January 27 morning skate quotes: Darryl Sutter

On the power play running hot and providing another big goal:
The power play’s been really good all year, if you look at it. ‘Hot and cold’ – ours has not been hot and cold. Ours has been very consistent. If you go two games without scoring, then that’s not hot or cold. Maybe you got good chances and didn’t score. Our power play’s been really good.

On a “special” win against San Jose:
Every win’s important. Doesn’t matter to me which one it is. I’d prefer to win every one. That’s not any different than the night before in Arizona. Lose 3-2, win 3-2.

On Jake Muzzin’s play and his 12 shot attempts from Sunday night:
On net. That’s the key. Shots. Cut off attempts. Some of the games lately, our attempts and blocks are more than our on [-net]. One goal. So cut it off, shots and attempts. Shots. [Reporter: If I can ask about Jake specifically too, one of his efforts that he wanted to work on going into the season was getting more shots through, now almost 50 games through, have you been happy?] I think his game lately has gotten better again. I think there was a spot there after Chrsitmas, during the December-January thing where he wasn’t as sharp as he would’ve liked to have been, and I think lately he’s been better again.

On whether he foresaw Brayden McNabb being a 20-minute player this season:
Well, we’re a really young defense. Other than bringing a new player in and Ehrhoff, who hasn’t played the minutes that maybe we’d expected, Marty’s our older defenseman. Hey, you need the depth of it. So what’s the difference between 16 and 20? Two kills, if you’re good on the kill? So if you think about it, it’s not that. It’s your even strength minutes. You don’t have specialists now where ‘oh, this guy’s really good [on the] power play, but he’s not good five-on-five,’ or ‘this guy can play the power play, he can’t kill penalties.’ It gives you two or three more minutes. You need over the course of the season, when your schedule jams up or you get into a game where there’s a lot of special teams, then you need guys who can play a lot of minutes. … If every defenseman wants to go from being a 12-miunte guy to a 15-minute guy to a 20-minute guy, that’s how they progress, and if they don’t take those steps and they don’t do it consistently –it doesn’t matter if you play 20 minutes on bad team – then you’re not given quality. There’s a separation there. [Reporter: When a guy plays with Drew, obviously there’s a lot of good things about that, what are the challenges of playing with a guy like that? You’re playing against the top players-] Not many. Not many challenges. He should feel privileged and he should take advantage and he should feel challenged. Since we’ve gotten Schenn, then our partners through the game have changed a lot. I think Muzz has played a lot with Drew, and hey, our team is going to get better by the competition within. Guys’ minutes go down, it’s based on two things – performance and competition.

Rules for Blog Commenting

  • No profanity, slurs or other offensive language. Replacing letters with symbols does not turn expletives into non-expletives.
  • Personal attacks against other blog commenters, and/or blatant attempts to antagonize other comments, are not tolerated. Respectful disagreement is encouraged. Posts that continually express the same singular opinion will be deleted.
  • Comments that incite political, religious or similar debates will be deleted.
  • Please do not discuss, or post links to websites that illegally stream NHL games.
  • Posting under multiple user names is not allowed. Do not type in all caps. All violations are subject to comment deletion and/or banning of commenters, per the discretion of the blog administrator.

Repeated violations of the blog rules will result in site bans, commensurate with the nature and number of offenses.

Please flag any comments that violate the site rules for moderation. For immediate problems regarding problematic posts, please email zdooley@lakings.com.