image from mobilwi.typepad.com

Peter Laviolette was a guest on the WIP Morning Show today, and after some Cooter love and Bryzgalov talk, the conversation quickly turned to 24/7. Lavs enjoyed the whole process, but wasn’t really a fan of cameras in the locker room: 

The crew that was here, there were eight or nine guys that were here for a month, they were terrific. Very professional in what they did. It was really good. I’ll tell you a story. I remember the first day when we came in for the Pittsburgh game, they said “You’ll hardly notice us, and we’ll put this one guy in the corner here, we’ll just blend right in.” So we came back from Buffalo and they were here waiting for us, and this was the first home game that they were actually going to shoot a game. We had walked through at 4:30 where they were all going to be placed out– where the one guy was going to be placed out in the room. So I walk in for the meeting 10 minutes before the period, and there’s a guy with a backpack on standing in the doorway holding a 12-foot boom microphone into the middle of the locker room, and I’m trying to walk around him. I looked to the corner to see where the guy was with the camera, but he wasn’t in the corner, he was laying on the floor in the middle of the locker room with the camera shooting up, and I’m thinking to myself as I’m walking around, “It’s not really blending in like I thought.”  

 

That’s the whole Dry Island-inner sanctum thing Paul Holmgren and Lavs love so much.

The coach did go on to say that after a while the cameras seemingly disappeared and he forgot that he was mic’d up. Which brings us to the next part of the conversation, the cursing: 

I’m not thrilled with it [some of the language] either, to be honest with you. What we do in the locker room here, obviously you’re talking about the most powerful word in the dictionary, and when you’re behind the locker room, it’s not meant for my kids to see, it’s not meant for my wife to see, and it’s not meant for my mother to see back in Massachusetts. What we do in here is private, and it doesn’t matter how you coach or how you do it or how you prepare as a player, all of that is kind of like what we do, and it’s internal here, and it’s never been allowed in. 

Now, I love the show, I liked it better watching Bruce Boudreau and Dan Bylsma do it than I did having to go home and watch myself do it, but it is what it is, that’s the nature of the beast. But when we leave the rink here, we don’t go back to our house and have dinner and start swearing around the table and it’s not intense like it is before you’re going out for a game, and it’s just a different world. Sports is a different world, there’s a lot passion that goes into it, there’s a lot of pressure that’s involved with it, there’s a lot of emotions, from the good to the bad, and I think you get to see everything when you get to see a show like an HBO 24/7, no matter what it is, hockey or boxing, they do a terrific job of presenting what it is. 

[If they do it again next year] for the two teams in the Winter Classic, I’d be first in line to watch it again. 

 

Dammit, and here I imagined Lavs reading Fucks in Socks or Green Eggs and Jam to his kids before they went to bed. 

Now seems like as good a time as ever to enjoy the complete Lavs 11-minute 24/7 cut we put together. You can listen to the full WIP interview after the jump.