Darryl Sutter practice quotes: Budaj fatigue? Zatkoff “reset”?

On Marian Gaborik:
We’ll talk to him I the morning. He thinks he’s ready to play. We’ll just make a decision on playing him. I’m not sure. [Reporter: Really? What’s holding you back?] He hasn’t played in nine weeks. It’s like Kopi was off for 12 days. First off, the player has to really tell you that he’s ready, and then the coaching staff has to think that way, too. [Reporter: But if you don’t get him in, isn’t it a few days before you play again? When do they play again?] [Reporters: Wednesday.] It doesn’t really have any bearing on when we play again.

On Anze Kopitar skating as a left wing in practice:
We can practice whichever way we want, we just don’t have to give information to the other team through you. We’ll just make it up as we go along. [Reporter: How did he look to you during the game?] Kopi? I think he got better as the game went on. We were able to use him a little bit more with those two sets of wingers, so that’s kind of how I see it until he gets right back on his game. [Reporter: Took a lot of draws, I think, after the first period.] Not really. He was only taking them on one side.

On whether he’s concerned about Peter Budaj and fatigue:
Well, the schedule the next three weeks doesn’t bother him. I was concerned on this last trip. He was supposed to have the whole Ottawa game off and didn’t. That cost us a game and cost him – when you give the guy who’s playing a lot a game off, my preference would be to not even be in the building, right? That hurt our team and it hurt Peter for a couple games, too, because he just couldn’t get refreshed. He had to go in at the end of the second. He’s tired at that time, too. It cost us a game. We lost two guys in that game. It’s a game you’re going to look back on and say that you need one guy to play 60 minutes and give yourself a chance. But as far as the fatigue part for him, he played a lot of games last year, so he should be wanting to play 100 in a row. [Reporter: Do you envision getting Zatkoff in on the back-to-back, maybe?] I haven’t even thought about it. I want Jeff to have some good practices. It’s like asking about Gabby or those guys coming back from injury. It’s the same thing. He’s got to be a hundred percent and say, ‘I am ready to win, to help you win,’ and we have to feel the same way. It hasn’t been easy for Jeff, because he comes from a Stanley Cup summer and goes to a new team knowing full well that you’re backing up a number-one guy, and then 20 minutes into the first game you’re seen as a starter and you don’t get off to the start you want, so he’s kind of got to reset and start over. He will. That’s how we’ve got to see it. But in terms of when he’s going to play, I don’t know. Our schedule, until we go on the next trip, in terms of game day ratio, it’s not an issue.

On the team’s “efficient” play, and what that means as a coach:
I think we’ve been really efficient. I think other than one period in Ottawa, which is related to what I just talked about, we’ve been really efficient. The league, Jimmy, is really close. It’s not a superstar league or what-everybody-says league. The league, teams are very, very close, and schedule and injuries have definitely impacted [us]. We’ve been as efficient as we can be. In fact, if we only play in Chicago twice this year, so if you’d just say we played them last week, well, we were really efficient. The only problem was we were coming off a one-nothing game in St. Louis and getting in in the middle of the night, and we were really efficient. We lost a defenseman in St. Louis and we lost Andreoff during the Chicago game, so everybody else was really efficient. [Reporter: Like Anaheim, too, right? Back-to-back-to-back?] Hey, it’s happened. You see it. Play summer tournaments, and pretty soon you start seeing the fallout around the league. It happens.

On his Thanksgiving:
I fed Marshall (Dickerson, Director of Team Operations). Fed and watered and gave him a little sleep, and I shipped him home.