Ken Hitchcock Start Quotations

He needs to have a big year. It's his third year pro and that's usually when players start stepping ahead. He showed flashes in the (Calder Cup) playoffs and now all we're looking for is consistency.

He was really good. He was outstanding and gave us a chance to win and it was good stuff. We had a really good start to the game and then we were killing penalties in the first period and that?s when we really needed him. ..In the end, we needed him again. It?s good for him to make him feel part of the group again.

We've learned to live with the idea that we will have five players out every game. I'm happy in one area, and that is with our attitude toward competing, but I don't think you ever want to be satisfied because as soon as you are, you start standing still.

Well, put it this way. If he put together five days of practice like he did today and didn't feel any ill effects, then maybe you could start to think along those lines, but it's not something anyone is planning on at this point.

Yeah, wait until I start yelling at him.

When you start a goalie, you expect him to go the distance.

Yeah, I'm concerned. . . . You start thinking in terms of (muscular) defects going on. Right now this is a minor injury and we don't want to make anything more of it. But this is now the third occurrence in that area and that's the part concerning everybody right now. We don't know whether this is minor or we have something bigger.

We weren't prepared to pay the price to win the hockey game at the start and when you give a team like Toronto a sniff, they're going to make you pay a price.

We had the wrong attitude to start the game. They play a heavy game, they play an old NHL game and we wanted to play around the game instead of plow through it. When you give a team that's in a desperate state like Toronto some hope, they're going to follow through.

We had the wrong attitude to start the game.

We had such a terrific start to the game. And to me, as soon as Peter went out, our whole energy just dropped right off the cliff. Our energy went right down the tubes. That's the second time that's happened and that's got to change.

Both guys are going to start the season with us. We are counting on them being good players for us. They are here because they can help us win. They are not here because they are young players.

That one line, you can't turn it over against them. (The Red Wings) schooled us. They turned every mistake we made at the start of the third period into a goal.

This is an injury that when we did our medicals at the start of training camp was an injury that was in place from his time in New Jersey,

You don't want to start out next weekend trying to find your hockey game.

This is the state were in right now. We played great yesterday and didn't get rewarded. We had a flat start to this game. Montreal took advantage and scored 5-on-3. They took advantage of our mistakes. We have to regroup. We have to get some healthy guys back in our lineup. We didn't play our best game today. We have some things we have to talk about in the next 48 hours.

It took us almost a period and a half to get up to the pace of the game and then we were fine. We were much better in the second half of the game and the overtime than we were at the start. I thought we were a little behind the pace at the start and then really got going.

I know about playing back-to-backs, and they're up there waiting for us. Whatever happens in that game, if we play the right way, we'll feel good about it. You don't want to start next weekend trying to find your hockey game.

The difference was we had a great start to the game and played very well, but when they got their power plays, it shifted the momentum back their way. We did a lot of things really well today. Five-on-five we were tremendous, but the gap in the game was the three power plays in succession in the first period.