May 8 morning skate quotes: Darryl Sutter

On Kings players believing they can play better:
Generally, the farther that you go, if you make the playoffs, and generally if you can continue to play, generally players think they can play better.

On Jarret Stoll advocating for a more physical game from the Kings:
That’s the way Jarret plays, so he’s always looking for that. He wants the physical game, and both teams play that way, but that’s not something that’s part of your game plan ‘We’re going to be more physical.’ You’re trying to stay out of the penalty box and be in good position and check. That’s what you’re trying to do.

On how to gain an edge when both teams know each other well and are well prepared:
I think you can help guys individually more than X and O. If you’re making dramatic changes in X and O’s, you’re just moving pylons around, and you know that’s not the way that hockey’s played. But you can help guys individually. Sometimes they’re so in to the compete part of it, and the next shift part of it, but I think you can help guys – it doesn’t matter where they fit in – but you can help guys, give them a little tip, or relax, or that sort of thing, for sure. You know what? At the end of the day, they’re all people. Sometime they get so locked into one thing they forget about something else. If you can just give them one thing, sometimes it frees ‘em up or opens it up there a little bit.

On whether line matching is like a “heated chess match”:
Not really at all. If you just did it, if you actually break it down, it hasn’t been much of a match-up. I know the way it works. You go, ‘Well, the opening faceoff, Getzlaf against Kopitar.’ But if you watch it, if you actually watch it, as the game goes on, other than the official time outs, most of the game is played on the fly. So it’s more of that. You’ll see end of shifts it’s very seldom the same guys on the ice against actually who started the shift, and that’s another part of playoff hockey.

On the benefit of having spread around the ice time in Game 2:
Well, it’s something we talked about before the series started. Just the way the games are set up, and if you remember with overtime, overtime adds a lot onto games. Usually the longer overtime games go, the top guys’ minutes goes up, which usually affects the next game. So you just have to be able to get rid of the overtime part of it whether you win or lose and then sort of reset, ‘and this is what we’ve got to do tonight.’ Quite honest, I’ve said it the two games we played in this series. The overtime game we won, we were very fortunate because we couldn’t use everybody that game. That put too much on some guys for Game 2. It’s not a great tactical decision we made. It was based on the energy level that some of our guys had for Game 2.