Murray postgame quotes

Terry Murray’s postgame thoughts…

(on the recent lack of scoring…)
MURRAY: “Scoring’s not there. There were good flurries at the end, in the last seven or eight minutes of the third period, which gives you an opportunity. But the consistency of that kind of an attitude needs to be there. It’s not. It says on the sheet I saw, at the end of the second period we had three shots on goal. I don’t agree with that. I thought we had a couple of real good opportunities there. There were more than three shots on net. But the bottom line is, we’re not getting enough on a consistent basis to give ourselves an opportunity to find those second and third opportunities, or we’re getting shots and the traffic’s not there. Scoring is something, we’ve got to make it happen, we have to pay a price in order to score sometimes.”

(on falling out of the top eight in the West…)
MURRAY: “If it changed in one game, going out, I guess it can change the other way pretty quickly too, with one more game. That’s the way it is, whenever you don’t win games.”

(on Chicago’s first goal…)
MURRAY: “That is bad luck. That is unbelievable. That’s a 2-on-1 for us. It hits the shaft of (Jack Johnson’s) stick. If the pass goes to our player, that defenseman is sliding, he’s below the goal line and it’s a tap-in goal. Jack comes in and looks for the shot, and unfortunately it gets blocked and they have a 2-on-1 going the other way. So it’s not deflating. It was a lucky break, and those are things you just have to absorb. I didn’t think that we let up in our play after that particular goal, but we didn’t elevate it high enough, either, to say, `Let’s really move on and get something going the other way.”’

(on the new first line’s performance…)
MURRAY: “Well, Brownie was OK. He was fine on the left side. He’s experienced enough, and his played enough on the left wing, that he can deal with it, and did a pretty good job. The line, we need more from the line. We’re talking about scoring, and that’s one of the lines we look to for the offensive part of the game. Why I had a good feeling, about putting Simmer on the line and putting Brownie over on the left side, was because they had been doing a pretty good job with puck possession and cycling, and I was hoping they were going to create a lot more in the game tonight than what they did. That’s one of the lines that has to get turned around for us.”

(on whether he has been taken off-guard by this slump…)
MURRAY: “You don’t want to believe it. Anything can happen in the game. We’ve lost game, but you look back over the road trip and there were games that we played very well. We go into Buffalo and we outplay them there. We had some bad things happen. In Ottawa, we outshoot them 30-19 and we lose the game. We tie the game late and lose it on a goal that’s disallowed. So it’s not as if you’re losing games 5-0 and you have nothing to rally around. We played pretty well on the road trip. I didn’t like our game overall here tonight. I thought we were sporadic. There were times in the game when we were really good, but it’s a 60-minute game, and you’ve got to play good against the defending champions.”

(on needing more of a shot mentality…)
MURRAY: “Well, that’s the attitude we all have to have. We need to get more pucks to the net. We’re not a high shot team. We’ve got to generate more chances just through that shot mentality from everybody. In particular our top players, [and] our back needs to get more pucks to the net on the power play. That needs to start to come through for us. We had opportunities again tonight at critical times to take advantage of and get us back into a tie game, and we’re missing those opportunities.”