Brendan Shanahan Team Quotations

Since the first day of training camp, he talked about us playing more like a playoff team and scoring playoff-style goals. It's a theme we hear every day. Sometimes you don't like the news the coach is delivering, but he's the coach. It's not his job to fit in with us. It's our job to fit in with him. You need one guy in charge, and he's the guy.

One of the reasons we've been so good for so long is the group of players we have are very competitive professionals. If we were the kind of team that looked at the standings and said we can take it easy tonight we wouldn't have the kind of success we've had.

We lost some guys from last year, but I think they did a good job of keeping this team intact, and we think we've got another good shot at a Cup here. With Colorado, it's always going to a special game for both teams. There's been such a great history of great hockey between us.

I see a lot of young players today who are supposed to be the future of the game and I shake my head. Guys who dive. Guy who don't put the team first,

We rolled four lines, we got a lot of gritty effort from a lot of different people at both ends of the ice. People talk about our ability to score, but we've also got a great ability as a team to play great defense.

We lost a couple players and our rotation got a little messed up. We found a way to win. Obviously, this is a team on the other side that has been finding ways to win. There's no quit in Columbus. We knew they were going to come back. We maybe have to show a little bit more poise in our own end late in games.

Our approach going in was they were a desperate team and if we could get of to a good start we could get them to press. It's certainly a lot easier, a lot less taxing to play with the lead.

It's such a playoff failure for our whole team. This was, really, I felt, a very, very strong team and a very strong potential playoff team that we had built. What a blown opportunity this was by our team.

It's definitely disappointing, but as teammates, we'd like to think the door's not closed on Pavel coming back. I think the expectations remain high. This team has a lot of depth. We'd all rather have Pavel, but when you compare us to other teams in the West, there's no reason for us to use that as a crutch.

I don't think there was anyone on this team that didn't think we'd have to win in Edmonton. The road is a place where we seem to play our best hockey, so it's on to Game 3.

I don't think there was anyone on this team that didn't expect that we were going to have to win games in Edmonton.