Craig MacTavish Team Quotations

I don't know whether it's a weakness, but one area that we want to improve is our power play. Our penalty killing has to improve, too. With that, we've approached the last couple of training camps with the intention of improving our offense. Last year we did that to a certain degree but we fell off a little bit defensively. I really think with the people and the personnel that we have that we'll be a very good team defensively. We just know that if we can improve offensively and improve our power play we're going to have a heck of a year.

You get to know how close they are. You get to see what your team is going to look like down the road.

Ryan has been an integral member of our team for a long time around here. We don't have a lot of guys with the type of tenure that Ryan has on our hockey club. That's not withstanding the value that he has purely from a playing standpoint. He's a versatile guy and he really does a lot of things well for us. We are certainly happy to have him back, and happy they settled and made an equitable deal and arrangement before reaching arbitration.

It will be a work in progress. We like to think, as everybody would at this stage, that we're progressing and we have our teams prepared. But there will be things that crop up. Every coach is saying we don't want to struggle with the learning curve early on. But some will.