October 18 postgame quotes: montreal

Claude Julien, on the team’s third period breakdown:
Unnecessary risks. Simple as that.

Julien, on whether the third period breakdown was a result of desperation:
I don’t know, but I don’t accept that and when you’re in a hockey game like you are after two periods. You’ve got to be smart. You’ve got to make the right decisions and we didn’t do that. You know, there’s accountability that comes with that and we’ve got to be a lot better, a lot smarter, in those situations if we’re going to turn this around and win some hockey games. And the risks that we took were unacceptable.

Julien, on the team’s first line:
Well,I think right now I can tell you I was pleased with De La Rose’s line and Danault’s line and they gave us a lot more tonight. We needed four lines in order to survive this game—a big team and us playing last night—so we tried to balance things out a little bit and make sure every line brought something and for two periods they did. But obviously the end kind of tarnished that.

Julien, on Montoya’s performance:
Monty definitely deserved better. He was good, solid for us tonight. Gave us a chance to win this game and unfortunately those mistakes in the third period took away what should’ve been a win for him.

Julien, on Max Pacioretty’s start to the season:
Well, I think you’ll have to talk to Max about that stuff. Obviously, he’s frustrated and we know he can help us out. And right now, we know he’s off to a slow start. From what I’m told he had a slow start last year too. So he’s just got to stick with it and stay positive and work his way out of it. Working his way out of it is probably the most important word. You can’t wait and expect it’s going to happen. You’ve got to make it happen by competing hard and having the right mindset and working through it.

Jordie Benn, on what went wrong in the game:
It’s just a tough time I guess. We’ve got to just put the old hard hat on and get out of this storm.

Benn, on “manageable mistakes”:
It’s just minor little things, right now. So once we get rid of those, it was 1-1 for a while. I thought we were playing pretty good back-and-forth hockey.

Benn, on what led to the Kings’ two-on-one goal:
You obviously want to be a part of that goal that gives you the advantage, but sometimes it goes the other way and it did tonight.

Thomas Plekanec, on the team’s start to the season:
Seems like we are able to play good games for 20-30 minutes and then we have a breakdown where its costing us the game. We’ve got to find a way to win those.

Plekanec, on the team’s psyche:
Well like I said, we’re always ready to play. It seems like we always have a good start and we’re outplaying the teams, but we’re not able to keep it up for 60 minutes. And if we’re going to find a way to do it then the wins will start coming in.

Plekanec, on Al Montoya:
He played great for us. He was great tonight and he definitely deserved better from all of us.

Plekanec, on the last time he remembers the team going through a situation like this:
I don’t know, there’s been a lot of times where we had a good start, we had some average starts, but we couldn’t find a way.

Plekanec, on the team’s lack of offense:
I don’t know. I mean we’re having chances. We’ve just got to better. We’ve just got to find a way to score goals. It’s not like we’re not creating anything. We have those chances, we have those A-chances. We had a couple of breakaways. We had some quality scoring chances and we didn’t bury those and it seems like team are scoring so easy on us that we’re giving them the games.

Al Montoya, on the game’s outcome:
That’s my job, the other guys played last night and you come in here expecting to win. This is tough right now, you’re in the game the whole game until the last ten minutes and you get blown out like that. This is a tough one to swallow.

Montoya, on whether the score wasn’t an accurate reflection of the team’s effort:
Sure, but that doesn’t matter. I mean at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter-it’s a loss. It’s a loss in the column.

Montoya, on what happened in the game:
Some sort of let down. At some point you’ve got to find a way to come together and we hung in there. We hung in there. We fought hard. They’re a good team. But it’s going the full 60.

Montoya, on how he felt, personally:
I felt good.