Craig Berube addressed the media after his team’s 2-1 shootout loss to the Montreal Canadiens, which dropped the Maple Leafs’ record to 13-11-4.
On the team’s performance:
Good first period. I thought we came out with the right mindset and did some good things.
In the second period, we turned pucks over. That is basically what it boiled down to. We put ourselves in three-quarter ice. Basically, Montreal owned that period because of turnovers, in my opinion.
The third period was a pretty good period.
Overall, we missed the net about 15 times, at least. There were good opportunities, too. We have to hit the net on those opportunities.
The power play has to come through for us, and it didn’t. But I thought our goaltending was good, and we got a point out of it.
On the team’s response after a bad second period:
We responded in the third and played a much better period. We played behind them more and got to our game. We had some opportunities there with some plays and situations. But we can’t go and miss the net on grade-A opportunities. We shot ourselves in the foot there.
On Dennis Hildeby’s 33-save performance:
Good. He was really good, I thought. Solid. He did the job for us. He made some really good saves. I was happy. Good to see that from him.
On the team’s continued struggles on the power play:
Right now, what I see when I watch is that they’re unsure of themselves a little bit. In particular, the power play in the second period moved it well. We didn’t take the shot. The shots are there, but we aren’t taking them. When we do take a shot, it is probably the wrong time.
They are not feeling too good about themselves out there. Obviously, they’re not seeing it right now.
We’ve got to work through it. It’s all you can do. We’ve got to work through it and try to create some chemistry here.
On whether the extent of the power play struggles is surprising to him:
It is. I actually thought Cowan, on the power play, made some good plays and did some good things on it. He was pretty good tonight, again.
On whether there was a gameplan in place for the shootout, given how rare they’ve been in recent seasons:
We always look at our lineup. We haven’t been in a lot of shootouts, even going back to last year. We won in OT a lot, so we didn’t get to a lot of shootouts.
I mean, we have numbers you have to look into a little bit, but at that point, shootouts are a crapshoot a lot of the time.
