April 30 morning skate quotes: Darryl Sutter

On whether Keaton Ellerby will replace Matt Greene in the lineup:
“We’ll have an extra forward and an extra defenseman in warm-up.”

On officiating supervisor Rob Shick meeting with both coaches, and his message to Shick:
“Well, both teams play similar styles. Both teams are pretty much five-on-five teams. You look at it, and we’re both low penalty killing teams, in terms of minutes. I don’t think there’s a whole lot that goes on after the whistle in the playoffs, unless you’re planning on going out early. There’s tendencies of teams in terms of net-front guys and things like that, but really there’s not much. The message is really from the league, always, more than from teams. I think as the series go along, there’s things that happen that you want to address or try to, but there’s not a whole lot between us, between the teams, that causes a problem.”

On what has impressed him the most about St. Louis since the additions of Jay Bouwmeester and Jordan Leopold:
“Well, obviously Bow brings a level of settle-everything-down, and he’s going to play a lot of minutes. You put him with number 27 on their team, and that’s a pair that can play together in a lot of situations. So that’s the biggest difference. So obviously, he’s a guy who plays every game and plays a lot. You’re not going to play him out.”

On knowing both Bouwmeester and Leopold well, and how St. Louis is a different team than the last time they faced Los Angeles:
“I think I just said – Bouwmeester adds a left-handed defenseman who moves the puck and plays in a lot of situations. He’s a good player. You’ve seen it more than I have. We watch him and hear everybody raving about him. He’s a good player.”

On how to keep players from their “natural tendency” of trying to “repeat what they did last year” and not accept a new, unique challenge:
“You know, the experience of being there…of not just winning, but playing a lot of games in playoffs helped our players tremendously, and you know that from talking to the young guys that haven’t played playoff games or have never won a series. Ttat’s what helped them most. So how did they use that, or how did they channel that in the right way is knowing that they don’t look too far ahead. They’ve seen that during the regular season. That was the best part about our hockey club the whole year, was not ever getting ahead of themselves and handling all the attention the way they did. It doesn’t [bother] them now, either. That doesn’t result in being able to predict wins or losses, but it’s certainly does not affect the way they play. They’re not going to look ahead. That’s why they’re a good club.”

On whether there’s any benefit of opening a playoff series on the road:
“I’m not sure…Because of the condensing of the [playoff] schedule this year, we start right away. Obviously we’d have preferred to have been playing on Wednesday or Thursday or something like that and not having to travel, but we fell short of that. Last year if you look at it, there was lots made out of the gaps between series, basically because the series were shorter. But if you look at it, in the first round last year, we played one game in five days between games three and five. I think one game in six days in the second round against St. Louis was the same thing. There was like one game in five days. I’m not sure of the benefit of it. I just know that the first four games are in six days in this one, and that’s tough when you’ve got some travel and you get to play at 8:30 at night. When you just look at that alone between the second game and the first home game for us at home, if there’s overtime tomorrow night, you can see how your travel’s going to be. Playoffs are also about your top players playing a lot of minutes, so how’s it going to affect those guys?”