January 13 morning skate quotes: Robyn Regehr

On whether the Canucks bring out the best in the Kings:
Well, we just look at it as division games. That’s what our big focus is on, and we haven’t done a very good job against some of those teams. We lost two games to Calgary in the last minute, but we’ve done a really good job against other teams, too. The focus is really that those division games are extremely important because they are your rival teams. That being said, though, there is no game where you go into your preparation and say, ‘This is just going to be an easy game.’ That’s not the way things work. But I think there is a little bit extra attention and maybe special motivation when you’re playing against guys you see five, six times a year, sometimes more with the exhibition schedule the way it is. And then also with the way the playoffs are going to work this year, you have to come out of your division. So it’s going to add even more of an intensity and a rivalry to an already a pretty good thing.

On the Canucks:
They’re an aggressive team when they come in with a pretty good skating forecheck. They also have a potent power play with guys that are very capable. Sometimes you go through streaks with your power play, but the personnel that they have on there, especially the Sedins and Kesler, they can score if you give them a lot of opportunities. For us, we have to remember what we did in the previous games, and I think the things that we did a very good job of was we really played a very physical game of our own and spent a lot of time in their zone generating a lot of shots on goal, scoring chances, and lots of traffic in front of the net. We’re getting shots right now and we’re having trouble bearing down, but we just need to continue to get people and pucks to the front of that net and hack and whack away, and hopefully capitalize on more of those chances.

On the team’s response to experiencing scoring woes despite the sturdy play:
I think we just were talking about bearing down, and when we do have an opportunity to make sure that we make the most of it, maybe be a little bit more selfish in a good way in that you shoot the puck a little bit more when maybe we were looking to make a play or pass or something maybe a little bit prettier. Right now we’ve got to capitalize, and it doesn’t matter how many chances you generate. What really matters is how you capitalize on that. We’ve been out-chancing teams, but we’ve also been I think giving up a little bit too many high quality chances against, so we’ve talked about that a bit in trying to really cut those down [by] maybe three or four chances against a game, and then go from there.