October 9 postgame quotes: Ottawa

Paul MacLean, on the overtime loss:
Penalties, penalties, penalties, if you’re going to take penalties in this league, especially consecutive penalties and give teams the opposition five-on-three and four-on-three, it’s pretty reasonable to expect in the National Hockey League that you’re going to get goals scored against you. We got to stop taking penalties, for whatever reason, we can’t just sit there and say the officials don’t like us or anything like that, we have to stop taking penalties. We got to get our feet moving, we got to play harder, and stop putting ourselves and putting our team in a bad spot.”

MacLean, on coming back from a three-goal deficit:
I thought Andy came in and really shut door for us in the second and third. We got one back in the second and in the third we came back and got a couple more to get to being tied up, but at the end of the day, it’s a heck of point on the road. It might be a little bit sour how it ended by taking another penalty and losing in overtime. Heck of an effort by the goaltender and the team to come back and get a point in a tough building against a tough team. We take the positive of it and try to do something about the penalties.

MacLean, on being on the penalty kill:
We do it too often. If we do it less we get better at it.

MacLean, on getting a point in the standings:
I think it’s good. Anytime you come on the road in this league and get a point I think that’s good. On the road in this league is hard to do and we are half way through a six-game road trip and have four points. I think we should be pretty pleased with what we did. Are we totally happy with how we are doing it, how we are playing and going about having it happen? No, but that’s what we have practice for. That’s why we have video. That’s why we have coaches to get it sorted out and get ourselves our identity as soon as we can. We’re not there yet. We’re there in a lot of ways. The discipline part of it has to be better, and if we are more disciplined we get way better.

MacLean, on Bobby Ryan:
I thought Bobby’s been fine. Good to see him score and [Michalek] scored as well. Important players for us to get on the mark.

MacLean, on what changed after the first period:
We stopped taking penalties, first of all. Second of all, we were able to put some consistent shifts together. One, two, three, four. One right after another and playing in their end of the rink. I think the goal helped us and settled us down when [Pageau] scored to make it three-to-one. From that point forward, I thought we got a little better identity.

Craig Anderson, on the overtime loss:
We found a way to get a point. You’ve got to take some of the positives out of the game and at least give yourself some credit for sticking in there and battling back. Obviously not the finish or the start that we wanted but you know we found a way to get a point and that can be huge for us.

Anderson, on the penalty kill:
We’ve got to get better at it. That’s the bottom line. Last year we had a great penalty kill and obviously we have many of the same guys that are on that same penalty kill. It’s just a matter of baring down and maybe getting some puck luck on our side.

Anderson, on the end result:
No, there’s no satisfaction. We can be happy with the point but we can’t be satisfied. There’s no room for being satisfied with playing .500 hockey. You have to go out and you have to try and win every game.

Chris Phillips, on the overtime loss:
We showed a lot of composure on not getting down and battling back. Obviously disappointing to not get the win after that but at the same time we’ll take the point after the way we started.

Phillips, on the first period:
You can look at penalties. A couple five on threes and you want to try and kill those off but it’s a tough task. They’ve got some really talented guys over there. It just kind of turned in to a downhill slide getting down.”

Phillips, on how to improve the penalty kill:
We’ve got to look at it and see where we can improve and go from there. We need to look at the video and break it down to see where we’re going wrong. If you’re in your right spots and trying to do the right things and be in the right places sometimes you have to tip your hat and not get too down.