By Drew Scott

With a little less than two weeks until the end of the NHL regular season, WEEI.com goes one-on-one with the man who will be guarding the net for the Bruins throughout the playoffs, goaltender Tim Thomas. 

What do you think the biggest difference is between this year’s team and last year’s team?
There isn’t any one difference, you know? It’s a combination of differences. It’s the young kids being a year older, and having more of an impact. The new additions that we made to the team like [Blake] Wheeler and [Michael] Ryder, and then the veterans like [Stephane] Yelle. I don’t want to leave Yelle out when we talk about the guys that we’ve added, who has been terrific for us, not only on the ice but as a veteran leadership role. And you know some of the great players that we have here like Zdeno Chara and Marc Savard , have played up to their potential.

As a veteran presence on a relatively young team, what kind of role do you play trying to mentor and give advice to the younger players?
Goaltending is a little bit different, you know? I just try to be myself. I think I enjoy myself quite a bit of the time on the ice, and hopefully that feeds over to the young kids too. It can bring a little bit of extra bounce and energy especially through the dog days of the season, and there’s times when I get tired too, but when you see somebody on your team is tired, everyone else has to lift him up a little bit.

What’s the one thing Claude Julien stresses to you guys more than anything?
Well, yeah … First of all, as a goalie, I don’t really listen to most of that stuff. I pretty much live in my own world and I like it that way.

Do you have any pregame rituals?
No, no rituals. You know, if it’s a ritual and something happens that you can’t do it, you can use that as an excuse for not performing your best. I prefer to call it a routine rather than a superstition or a ritual. So yeah, I have my routine as far as get up pretty much the same time of the day, go to practice, come home take my nap pretty much the same time of the day, eat pretty much the same thing. So I have a routine, but no rituals.

The month of March has had some tough losses to teams like the Rangers and the Penguins. What are some key areas you would like to see the team improve on heading into the playoffs?
Well, we’ve already started. You know for a while there I think you could pretty much say we needed to improve. It wasn’t any one area that had totally dropped off it was just a little bit in every area. You know power play, penalty kill, not taking penalties, getting big goals at the right, playing good defense at the right time, big saves at the right time it was a little bit of everything.

I see that you were drafted in 1994, but you didn’t start getting extensive playing time in the NHL until the 2005-06 season with the Bruins. Were you ever frustrated enough to consider giving up hockey?
I never thought it wasn’t for me. I think I came to the conclusion that the NHL wasn’t for me, and I knew that the game of hockey was for me. So I was playing in Europe, and enjoying myself still getting paid to play a game rather than be working at Flint, Michigan at GM, which would be a terrible place right now. I’d probably be laid off. So I had never given up on the game of hockey, so I think at one point, I know at one point I had given up on getting a shot at the NHL.

What was it like playing in Europe?
For me, it was great, you know some people really enjoy it, and other people have a harder time adjusting. I enjoyed it. I was fortunate enough to meet a lot of friends when I was over there and be treated well by every team that I played for. So that made the experience a lot easier.

Are there any particular goaltenders you model yourself after?
Yeah, it is my own style. I don’t model myself after [Dominik] Hasek, but when I was in college, right during that age was when he was at the top of his game. Well, he stayed at the top of his game for a while, but I started to pick up some things that even I hadn’t thought of as far as desperation. It kind of became OK to do whatever it took instead of having to look the perfect way. So there’s that and there’s stuff that I see Marty Brodeur do — that I say, ‘Well, you know what? That might be a little bit easier than the way I do it.’ It’s not big things and it’s not always that I’m changing the way I make the save but I do pick up stuff off of other people. Even [Evgeni] Nabokov I can think of just the way he stands I’ve copied that to a certain extent at certain times. So there is just little stuff.

Who are some of the sharpshooters you hate to see heading down the ice at you?
I mean [Alex] Ovechkin is always very hard, [Ilya] Kovalchuk is another one of those guys, but [Alexander] Semin’s got to be right up there too — if he has time and space, he’s a little bit easier to control if you play good defense against him than like Ovechkin, because Ovechkin is a little hungrier player. Once he gets alone, he’s pretty tough.

By now you have probably seen the footage of Tukka Rask getting pretty animated in a Providence Bruins game. How do you hold your composure when things aren’t going your way?
Well I’m older. It’s a little bit easier. Actually having seen that, I sympathize with the kid. I don’t think that should be allowed to be a goal and it’s good to see some fire — especially from a Finnish goalie. If you think of the Finnish goalies they are very emotionless, [Mikka] Kiprusoff and [Vesa] Toskala, so it’s good to see a little bit of fire. But then, on the other hand, it has to be controlled obviously. I struggle with that myself and I struggled a lot more with it when I was younger.