Practice makes perfect?

Lots of interesting stuff today on the goalies, with Terry Murray saying that Jonathan Quick will start tomorrow against Atlanta after sitting in favor of Erik Ersberg last night. This is obviously a big season for Quick, being named the starter and now going through a bump in the road. I do think he has struggled of late, but throughout, he has been honest and good to deal with. I talked to him today about the work he has done with goalie coach Bill Ranford over the past couple days. Also, there are comments from Murray about Quick’s game. To me, the most interesting part was Murray’s reference to Quick working on stopping high shots. I also talked to Ranford, and I’ll be posting his thoughts shortly…

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Question: Anything in particular that you’ve been working with Bill on?

QUICK: “All the little stuff. Just being detailed and doing the little things well. It makes my job easier.”

Question: Terry has talked about the importance of practice for goalies. Do you think it helped you to get a couple long practices this week?

QUICK: “It does. Obviously when you’re playing games every other night, you get into a rhythm, which is good, but there are little things, details, that you might lose sight of. When you get a couple days of practice to work on things, it slows the game down a little bit for you and makes it a little bit easier.”

Question: Sitting out a game probably isn’t something you enjoy. Is there any part that helps? Getting a little mental break?

QUICK: “Absolutely. It is good, from time to time, to get a mental break, and physically too. You’re still getting ready for the game, but it’s not as intense as if you were playing in the game. Obviously if anything happens, you’re in the game at the drop of a hat, so you have to be ready for that and you’re not taking the day off, but you’re not trying to get as amped up as if you were playing.”

Question: I imagine, though, that it probably makes you want to get right back out there…

QUICK: “You see the boys battle in front of you, and there’s a sense of helplessness because you want to be out there. You want to be helping them and you want to be battling with them, but you encourage them on the bench and you try to stay in the game and help out as much as you can, even though you’re not in the game. But yeah, you do get a sense of, you want to get back out there.”

Here’s what Murray said Quick’s work with Ranford…

MURRAY: “It’s more of a focus on some urgency on his game, being real quick to the shooter. There were some drills that he was doing on pass-outs from below the goal line, and being right on top of it right away. Being bigger. Billy and I spoke about this. As the player is attacking him on any of the shooting drills, I found that he was really getting small, getting bent over. I couldn’t even see the crest on his sweater in the early part of yesterday’s practice.

“Again, Billy talks about that and puts a couple drills in place where now he’s more upright, he’s bigger and his skill is able to take over in a lot of those situations, because of his ability to react to the low shots. He’s tremendous in that area, but we felt that by him getting so bent over and crouching into a smaller physical condition, it opened up the top, and he worked on that part of it especially.”

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