Ron Wilson Guys Quotations

We made an awful play up the ice. It was a bad pass. You know they have four guys on the ice, we have five. You should be able to find someone open and execute a good pass, and we didn't.

He's got no fear. He'll stand his ground at the blue line all day. We need more guys like that.

There aren't very many guys who would even try to make that pass let alone execute it.

Guys have missed being with this team. That's the greatest thing, to get back together and start having fun again with your teammates.

Most impressive to me about the group is how they've grasped the rules and played disciplined. Hopefully that gives us a bit of a head start that our guys have understood what the rules are right off the bat.

We're not even close to worn out. If we were worn out, the schedule would have killed us, and it didn't. We're a young team, and these guys are excited. They're all fired up. When you get on a roll like this, you storm into the playoffs.

We had some guys were probably already sitting on the plane ready to go home and that's not what we needed in a game like this. Now we've got to find a way to get back points we absolutely need.

We've been missing that type of performance from a player all season. And hopefully that will light the fire under a couple of guys who are capable of doing it, but just haven't decided to do it.

Tonight it seemed like we had five or six guys missing.

This was the opposite of the last game. They had five guys missing, and tonight it looked like we did, too. Five or six guys missing. You need a complete team effort to beat a team like Detroit, especially here, and we didn't get it. So we'll just throw it away and move on the next one.

The right guys are scoring for us. I'm cheering for Joe to win the scoring title and for Cheech to win the goals title, the Richard Trophy. Provided it doesn't take away from what we're trying to do to win, I'll do everything in my power to put them in the position to succeed.

As long as you can get the job done and you let those guys know you believe in them by putting them in certain situations, yeah they're going to make a mistake every once in a while. My experience tells me the veteran guy will make mistakes, or maybe won't even try to do something for fear of making a mistake, that's what I like about the young players.

You're always going to struggle because of the excitement of the first day, but I was generally happy with the pace of our practice. It's exciting to be working with all these guys again.

The young guys with the way they're competing, they're really hungry, and that's what you need at this point in the season. Not guys who are afraid to fail, but guys that go out there and compete really hard.

It shows you to just shoot the puck. And the lesson learned hopefully for a lot of our guys is just shoot the puck and you have a chance to score. If you don't, you're not going to score.

It's nice if we don't have to hide Christian, just play him against specific people or make sure he doesn't go out against guys in the past that maybe he was intimidated to play against or who would plain-old dominate him. I don't feel that way anymore.

I've had four guys do it and they all go for it. They all go to the net hard and live for the red light to go on. That's what they all have in common.

Not many guys can make a play on their backhand like that. To see the guy on your forehand is one thing, but to do it twice on your backhand is pretty fun to watch.

If you look at the guys who left and add up the goals they scored, it really wasn't very many. They provided leadership and stability in the room, and now it's time for other guys to have that responsibility, because they're mature enough to handle it.

I just said, 'Why aren't you guys calling the right stuff?' And that was enough to get a penalty. Some of the calls were very questionable, at best. It was a very frustrating night from that point of view, but we can't control what the referees decide to call.

I questioned one call, 'Why aren't you guys calling the right stuff?' It was good enough for a bench penalty. We haven't had a bench penalty all year. We can't control what the referee decides to call. We're not fouling people and we're (still) getting calls. That's not our team's fault, it's that simple. That's the freaky thing of it.

I don't think that's a big part of the game right now. It's about power plays and penalty kills, it's not about fighting. And it's a little different if the tough guy can play. ... I'm not going to knock some of these other guys who can play only three minutes and if you ignore them they're totally useless.

I don't think he realized how hard that is. He's very comfortable, and this is when it matters most too. These are huge games, and to see the young guys come through like this is great.

The guys really worked hard from the get-go. Even when Dallas) scored, I didn't see them flinch. I'm really proud of the effort throughout the line-up.