Murray postgame quotes

Terry Murray’s postgame thoughts…

(on the game…)
MURRAY: “We did a better job in the second and the third period. At the start of the game, they came at us pretty good. They played very well in their game in Anaheim. They just brought some of that energy to the first period, and they just had us going a little bit there in the first half of the first period. We started to settle down and do better things with the puck. I thought, in the second period, we were doing the right things through the middle of the ice to give ourselves a chance in the offensive zone. The thing that we needed to be better at in that game was just getting traffic at the net. We were standing off the post, we were off the side of the crease, but we needed to `play’ goaltender, to be right at his head. He saw a lot of pucks, and you end up getting a couple goals on pucks coming from the blue line. It’s just a shot mentality, but the traffic was much better. Loose pucks were there. We were finding a way to tie the game, which was a lot of hard work, but we got the job done and had a chance.”

(on the style of play…)
MURRAY: “I didn’t think it was a very physical game. It was more of a track meet kind of a game, up and down. They had the cycle going, and we weren’t stopping and sealing anything in our D-zone. Probably the same in the other end. We did a pretty good job once we got the puck into the offensive zone, with our cycle. Whenever the game got hard, the fans got excited. Clune got a little bit involved. Simmer, at the end. We need to be a little bit more like that on a consistent basis.”

(on the lack of traffic on the power play…)
MURRAY: “The traffic on the power play… We had many opportunities on the power play. In the latter part of the game, that was the issue. In the early part, on the power plays though, we were not shooting the puck. We were trying to pass the puck into the net. There were a lot of seam, cross-ice passes that were not necessary. We had shooting lanes, and we were passing it up. That’s a lesson learned, I hoped.”

(on faceoff struggles…)
MURRAY: “They won a lot of clean faceoffs, that give them possession, and then winning battles that were there for pucks. That’s a big part of it, when you’re on special teams. If you can establish possession right away, and get things going, the more things are going to happen. That was throughout the game, in all situations, 5-on-5, 4-on-4, power play, penalty kill, we were not digging in hard enough.”