With the NHL All-Star festivities underway in Toronto, it allows for many media outlets to get a wealth of content for players and coaches they would only see a few times during the season.
Elliotte Friedman and Jeff Marek sat down with Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl as part of a larger interview on the Edmonton Oilers season, their play, and their new head coach in Kris Knoblauch.
Although the full version is not live yet, Sportsnet released a video snippet of the interview and showed yet again how fun the two players are in an interview setting together.
The clips
Starting the snippet, McDavid and Draisaitl spoke on the Oilers horrendous start to the season and just what their mindsets were during that time:
“I wish we could say that we always knew, we always knew but you know obviously it was a bad start, a lot of things that went wrong. We brought in a new coach, of course, there was a sense of anxiety in the room but you know with our group there was always an underlying belief that was always there that was never shaken, at least in my mind and talking to other guys that felt the same way that eventually we were going to get out of it. We didn’t want to dig ourselves too big of a hole, it felt like we were on some free fall and couldn’t catch ourselves and we just hoped we caught ourselves in time to save the season.”
– Connor McDavid
“When you’re in a situation like that you go into every game like ‘this is the game where we are going to turn it around, this is the one’ and we go out and just lay an absolute egg. I was just like what is going on, it felt like we couldn’t play hockey anymore it was crazy. But obviously, we worked extremely hard to put ourselves in a good spot again.”
– Leon Draisaitl
It was nice to hear Draisatil’s honesty that the team was just pure and simply terrible and just couldn’t explain it. There was no mention of any potential injuries (yet) or excuses, just they were not playing good hockey, but have done everything to turn that around.
The new coach and systems surely helped, and they spoke briefly on Knoblauch’s coaching style and addressed Friedman and Marek’s comments on how calm he looks behind the bench:
“He’s really calm, that’s his demeanor though every day. It’s not a bench act or anything like that, it’s just who he is… to his credit when you need to hear his voice you do hear it. He will point out something you do really good, or vice versa.”
– Connor McDavid
It of course had to be asked if such a calm, cool, and collected guy ever got mad at the team:
“What makes him mad? I mean… he gets mad a couple of times. You hear him on the bench a few times… He doesn’t like bad line changes, turnovers, typical coach stuff.”
– Connor McDavid
Not a shocker, no one in hockey likes those types of things.
The end of the clip let the duo talk about who in the NHL they like to beat right now, and you can tell based on their reactions they don’t like these (obvious) teams:
“For me, it’s Calgary and L.A. right now, I would say those two.”
– Connor McDavid
“L.A., Vancouver—they slapped us a round a little bit a couple of times this year so would like to get some redemption there.”
– Leon Draisaitl
Again, it’s great to see this type of video content coming out, and there is clearly a much larger interview coming on Monday with the two that we will cover in detail once released.
