On whether it’s “good to have [Kyle] Clifford back”:
“Everybody that’s on the ice is available. At some point it’ll be good to have him back.”
On whether anything specific was worked on, or whether it was a “standard practice”:
“It’s not ‘standard practice’ because you don’t have practice days…First off, even taking out the injured guys, if you can’t have everybody that’s healthy out there, then you can’t have a regular practice. It’s just like you filling in for me, and it doesn’t work because there are some things that you work on in practice that only can happen in a game if you’re used to play with that guy. So when you don’t have regular practices and you’re not able to recover after games because of injury and fatigue, then you can’t have regular practices. Today is the first really regular practice we’ve had since the second day after the first round and the first day after the season.”
On the reason behind flying back to Los Angeles between Games 3 and 4:
“Just our own practice facility. You know, what are we going to do up there for two days? Really? You know what, if we had all stayed up there for two days, we’d have been bored last night and today, right? Because you’re basically just sitting around the hotel and there’s nothing to do.”
On how much momentum can be gained from one game to the next:
“Zero. It’s something that different guys have asked all the time. There’s zero momentum. Once you get in the playoffs, there’s zero momentum unless somebody’s way better than somebody. And, as you see, nobody is. There’s zero momentum. I mean, if there’s a carry-over, then you’re probably not a playoff team in a ways.”
On the key to success on the road:
“We’ve won enough in a lot of different venues and a lot of different circumstances that I don’t think so. Quite honest, when you talk about ‘at home’ or ‘on the road’, it’s just about playoffs. Who cares what the record was any other time, quite honest? So it’s just about playoffs.”
On getting to Antti Niemi:
“Their defense blocks a lot of shots. We have lots of traffic there, but so do they. So there’s a lot of shots that don’t get [through], and I know again the stats are taken off somebody that’s sitting up there looking at it with his glasses, going ‘Oh, that was a shot. That was a shot.’ Really. They’re not really that close. I know you get it between periods and after the game, but when you actually do it, it’s not that close. It’s about bearing down on opportunities because you don’t get very many.”
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