January 27 morning skate quotes: Darryl Sutter

On how he has changed as a coach since his time in San Jose:
They’re different teams. San Jose, when we first came here, you know – that was an older team that was sort of waiting for the draft picks, right? They were waiting for Marco and Patty and Stewie and Scottie. It changes. It changed then. It changes with every team that you coach based on personnel and the individual. [Reporter: Does your method change? Your message to how you have to play in order to be successful?] No, you have to play the right way. There is a reason. [Reporter: Do you change how you deliver the message, depending on the group you’ve got?] I don’t know. That’s not something I really talk about…It’s not that big a deal. It’s not about the coach being the center of attention. When it is, usually that’s the coach’s fault.

On whether he has seen signs that the team is “coming out of it”:
We’ve played well. I mean, jeez, we’re just coming off a game in where any time you can get past the teens in terms of good scoring chances, and you can limit the other team to not being in the teens, you probably are more deserving of results. The approach for us – it’s really eight road games in a row, because all we did was come home and play not in our building again. So this is seven of eight road games, and if we just continue to play our game, then we’re going to win.

On whether the schedule seems more compressed than last year’s schedule:
Our schedule – we didn’t start on time, and we finish early. We started two days after the season began, and we finish two days before, meaning February 6. So they’re going to jam more in. I think if you look at the compression of the schedule between now and the Olympic Break, and then after – I mean, after really has no bearing on anything because there’s nobody in the game that knows how anybody’s going to play after the Olympic Break because nobody’s ever gone to Sochi, Russia and come back. So, when you think about it, from a coaches and players standpoint, our goal was to try and be in a playoff spot at the Olympic Break. So hopefully we can do that.

On whether he can “coach scoring”:
A lot of it’s based on your top guys. You know what? As long as you have that great work ethic out of your top players, and your top players are also your top offensive players. They lead you in that way. You trust that they’re going to score, which they’ve historically done. And you look, for example, at a guy like Kopitar, who in the last game we played pretty much was a dominant player. Instead of seeing it there, I wish I could’ve turned it on and watched some of the highlights, because that’s how good he was…

On how he views the final six games before the Olympic Break:
Just what we talked about. We’re into Game 7 and 8 of it, and then we’ll deal with it. We don’t really get a break when we come back again and play every other day until we play Pittsburgh and Philly. And we do that within a 36-hour thing because of an afternoon game. So that answers that, doesn’t it? The schedule is jammed. If I have anything about looking back or looking forward, the tough part of the last game we played was that our team was clearly tired, which you wouldn’t think in a spectacle like that that we should be in that position, and the other team wasn’t.