Interview with Brian Lawton

Not that this article is anything new but I thought I'd post it anyway. We ARE in the off season.. not really much news to talk about. Oh, I noticed that the Mattias Ohlund Appreciation Page has fallen off the 1st page of google. Alas, it was a good experiment!

The Hockey News Snippet:Ed Fraser's article

HN: Was Mattias Ohlund the one guy who you had targeted from Day 1?

BL: We had three guys on our list that we really felt would be beneficial and we really felt like we needed to get one of them to get back on track to respectability.

Mattias was on that list, the other two, of course, were Scotty Niedermayer and (Jay) Bouwmeester.

Those guys signed quickly and Mattias was the only one available on our list and it made it real easy as far as giving us direction on July 1.

THN: Was Ohlund’s ability to mentor Victor Hedman at all involved in the thought process behind signing him?

BL: It definitely was. That’s an added bonus. It’s something we wanted, to have a mentor for Victor either way.

We wanted to get an anchor, quite frankly. We believe strongly in Paul Ranger and Andrej Meszaros, but they’re still young in their careers and we were looking for somebody with a little more experience than those guys.

Mattias really fit that bill for us, as did Matt Walker to some degree – not in experience, but certainly his toughness.