January 31 practice quotes: Darryl Sutter

On whether he has noticed teams keying in on Dustin Brown more than normal:
No. I haven’t noticed it.

On Robyn Regehr playing in his 1,000th game:
I think all the players that get to that number are obviously pretty durable guys. Not everybody that plays 1,000 is the same role of player, and obviously Robyn’s played a defensive shutdown, stay-at-home guy and he has been able to have success at that. Quite honest, there’s not many of those guys left in the game or coming into the game strictly because of the way the rules affected that player so much. So the guys that had the hockey IQ to adjust to the rules stayed in. The guys who didn’t are out. So that’s probably a testament more than anything. And then, obviously you’ve got to remember a guy like Robyn Regehr, he wasn’t supposed to play. He was a car accident injury away from whether he would ever play one game. So to get to this point, it’s probably pretty significant. Robyn – it’s not like he’s an older guy. He’s still only, what is he, 32 or 33? Whatever it is. He’s not the oldest guy on our team…[Reporter: Willie was saying that there were a couple of lockouts, too…] Yep. You know what, he’s had a couple of knee injuries along the way. I don’t like talking to him about it because I’ve seen him play through injuries where guys wouldn’t have played. Even last year in the playoffs – that’s why that thousand game number is a friggin’ bunch of B.S., right? Cause the older you get, the most important number is playoff games. That’s what it’s about. There’s guys that play a thousand games or so many games and if you look at their playoff games, well, basically those playoff games add up to seasons, when you look at it. I mean, just take our team for example. We’ve played more playoff games in the last two years. You don’t get credit for that unless you look it up. That’s way more significant.

On Anze Kopitar moving to the left to allow Jeff Carter to take third period faceoffs:
He didn’t play the left side at all, not one shift. [Reporter: He was lining up on the left, but he was playing as a center?] I think Carter and Kopitar take faceoffs, and so they line up on right wing. It’s never once Kopitar was a left winger. [Reporter: Because usually we see Carter on his strong side, the right side on the ice, and he was taking them on the left side. Was that because he was just having such good success at the faceoff dot?] It’s their call. It depends who they want, who they’re against. I mean, obviously they played a lot against Malkin last night, and they had trouble against Malkin. The one goal they scored, Malkin beat Kopi. So Kopi and Jeff are smart guys. One’s a righty, one’s a lefty. So it’s not like they’re fighting over who’s going to take it. They’re trying to decide who can win it.

Whether the team will have a day off soon:
The players have…the day after Chicago, and the coaches are going to do our whole Olympic training schedule that day. Obviously there’s a whole lot that goes into that because of what your roster can be, who you can have, so we have to get all that cleared up. We have to know that. And then depending on numbers, what we’re going to be able to work on that can help so you’re not just fooling around. But you can be constructive of both.

Whether the Olympians will have extra recovery days when they return:
You know, the only two other times…it was just Salt Lake and Vancouver, so it was easy. I was in San Jose, it was Salt Lake, so it was an hour, and then Vancouver to Calgary, so it was easy…That’s the other part of it. This is a salary cap era. You can’t give guys breaks, because then what are you going to do? That’s a fact. We’ve set it up as good as we can. Anybody who plays in the last two games, which means four teams, all the NHLers are coming back to Newark together on those planes, so there are four teams, or potentially four teams, depending on guys who stay in Europe. So say that’s 120 players there, so we’re going to bring our guys right from Newark.