Anyone who plays in the NHL dreams to win the Stanley Cup and I dreamed as well to be one of them and raise the cup in Washington and bring it home to Moscow and celebrate with my friends and my parents.
The most important thing for us is winning the Stanley Cup and I want to win.
Hopefully my time in Nashville has helped me. We've had a lot of different things happen to our hockey club, seen a lot of different situations and different types of clubs from an expansion team to a Stanley Cup playoff threat. I think any coach that's gone through those things, you become a better coach.
That's what they hired me to do in Washington, change a little bit of the culture, try to win a Stanley Cup.
If you are not playing for the Stanley Cup at the end of the year, what's the point? If you don't win, you may as well not make the playoffs, because you are loser just like everyone else.
Winning the Stanley Cup in '99 was a dream come true. I'll never forget it.
I'm competitive. I'd love another chance to be part of a Stanley Cup championship team. That'd be awesome.
The school I went to was a little farm school in Wannaska, student body 61 or something. There was a kid, the only black kid in our county, Dustin Byfuglien. He won the Stanley Cup a couple years back with the Blackhawks. Out of a class of 21 kids, he and I always had to be on opposite teams on everything because we were the most athletic.
War of attrition, war of wills. That's what the Stanley Cup playoffs are - more intense, more physical and more prolonged than the playoffs of any other sport.