It's been tough and nobody in here's going to lie that it hasn't been a tough year for all of us, not knowing what's going to happen. But we have no part in that, everything in that is out of our control. All we do is play hockey. |
It's more positional play now. Before, if you got beat, your first instinct was to grab and hook and in most cases, you were allowed to get away with that, especially when you were short-handed. Now, if you do that, they call it, and you're down five on three. Your body position has to be a lot better. |
It's one of those nights, the last couple have been. We make a mistake and it ends up in our net. That's just the bottom line. There's no real reason or rhyme for it. They scored on their good opportunities and we haven't even come close. |
It's one of those nights. They scored on their good opportunities and we didn't even come close. |
It's sort of been one after the other. |
Obviously, winning makes everybody feel better about themselves. We're not that high yet, but we had a good week. |
Obviously, you didn't want to let him shoot the puck. That was your main focus. You let anybody else shoot it besides him. |
That was unacceptable. We just refused to shoot the puck. |
That's going to be a rivalry going on for a long time. Jacks loves that, I think he loves playing against him. It helps him elevate his game. |
That's part of it as you get older, and unrestricted. No offense, I'd trade all of us, too. |
The hardest thing to do sometimes going down the stretch, especially when we're not going to make the playoffs, is to focus. It's easy to say that we've got nothing to play for. But our young kids have been great, trying hard every night to win. |
The Phoenix game the other night had 27 penalties in it, so that's pretty much the whole game somebody's on the power play. Believe it or not, you almost have got to forget about the score and just try and play the game as best you can with the new rule changes. I know that's hard to think about it that way, but you've got to teach yourself to adjust to the new rules as quickly as possible. |
There's going to be a lot of relief I'm sure for a lot of people around here. It's taken a while, but it will be good for everybody in the long run if they can get this sorted out and have a good summer. |
There's nothing you can really put a finger on, except preparation. For whatever reason, maybe we feel too good about ourselves. We shouldn't. I think we get out of our element a little bit. Then we try to do too much. |
They're getting the chance of a lifetime. It's not going to come along like this every year for them, because next year the team might be different. This is their time to show themselves, see what they can do. |