I'd like to maintain the team we have and see if we can do it, but it's really not my call. I really think we probably needed to be closer than seven points to really show that we can take this team farther than where it is right now.
I'd like to maintain the team we have and see what we can do with it. I think we needed to be closer than seven points away to realistically keep this team together.
I thought we were a fairly easy team to play against early on. We took a back seat to their passion.
What I think was missing this season was the team-first mentality. Some nights our defensive work was good, on others, our offense was good. But we need 20 guys to put the team ahead of individual accolades, and I don't think we had that throughout the season.
We feel we can do it. We feel that we've got a lot of firepower on this team and teams can underestimate us at this point . . . We've all got a little bit to prove.
The short-handed goal really killed us. We were struggling on the power play and when you're not scoring and the other team scores on (the short-handed play), it is a big shot in the arm for their confidence.
Without Zhitnik in there it left a hole. We were kind of putting pairs together and trying to see what worked. It's a bad team to be trying to do that against.
In the second period, it was pretty good for us. We probably played as well as we can as a hockey team and didn't get rewarded quite as much as we thought.
They worked to get into those shooting lanes, they worked to get a body part or a stick in front of the shots. It's how they've had success. They have a ton of skill, but they also work as hard as any team we've seen this year.
It looked like what we pictured from this team at the start of the season. The difference is believing in ourselves. We saw a lot of good signs.
Any team would miss valuable players like Z and Ash. We're treating today's news the same way we approached last week when we moved some veterans for prospects. This is another opportunity for very talented young players to step up.