November 15 morning skate quotes: Darryl Sutter

On whether Anze Kopitar is improving:
Yeah, he’s better, but it’s still day-to-day and see improvement. Just kind of go from there. Hopefully every day we keep seeing improvement. [Reporter: Has he been skating?] No. Prefer that he not just to let it quiet down. Hopefully he’ll skate tomorrow.

On whether the streakiness is a “good barometer” of the team’s play:
Not really. I think we’ve had a lot of different lineups, that’s for sure, a lot of different situations in terms of schedule, a lot of different goaltending situations. I think that early losses, you can nail it right to that, the first three to the goaltending. We won games in overtimes, could’ve done that on this [trip], so if you look at this streak, we’ve played really well this whole trip.

On whether Peter Budaj has played well:
Yeah, he’s been solid. I’m kind of tired of talking about it, quite honest. We need him to win games, so it’s sort of what [Reporter] is saying now. He hasn’t played well enough for us to steal us a game in the last three or four now. There’s always points in the season where goalies do win you games by themselves. It was funny watching Colorado’s last game against Boston how well Varlamov played. I think that could’ve been a game where he stole a game as well as he played, but that’s also where every team goes though it where you say, ‘hey, the goalie stole us one.’ We haven’t said that, yet. I’m really not talking about goaltenders anymore.

On the power play:
It’s funny – our power play, hey, you obviously want it to produce – but even going over to the last game, they’ve got to score that goal. I mean, if you look at Ottawa, the difference in the game was Kopi has a great chance on the power play and hits low-blocker on Anderson. Last game, four-on-threes, all the guys you want to have the puck on their stick have great chances. I guess it’s a little bit of part of the challenge when you don’t have a lot of the goal scoring, so then it’s a little bit more pressure on the power play to score, there is. I kind of go the other way with ‘em, I just want them to keep getting good chances and give us momentum, and it’s done that during games for us.

On the expectations when Tanner Pearson, Jeff Carter and Tyler Toffoli play together:
It’s either King or Tanner. Ty and Jeff play together. The expectation is to give us good even strength minutes. I don’t care who the hell plays with Jeff. I mean, our wingers, they’ve been relatively quiet, Tanner and Tyler.