Ken Hitchcock Quotes

"We've had to overcome adversity the whole season."

"We feel confident in his ability. He has the speed to get up on the attack."

"You were taught at an early age that you don't just fall down as soon as someone puts a stick on you,"

"I guess I need to apologize. I know better than that. I kind of lost discipline the way our team did in the game."

"We were tentative, but once we got angry, we got some emotion and we were ready to go."

"There are too many games now where there's too much structure and not enough of the chaos."

"There almost becomes a fear factor. Nobody is used to what you can do and can't do. If you take one or two, then you don't want to do anything. Then you end up doing nothing."

"We're disappointed. We played a great game. We deserved a better fate. It's the best game we've played in a month."

"It seemed like every mistake we made went in our net. We deserved a better fate. We had a ton of things go right. We out-shot them. We out-chanced them. We outplayed them, but they're an opportunistic team and they took advantage of the mistakes we made. That's what good teams do."

"That second period felt like the longest period I've ever been through as a coach. The first question was whether we could skate with them. We can. They've got speed and so do we."

"We look at that as a compliment, first of all,"

"Their determination defensively was a little better than ours was offensively. Overall, they were all committed physically. We were one chance and out."

"This is a huge deal for the players. For once in their lives, they get to feel like an athlete, not an entertainment machine. They live with everyone else from different sports. They get to represent their countries, which is the biggest thing for these players. From the experiences of '98 and '02, this is a big thing."

"They pushed the level out there. It's not about whether we can keep up. We don't have a choice."

"As the game wore on, we were out-competed,"

"It's just bad luck. We feel like we might as well get it done now. If we wait 25 games and he's sore, he won't get a chance to play (healthy) down the line."

"We knew they were going to play games for us, but to switch locker rooms before we even played a game, we never even thought about that stuff. We had our 23 guys and we thought that was it, then bang, bang things change dramatically."

"Their tenacity, speed and hunger controlled the game."

"We had a lot of things that we did very well tonight. But to give up the two goals (in the third period) was really disappointing."

"Those are usually a reward for hard work. Good players score those goals. Guys like you and me, the puck would end up in the seats."