February 3 morning skate quotes: Darryl Sutter

On how the team will prepare for Alex Ovechkin:
He’s a pretty good hockey player. I know we’ll try and get certain players on the ice when he’s on the ice, and on the road when you don’t have the match-up, everybody has to be aware of him. Their team, it’s not just about Ovechkin now. I think their team is a big forward group that plays a pretty solid team game.

On how to pay attention to a power play with both Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom:
Well, there’s one extra player on the ice.

On what more needs to come from Anze Kopitar, Marian Gaborik and Dustin Brown:
Maybe they’ve all played as well as they can. [Reporter: Do you really think so?] I mean, we’re 50 games in. Maybe they have. Maybe they are. [Reporter: Is that an indictment on them, then?] No. Again, you guys, it’s always the same thing. You guys want the coach to criticize a player, and then you say that the coach criticized a player. You know who should do it? You should. [Reporter: I’m not criticizing.] [Reporter: We’re just asking you to evaluate.] They’ve been really good at home, and they haven’t been very good on the road. [Reporter: Is that a match-up thing?] Maybe it’s a depth thing. [Reporter: Makes sense.] Shouldn’t isolate, I don’t think, when you think about it.

On whether there is a sense of urgency when looking at the standings:
We’re playing Washington tonight. We’re not playing anybody that’s behind us or ahead of us in our standings. We’re playing the Washington Capitals, so we’ll deal with that. That’s how you have success over and over and over, is you don’t let anything from the outside interfere with what you’re trying to, and if you do that well enough, you win more than you lose, and that’s kind of what we’ve done.

On how Washington has evolved under Barry Trotz:
Well, they’ve made a lot of personnel changes, haven’t they? So if you know those players, then you say how that affects your team.