Winnipeg Jets head coach Paul Maurice delivered one of the best quotes about playoff hockey you’re likely to hear.
It’s won’t live on in history like the Rangers’ Mark Messier saying “we will win tonight” in 1994, nonetheless what Maurice said Tuesday morning in St. Paul about keeping playoff hockey simple is beautiful.
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“You keep it simple because there’s less time in the playoffs to do anything more creative. There’s just not as much room on the ice. The intensity of checking, not just the physicality – the intensity, the speed of checking increases to the point where there’s nothing left except the simple movement of the puck.”
It’s one thing to read his quote. It’s another to hear him say it with a stoic, dead tone (26:53 in the video).
Maybe it’s just me, but his delivery strikes me as amazing, and it’s no surprise when you hear him speak that he’s turned Winnipeg into a machine of a team.
Maurice is a bit of machine himself when it comes to delivering a good quote.
On Monday, he said the Jets suffered from “the disease of slowness” in their Game 3 loss to the Wild.
“It’s the disease of slowness,” Maurice said. “That’s what cost us the game,” he said, via the Winnipeg Sun. “Everything we do is, how fast can we move, with the puck and without it? And we were off. Any of the symptoms that come after aren’t really important.”
Maurice’s Jets were firing on all cylinders in Games 1 and 2, but the Wild punched them back in Game 3, and hope to do the same to tie the best-of-seven series 2-2 going into Game 5 Friday in Winnipeg.
Puck drop tonight is just after 7 o’clock on CNBC and Fox Sports North.
