December 8 morning skate quotes: Darryl Sutter

On Carolina’s under-recognized defense and team play:
I think – when you guys asked about that yesterday – if they played out here they wouldn’t be. It’s like [asking them about our younger players], same thing. [If] you don’t watch them enough, you don’t know. Just do last night, how dynamic their defense is, and Faulk had 11 shot attempts, and Pesce has a bunch of shot attempts and the speed of them, it’s significant. It’s a reason that their team has made a big jump in terms of their whole [performance]. There’s a lot of things they have going for them, if you look at it, in terms of possession and checking and all those things. For the data that matters, they’re a very good hockey club. [Reporter: How similar are they to the Kings? Because they’re also a high-shot volume team that seems to have pretty good structure.] We have three guys that take a lot of shots because they have really good shots, and I’m sure they feel the same way, too.

On having a positionally-sound defense, and whether it signals a change in philosophy:
We’ve had players that are really good at that, a guy like Willie Mitchell, who’s an angle-stick guy. Angle, stick, get the puck back, and that’s when we talk about a physical game, It’s gotten way out of line. It’s not ‘this big, physical team,’ everybody’s saying that, but the key is the angles part of it, the stick part of it, the separation part of it, the getting-the-puck-back part of it. Even with our defense, where Marty’s evolved into that type of player. I mean, you’re trying to get Muzz to be more of that type of player, so consistently where Drew does it, most of the time where you’re trying to get Forbort and Gravel to not get off their angles and make sure that they’re making contact and they have a strong stick. It’s not necessarily ‘making contact,’ but it’s in that part of it.

On whether Andy Andreoff is “ready” to play:
He’ll be ready when we need him. I’m not putting guys in for no reason. We’ve got Devin and Andy, who are two different types of players, one’s a left winger and one’s a right winger. One’s if we need to take a left winger out, and then it’s if you need to take a right winger out.