Mats Sundin Team Quotations

I believe in my heart that we have a good enough team to make the playoffs and a good enough team to beat Ottawa.

We don't care who is not in the tournament any more. We are focused on our team, our play. We always thought we could get to the gold medal game, that we had the talent and team strength to do so.

It is almost must-win for us in this stretch because we're going to need them. We're going to be on the road a lot in January (nine out of 13 games) and play a lot of teams above .500. We'll need this stretch as a foundation to play the teams at the top of the league.

I'm 31 years old and I want to be part of a championship team before my career is over.

And I'm, whether I want it or not, a front figure for the team, a guy that talks about how the team is doing and represents the team.

You can see all kinds of matchups within those teams, but I think it's going to come down to who plays best as a team and is patient.

As a team, we are scoring some goals but we still have a lot of work to do. If we want to compete with Ottawa and the other top teams in our conference, we have to do better in our own end.

As a team we are scoring some goals, but there's still a lot of work to do,

Our only focus from now on is to turn this thing around. We have to get back to playing the way we did. The way we're playing right now, it hasn't even been two weeks. Before that we were playing really good hockey and we could beat any team in the league. We have to climb back to that, and it's going to take all of us in the dressing room. We can't look at the standings right now.

They are one of the hottest teams in the league. We'll take a win any way we can.

If anyone from my team deserves to go, he's the guy,

We got an experienced team this time around.

We were ready to play, there's no doubt about that. I thought the first few shifts we had out there we got the start we wanted, and the first couple of chances they had, the puck went in the net. Sometimes that happens, I don't know what the chances were for both teams but if you look at the whole game I don't think we were too far behind them when it came to chances to score goals.

Now, it's a little more my respnsibility to answer for what's going on with the team and explain why we're doing well and why we're not doing well.

You are begging for trouble when you give up three on two (breaks) and two on one (breaks) to a speedy team like this.

You are begging for trouble when you give up 3-on-2s and 2-on-1s to a speedy team like this.

We're going to miss him in these last 10 games. I think Jason had a great year for us. That's sports, you can never tell what is going to happen. I think all teams go through injuries in the season, but it is not why we are where we are in the standings.

We've got a lot of teams around us in the standings and behind us, so every game is big. There is no doubt in the locker room that we can make the playoffs.

This is a two-week direction (the losing skid) and we still have a long season to go. I believe we have a good enough hockey team to make it to the playoffs and I believe we're going to make it.

There's a bigger area from which to attack, ... I was one of the proponents of this kind of hockey several years ago. We built our early team in Toronto around that. But it became clear (the league) didn't want style and speed, they wanted people who could knock heads off.

I'm excited about having the team over, ... I know there are a lot of Leafs fans in Sweden and in Europe, so this is a great chance for the European audience to watch the Toronto Maple Leafs. I think that's the most fun thing about this whole thing. We are going to focus on practicing and preparing for the season, just the same way we would if we were somewhere around Toronto. I'm sure we are going to have some chances at night to have some dinners and take a look around Stockholm, but most of the focus is going to be on practicing and getting ready.

It's not his fault. We can turn this thing around, there's no doubt about it. I believe in this team. We're facing adversity, but every team does that.

There's so many games left, our only concern is our own play. We know we can play better than we did in January (3-9-2) and we can beat the teams we need to beat to make it in (the playoffs).