April 4 postgame quotes: Colorado

Patrick Roy, on how the team played knowing they’d been eliminated from the playoffs:
Obviously we’re all disappointed. Obviously after the season that we had last year, we all wanted to make the playoffs. But at the same time, I have to say that I’m happy with the overall effort of our team. I think all year, so many times I’ve said to you guys, how resilient our players were. I think obviously the power play was one of the things, but the big reason to me is the injuries. Early in the season, we lost our goalie for 15 games and after that we lost depth players and they miss a lot of games and then at the end, we lost Johnson for 10 weeks, we lost MacKinnon for five weeks. Counting today and right now, we’re probably going to have a record year for the Avalanche with the number of injuries, just to show you how affected we’ve been by injuries.

Roy, on whether the 10 shots on goal was representative of the team’s effort:
It’s kind of funny because I was talking to the coaches and Landeskog took a shot on net, the goalie made the save, and then O’Reilly took a rebound and scored. You look at the stat sheet, Landeskog has no shots on net tonight. I guess every rink has their own way to count the number of shots. To me, it’s more of how many shots we gave to them – back-to-back games, they were waiting for us, they’re a desperate team. I thought we defended ourselves very well and that’s what I was looking [at] more tonight than the scoring chances. Duchene missed an open net early in the game and the game could’ve been… could’ve made a big difference. We had a few shots that we missed the net as well. I’m not making a big deal of the number of shots, if that makes sense.

Patrick Roy, on the five-game losing streak against Los Angeles:
The first game we played this year, we had over 40 shots. Their goalie was phenomenal. The second one… it’s a team that has a lot of depth. It’s a team that knows how to win and obviously they protect the puck very well. They spend a lot of time in our own zone and then we have to defend and obviously it’s tougher for us to generate a lot of offense. But they play well, they play well against us. I have to give them credit for that.

Matt Duchene, on the game:
I think that we played well in Anaheim. Obviously got a big win and tonight we were right there, it was one shot away. We did a lot of good things tonight and then obviously some things we’d like to clean up.

Duchene, on the amount of shots they generated:
We didn’t have a ton of shots, but we had a lot of chances that probably didn’t result in a shot on net. We were just forechecking hard and it’s a puck possession game against them. They’re a big, heavy team and they possess it lots in our end and we’ve got to try and do the same. I think in that game, obviously they had more shots than us but a lot of them are shots from the point, funnels and things like that. That game I feel like probably could’ve gone either way.

Ryan O’Reilly, on the loss:
You could tell they desperately needed those points. They’re fighting for their lives and for us, it’s frustrating to see that we’re out of the playoffs. But we thought we did come out with some good jump and we just made a couple errors that shifted the momentum quickly. If you can limit those big errors and simplify it at certain times in the game, it would’ve helped us out and given us a better chance tonight.