Lombardi: “I never doubted that they cared”

Picking up the conversation from yesterday, Dean Lombardi noted while speaking with reporters that “the beauty of this, other than, the trash can thing, the players were never pointing fingers at each other. They clearly care. I’ve got no problem with that.”

He continued by making it clear that the players never had any internal issues working with each other, and differentiated between mid-season games where perhaps the team’s heads weren’t in the right place, and games in which the team simply ran out of gas later in the year once “we got our head together.”

“We’re not going to be able to bring everybody back, but, boy, a lot of those guys, some of those guys who ain’t going to be able to come back will never forget that they have left something here that is invaluable,” Lombardi said. “Not once did a player bitch about it, disguise it and said ‘did you see that crap? It’s his fault. He’s not scoring and this ice time.’ And I think that’s probably one of the most frustrating things for them. We talked about it during the year, the flicking the switch and everything else, deep down we all knew that they weren’t working like they needed to work and because that’s the way we work, right? We work, we’re a damned good team. We don’t, [we] become very average in a hurry. I think that they were as frustrated about this whole thing as we were. Like I said, I think the key is for them to learn from it now, but I never doubted that they cared. I think they were as frustrated as we all were. And why we couldn’t get that car revved up, and I think they did eventually. And then I think they ran out of gas. But in terms of those things about loyalty and commitment to each other, I think they are just awesome. You start getting into those intangibles and those spiritual things, I could go on forever and they don’t translate into tweets. But what they have there are those things you can’t define. It’s a feel thing. We all felt it during the year.”

“How many times did I say to Blake over here in a play or in a game ‘I’m not feeling it?’ Edmonton, I knew we were in trouble. We were in trouble after we ran the table in New York. But it was a different type of trouble. I worried about our gas tank. Early in the year you’re pulling your hair out, like going into Buffalo and laying those stinkers. The Florida game, that wasn’t gas. That was our head wasn’t right. We got our head together, I think we ran out of gas. But there is a whole litany of things, like I said. Somehow we’ve got to find a way. Going back to your original point, because they care so much in their loyalty to each other, we can fix this and become stronger. If I didn’t have that, then we’d probably cave because they’d take the easy way, and ‘screw it.’ But I really think they can, as long as they go like this, too.”

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