Canadiens, which dropped the Maple Leafs’ record to 9-10-3.
On Joseph Woll’s performance:
Well, he was excellent. I pulled him there because we were just giving freebies to them. I just said I’d had enough.
On whether the pull was to wake up the team or conserve Woll:
Both. We’re down a goalie already, so both.
On where it went wrong in the second period:
Right off the first draw, we had an easy breakout, and we just don’t make the easy play. We turn it over. When they’re in our end, they make a couple of plays and passes. They got a couple of looks.
That is basically what the period was, and then you take penalties because you’re in your end too much, so we’re killing. What did we kill? Three in a row? Basically, that was the second period.
On the decision not to challenge the 1-0 Montreal goal for goaltender interference:
It was a tough one. Stecher kind of spun him. The shot was off. Woll probably wouldn’t have got there. It was close. It was a tough one.
On what it will take to turn the team around:
Obviously, getting some people back in the lineup is definitely going to help, but until we decide to dig in and play the right way for 60 minutes on a consistent basis, it is going to be hard to pull yourself out of anything.
On whether he thought the team had made strides in the last couple of games:
I’d go back to probably the last three games. I thought we made good strides. I didn’t mind our first period. I get that there were a couple of breakdowns, and we were down 2-0, but I just don’t understand why we can’t go out in the second period and dictate how we are going to play the period.
That is the difference for me: They dictated the game in the second period. They put their foot on the gas and took it to us.
On whether there is a confidence issue at play in the momentum swings against the team:
What I’ve seen a few times this year is when we get down a couple of goals at times — this happened in the second period — where we go out there and we don’t play with any urgency or any confidence in the second period because we get down a couple of goals. That’s an excuse all day long for me. This is a veteran hockey team. It’s inexcusable, and it’s on me, too. It’s on all of us. With a veteran team like [ours], that shouldn’t happen.
On Jake McCabe’s injury status:
Upper-body. I don’t know the timeline for it right now. Bad enough that he couldn’t come back and play.
On the difficulty of building momentum when the injuries keep piling up:
It makes it difficult, for sure, but again, it is what it is. This is what we have. We have to be better. That’s the bottom line. We have shown we can do it. These guys have been out for a while now. We have played some pretty good hockey at times.
There is no reason why that didn’t happen tonight. We came out with that mindset in the first period and did a pretty good job, but you can’t lose all of the momentum because they scored a couple of goals. We are a veteran team, and it is inexcusable.
