October 13 morning skate quotes: Darryl Sutter

On his impressions of the Vancouver Canucks:
They made good additions to their team, young guys. Some more speed on their speed – that’s something that jumps out at you. The speed and skill they’ve had, for sure, on the back end, and obviously up front with Brandon, and Horvat being a year older. Who was their first round pick? … [Reporter: McCann?] McCann. Yeah. Hey, it’s the way teams are trying to play. Be a faster team, and they’re certainly doing that.

On how to counter fast teams:
Well, the best way to be a fast team is moving the puck. There’s not much difference in anybody’s speed now, if everybody went on the ice and skated – how fast they are. There’s not much difference. The key is how your back end moves the puck. It’s really important. That’s the speed of the game now.

On whether the Pacific Division is “tougher”:
We’ll see as we go along. I mean, we don’t know two games in. There’s still a lot that goes into that, in terms of injuries and the performance of top players, things like that. The division – I don’t know what you mean by ‘tougher.’ [Reporter: Well, San Jose thinks they’ve improved. Calgary’s a year older, Edmonton’s got McDavid-] Well, it should be more even, right? I don’t think it’s ‘tougher.’ Basically what happens is it gets more even. Put it this way – we didn’t make the playoffs last year, and we were in the middle of the pack of the league. So, is that based on the division? The division’s still really unbalanced. They do seven teams, there are five games, it doesn’t make sense. You get two home, three away.

On whether he believed in the theory that the Kings hit the wall last year after playing so much hockey and needed to have a proper summer for training:
Yeah, we’ve talked about that, and it’s true. I clearly saw it last year when I was coaching. You clearly saw it. It has nothing to do with how we played. I think the team last year had a really good start – if you look at it, it’s late December and January when the drop was, and they came back again. But there was a point there where there was a big drop. You can’t apply that to this year at all because it’s quite a bit different team. If you’re looking at defense and down the middle, it’s quite a bit different. You can’t take anything from last year now and apply it to this season. What you apply now is the personnel changes of how we played, and then how your star players played last year, and how they’re playing this year. [Rerporter: Did you notice any difference in freshness or intensity or motivation or anything with the group that came in to training camp this year?] Well, the big theme was that we were going to be a better-trained team. Well, if you have more time off, you should be a better-trained team. That makes perfect sense when you think about, so we were a better trained team. We hadn’t done much of it, so we were a better-trained team, we had a really good camp, and hopefully we can have a good season.

On Christian Ehrhoff’s play:
I think he’s got to get up to the pace of the game. That’s going to be the key. I think his skill set and his skating are clearly still at a high level, but the pace of the game has changed in the last two or three years, too. You have to be able to push that into your own game.

On whether he’s happy to see Brandon Sutter on a Western Conference team:
It’s good to see him. I’m happy for him. I mean, he’s from out west. Vancouver’s closer for him. I know he’s a good player, and he’s in our division. I’m not too worry about what his last name is. We can talk about that in five years or 10 years or in July and August. I think our key is to try and outplay him. [Reporter: Did you talk to him after the trade about coming out west?] Yep. [Reporter: Did you ever foresee him as a winger?] … He’s played wing before, yeah, and if you look where he lines up, it’s not where he ends up a lot. [Reporter: It’s not bad guys to play with, either.] Yeah, Brandon’s a good player. He was always, always at the top of his age group wherever he played. Didn’t matter. Always, if you look at it. As a 16-year-old, as a 17, 18, always in Canada, he was always at the elite part of the [game]. He’ll thrive in Vancouver. Because of the players, where he was slotted, if you look at it, he’ll thrive. … [Reporter: You know what it’s like, the Canadian market. You don’t think that’s going to be an issue for him, just that constant glare and questions and everywhere you go on the street-] Hey, man, we’ve been doing this for 45 years. We should be fortunate they’ve still got some of them [Ed: so many?] in the game.