Ken Hitchcock People Quotations

We?re going to take Randy right through to the end of the day here and see how he looks. He had a really good first game, which was most impressive. I like what he does. He?s very smart and the way the game?s being played right now you need people who are smart offensively and defensively. He?s done a great job.

We want him to want the puck, to skate with the puck and find people open with the puck. Hopefully, he can do it. He's shown flashes where he takes off and goes, and sometimes he backs off and becomes conservative.

Now people are starting to see what we look like as a team. Hopefully we can stay healthy. We've been chasing it all year.

I found him to be a good friend and a great competitor, and one of the most loyal guys I worked with and for. He has wonderful people skills and he allowed everyone to flourish in his respective role ... he put his ego aside to allow that. I respect Pat Quinn the coach and Pat Quinn the man much more.

When he's healthy, the way this game is played now, it's built for him. He's quick. He's smart. He's hard to get a handle on physically. He's a huge asset. It's not just him as a player, but he makes people around him better. He's a good teammate.

I think that's a fair thing to say. I don't like it, though. I'd like to see other people step up. We're not a one-stick pony. People must step up when Peter is not on his 'A' game.

I thought as the game wore on we were out-competed. This was like a playoff game. For a game where you're going to checked this hard, I thought we had too many people below the bar today. Way too many people.

Our overall defensive play and goaltending have been excellent through six games. What I like is that we have different people every night who are chipping in. They've kept us competitive.

You are just dealing with an unbelievable level of fire when you're giving a team like that six, seven or eight power plays. You're not going to beat that team. You have to eliminate the reaching-in penalties. I know it's a natural reaction for most players but we've got to have the people that are doing it, not do it.

Those are the decisions that, when you don't have to make them or when you make them because people are playing poorly it's easy. The hard decisions are if we continue to play well, then it's going to be a tough thing to do, because you don't want to screw around with what's working.

There are a lot of new people playing there. You have people on the power play who haven't played there all year, and those things are going to happen. Hopefully in a couple weeks we'll be a lot better, but when you lose both your quarterbacks, you're going to have an adjustment phase.

You give skilled players that many power plays and eventually you are going to get some people tired and that is what happened. We made a couple of tired decisions at the end.

To me, it's about new heroes. It's about people other than the obvious ones stepping up. It's about people supplying energy and momentum for you. We're in a no-choice situation. We need everybody to bring the energy they can.

Beating people one-on-one, getting to loose pucks, those are all the things you lose if you get this much time off. And that's why we're scrimmaging at practice. We're having little games inside of the practice themselves.

The third period was tremendous. A lot of people played very, very well today.

For a game when you know you?re going to get checked this hard, we had too many people below the bar. Way too many people.

You know that if you just stay with the program, the home team is going to be the one that presses. We've caught people pressing hard when the game is on the line, and we've caught them on some odd-man rush situations. And we've won a lot of points late.

You can't expect 34-year-olds to score like 26-year-olds. Those guys have other roles that are as important, but we have to get more from other people who are capable.

The doctor here cleared him to play but it was a little sore, so we did not take a risk. We'll have our own people look at him.