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Well coach, you've prepared yourself for a lot of playoffs in your career, including one that I watched, uh, the Rochester Americans, uh,
as a special teams coach, when you, when you've got the power played stuff, is it, are you still looking to see, okay, what, where's what's
us? You're just above the halfway, it boy, you're like 15th in the league.
So do you look at, all right, what combination is going to work? Let's try this.
This might work a little bit because I notice things are a little different now.
Now I'm going to be simple in what I say, but it just looks like,
Tage is almost like a rover and it seems like it's working pretty well.
Like he set up a couple of nice goals.
He scored from the middle.
I mean, he scored from like all over, it seems like they lose him now.
As I said, I know I'm being simple, but is this time now maybe to try a few things?
It is, um, you know, certainly the, the power plays been a lot better since December.
Um, I think we're near 25%.
You know, in the second half of the season.
Um, and you know, some of that is Norris has been healthy.
So that's helped.
I think that Jack Quinn's elevation of his game, just the continued maturation of his
overall game gives us a little more flexibility to, to do some different things with
Tage and, you know, Tage is such a weapon.
He's such a dangerous player that the opponents penalty kill.
That's the first thing they're going to say is let's take Tage away.
And if he just stays in one spot the whole time, it's a lot easier to take him away.
Um, and so the ability for him to play a different positions and, and that's the beauty
of Tage is he has that talent level to play net front.
He could play a goal line.
He can play bumper and he, he could play the top as well as, as, as he has on the flank.
And so, um, I do think that the, having Norris now more consistently, um, and the maturation
of the Quinn's game, along with how good Zucker and Dalyne always have been, our gives
us a little more freedom right now.
Maybe people don't realize and we have seen it is Tage can be a good playmaker too.
He's made a couple of real nice passes to Zucker for some power play goals.
And those weren't passes that anybody could just make.
Uh, it seems like he's showing off his playmaking ability also.
I think he's grown that part of his game a lot here in the last, uh, you know, number of
years, you know, the first thing he established in the NHL was that he was an elite goal
score four years ago, whatever it is.
And, um, and has teams recognize that he gets more attention and the more attention he
gets, the more he has to diversify his game.
Um, and the better he's able to make plays and make opponents pay for being too, um, wary
of him, um, then, then he's going to start having more space because now that there's
more weapons across our power play.
This part of the reason Jack has been better is he's finding what I call Jack Quinn
places to shoot the puck.
I mean, there's certain places there.
He gets the pockets in unless he happens to miss it or something.
Is he doing a better job of finding those places so he can get that shot off?
Well, I think, um, first of all, he, he had a great summer.
And so he set himself up to have a breakout year in the NHL by having such a real strong
summer in the weight room.
He's strong enough to do it.
Now he's, he's dangerous.
He's always been dangerous enough to do it.
Now he has the physical confidence and physical strength to get to the inside more.
Um, the goalie scored the other nights, uh, at home on the power play against the islanders,
uh, every minute may goals.
He scored Rochester, um, where he's coming down the offside.
He has the, the, the, the, the ability to break out a defender down and get to the inside
and get to the dangerous parts of the ice.
And when he gets there, he, he's a dangerous shooter in that area.
Let me ask you this.
You say he's stronger as, as that helped his battles.
Have you seen a huge improvement in his battles along the wall because of that?
Yes, huge improvement.
Um, you know, there's still growth to go in his, his overall strength to be, to win the battles.
But that's such a big part of power plays.
Um, we have found, you know, we, we put a lot of, we worked with our analytics team, uh, to study the opponent's penalty kill,
but also studied the trends of our power play.
What's working?
What's not?
And one of the things that is went up dramatically in the second half of the year, which has led to our number of being
up dramatically in the second half of the year, is we are winning more loose,
pucker covers are loose pucker covering ratio is, is up by seven or eight percentage points,
which it gives you a second or a third possession.
And then you get to keep tired penalty killers on the ice.
And everybody can kill good for 20 or 30 seconds.
But if you keep them out there for 40 or 50 or 60 seconds,
your ability to break them down starts to increase dramatically.
I wouldn't ask you this.
A lot of people think like you're a coordinator, like in the NFL.
Don't you guys do a lot, spend a lot of time in the summer as a collaborative coaching staff going over a penalty
kill, going over a pop play where there's input by everybody before you guys decide what you want to do.
Yes, but that's not just the summer.
That's that's day to day.
That is day to day.
Lindy is an extremely collaborative coach.
We all have opinions on it.
Marty, I run stuff by Marty on the power play all the time because he's a penalty kill coach.
So he's thinking about how to think, take things away.
And we share information constantly.
We're all in this together.
That's the way Lindy coach runs our staff.
That's the way we work.
And you know, I lean towards more of the offensive stuff, both five on five and the power play and Marty
leans towards the defensive stuff, but the end of the day, we all work together on this coaching staff.
Finally, congrats on the playoff.
I know you guys have more to do, but congrats on the first step.
Yeah, thank you.
I appreciate it.
It's exciting.
It's something that I know when I got hired by this organization six years ago,
that was part of being part of this is turning this thing around and getting to this spot.
And now we just got to keep going.
Thanks for your time coach.
Thank you.
