Hughes on his top achievement over the last 12 months and his primary challenge for the year ahead:
I'm probably most proud of assembling a really good group of people in hockey operations. That's not just in the dressing room, but everybody here. We've worked really well together. It makes for a fun place to come to work, and there's enough self-confidence among the group that we can challenge each other without insulting each other. That has provided a great working environment for us to be able to exchange ideas and have this circular management structure where information flows instead of being in different silos, and I think we've been successful at doing that to this point. I expect it to be a challenge as we move forward. I'm not ignorant of the fact that there's less pressure today than there may be in a year or two, and people generally react differently under more pressure-packed environments. In terms of the greatest challenge, when you come into a situation like this where you're trying to build a team that can win on a sustainable basis, there's so much to do, and I think the challenge will be as we move forward, how we give shape to it all and how we evolve this environment. It's about balance. How do you create a work environment that's fun to come to every day, where people are excited to go to work, but yet they're held accountable? That's different today than it's going to be two or three years from now if we're doing our job.
Hughes on the work of head coach Martin St-Louis and the rest of his staff:
We're going to go through different phases here as we try to build this team into something. From our coaching staff, we're going to have certain expectations now that might be different than if you're in Tampa coaching a veteran-laden team; you have a different approach than when you're coaching a bunch of young hockey players. The one thing I know is our whole coaching staff, while they may be inexperienced as coaches relative to some other coaches and staff, they're certainly not as players, they've been through it. But more importantly, they're all very bright, intelligent people. They don't lack a strategic mind for the game of hockey, it's just, for us, we have to have priorities, we have to have this balance, and they're confident enough that we can have conversations. That's what we're trying to do with everything that we do. Ultimately, Marty and his coaching staff will make decisions about what they need to work on, but that doesn't mean that we're not going to come down after a game and say, 'Our D-zone looks terrible' or 'We're making bad decisions on zone entries' or things like that. There's that constant dialogue and there's a process to it all. I would say to people, be patient, Rome wasn't built in a day, and I don't think you can teach your team to be great in one day either.