Murray postgame quotes

Terry Murray’s postgame thoughts…

(on the game…)
MURRAY: “That was a good game. That was a good performance by everybody tonight. There was a lot of compete, a lot of skating. We’re thinking the game out there, and the support, the communication on the ice was as good as it’s been all year. And that’s against a very good hockey club. That is, in fact, the best team in the National Hockey League in the third period. Their plus-minus is by far the best and you can see why, because they just stay with it. They play the game hard. They have skill, they get the puck going north with a lot of speed. But we checked, we were very responsible without the puck tonight and our goaltender was outstanding.”

(on Quick perhaps not getting rewarded with wins of late…)
MURRAY: “That’s kind of the way the business is right now. Sometimes you can play well and you can lose, and he’s not going to get rewarded. Unfortunately, we all look at the wins and losses with play. There’s been games where Quicker, we wish he was better and had a few back at the end of the day, but tonight he had his `A’ game. He was on the puck. He had some huge stops, at times, in the second period. There was one where he kind of got lost there. He got stuck on the far side of the ice on their one power play, with Chara with the one-timer, but we got a break with him missing the net on it. But outside of that, he was very aggressive. His attitude was to challenge and stay on top of the puck. It has an incredible effect on your bench. The players, everything is alive, everything is energized because of what’s happening in your goal.”

(on scoring the early power-play goal…)
MURRAY: “It really helps against a team that’s a good hockey club like that. They’ve got the number-one goaltender, save percentage and goals-against average, in the league. If you can get one in early on them it’s very important. It’s important for your team, it puts more pressure on them obviously, and Smytty was right there for that shot attitude. The rebounds are there, and he’s in the right place at the right time.”

(on being in “playoff mode” now…)
MURRAY: “You’ve got to bring your `A’ game all the time. That’s the way it’s been. We’ve known about this. We’ve talked about this, going back through well before Christmas, how important every game is and to do things right, to make sure that you’re coming to practice and getting yourself ready for the next game. We just hit a tough time. We hope we’ve climbed out of some of the issues we were dealing with and that we can keep it going. I really like our last two efforts in the early parts of games, the first period in particular at Phoenix, now here again tonight.  We just have to keep building on it.”

(on Loktionov’s play…)
MURRAY: “Loktionov is a very intelligent player. That’s why he is there, to play with Kopitar and hopefully generate some offense, make some plays. He has a great deal of composure with the puck. Then we see the chemistry happening with that second goal tonight. Kopitar makes a strong play, carrying the puck. I think it was from high in our D zone, right through the ice, and Loktionov is off the back door.”

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