March 13 media availability: Sutter on managing workloads

On the approach to non-recovery days in which the team does not take the ice:
Going over lots of last night’s game, obviously. Lots of treatments, guys doing their off-ice stuff. It’s not necessarily that they have to skate to get exercise. There are guys who don’t play many minutes who need to make sure they maintain their conditioning, and there’s guys who aren’t playing at all that need to, and there’s guys who need to basically refuel.

On the tight playoff races:
It’s a playoff race. It’s not anything that’s old, new, different. It’s not ‘time of year.’ It’s the way it’s supposed to be. Anybody who watches the game frequently or has a good knowledge of the game understands how close the games are and understands how close the teams are.

On whether a six-way tie for the Presidents’ Trophy is representative of league parity:
Yeah. I mean, there’s always a couple teams that sort of fight for that flag annually. At the end it really has little bearing on anything other than if that team gets to play a Game 7 in their own building, otherwise it’s not really that important. [Reporter: You proved that wasn’t all that important anyway last year.] Well, home ice is important. Less travel is better. That always should be your second goal. Your first one should be be a playoff team, and then that should try and be the next one. You have to do anything incrementally in this league. You can’t let too much from the outside affect or bother you knowing full well that the most important parts of being a good team or being a playoff team are injuries, scheduling, officiating, things like that.

On the comparison between the grind of regular season and playoff schedules:
I think everybody’s schedule in the regular season, you are playing, as you said – like a five in eight or whatever that is – or back-to-backs in there somewhere, and if you did that just based on a…playoff series, that’s what it would be. It would be the very same. Just when you get out of division or out of conference, then there’s more travel. Other than that, there’s not much difference. When you think about it, our team’s played into the summer the last three years, so what that affects is – when’s the schedule over, April 11th? – there’s a big difference between being done April 11th and June 20th in terms of the athlete being able to recover for the following season. I think that would be the biggest thing to explain or for people to understand. I think if you look at just our season this year, our first quarter, if you did it just by quarters or game, our first quarter is outstanding, and our second quarter kept us in the playoff spot, and our couple weeks in January have put us into a real fight, and into our third quarter and the start of the fourth one is outstanding again.

On whether he has changed his approach to managing the team’s workload:
I think we’ve done it different every year. Obviously the first year a lot of us hadn’t been to a training camp together, that first Cup team, and a lot of the players who were on that first Cup that weren’t on the conference finals team – there’s four different teams. So what you handle different is you handle individuals different. Then you handle how we dealt with training camp this last year, and we did handle it really well as players and as a staff, and I just think that when we hit a little rough spot this year, it was not anything to do with ‘want’ or ‘desire’ or ‘need’ or any of that. I think we had some guys hit a wall from the last three years, and in the last six weeks those same guys have played really well for us. Handling it different would be the fact that the handful of guys who have been through three great playoff runs here, you trust ‘em.