Craig Patrick Time Quotations

Guys are starting to gain a lot of confidence. Hopefully, it's time to climb up the ladder, and if we keep playing like this, we will.

That's the one thing we've got to be careful of -- him feeling the pressure, putting it on himself to get back on the ice. We've got to calm him down from here on out, we've got to make sure it's right. We've got to not listen to him this time and say, 'No, Mario, not until we say you're ready.

We did this for the first time in the summer of 2003, and we believe it's a good way for some of our young prospects to come into town and get to know a little bit about our organization and our city before training camp. We'll put them through a series of tests, and they'll also have a chance to meet with our coaches and trainers.

We're down to a bare-bone operation in terms of players. After this weekend, we'll be down to 12 forwards, six defensemen and two goalies, and any time you get in that situation and have an injury, you can bring people up (from the American Hockey League) on emergency, and it doesn't affect what's going on down there in terms of being able to go back and play in the playoffs. That's important for us because we want to see these guys as much as we can this spring and make some decisions on them for the future and for our lineup in the future.

This is our third time around at it. It's going to work this time. The players will adjust and there will be a different game. Definitely.

We were positioned well for what we had to deal with, and it's worked out very well. For the first time around in this, it was hard to really anticipate what might happen, but we're very, very pleased.