Murray stands by call to start Bernier

After today’s morning skate, Terry Murray was asked about the decision to start Jonathan Bernier and whether, in part, he liked the fact that his backup goalie would be tested early in the season. Murray never quite got around to answering that part of the question, but he did offer a spirited defense of his decision to start Bernier over Jonathan Quick, whose streak of three shutouts will be put on hold tonight as he watches Bernier start.

MURRAY: “He’s got to play. Quick can’t play 82 games. We’ve got 17 games here in front of us until the end of the month (of November). Fifteen are conference games. So what do you do? Am I going to wait until December, when we have five Eastern Conference games, and get him in then? He’s got to play. He’s a good goalie and he played great for us in the second half of the year last year. We’ve got a lot of big games right in front of us now, so it’s time to start putting him into some games. The decision was made Saturday morning. It’s not like it was after Quick’s third shutout. It was before, to give him a heads up. It was fair to give him an opportunity to think about it over the weekend, the day off on Sunday, and come in to work hard yesterday in practice. There’s no second-guessing this one for me. It’s just time for him to get playing again.”

Question: Independent of all that, just looking at Bernier, it seemed like he had a strong camp, and then I don’t know what you thought of his first game…

MURRAY: “Really a good camp. Again, going back through the second half of the year, after the All-Star break, his game was tremendous, and right through the training camp. He gets into the first game and I just felt that he wasn’t challenging, wasn’t as aggressive in his game as what he showed in the training camp. Things happened as a result of that. Billy (Ranford) spent quite a bit of time with him, a lot of work, a lot of drills, and he’s been pushing it in practice, working very hard in practice. We need to bring that to the game here tonight.”

Later, Murray was asked whether he felt he would have been messing with Bernier’s confidence is he changed his goalie plans after Quick’s third shutout…

MURRAY: “(Bernier) knows what happened in the first game against Buffalo, where things were not where he wanted them to be, and he paid a lot of attention to it over the past couple weeks here, to get it back in order. He’s ready to go. I would be nervous if I went back to him (and told him he wasn’t starting tonight). Yes, absolutely. It wouldn’t be the right thing to do. The other thing, as I mentioned earlier, is we’ve got 15 of 17 games against conference teams. So then we would have to wait until we get into December. If I don’t show confidence in him now, when does he play?”