Postgame quotes

Here are some thoughts from Anze Kopitar and Terry Murray after tonight’s game at Staples Center…

(on the game…)
KOPITAR: “It took a couple of minutes to get into it. It was a long summer, and it’s just getting the timing back, and pretty much the whole routine before the game, too. It takes maybe a few games just to get everything down and remember everything from last year that we did. I thought the first period was a little bit slow, but then we picked it up a little bit. We just couldn’t score a goal today. Their goalie was pretty good. We had some chances, and we didn’t bury them, and they got the power-play goal.”

(on the game…)
MURRAY: “I thought they [the Coyotes] came out with a good tempo. They played a good pace. They came after us off the attack and they recovered a lot of pucks in our end, off shots and rebounds. And we were sloppy in the first period. We had a lot of those pucks on our stick, where we could have had, I thought, clean breakouts, and they end up coming back at us for another attempt at our net. But it got better. We skated well and we started to play together better in the second period, with attacks and o-zone pressure. So I liked that, and I encouraged building on that as we got going for the rest of the game, the third period. We had our chances, but at the end of the day it wasn’t good enough.”

(on Jonathan Quick’s game…)
MURRAY: “I thought Quick looked really good in some situations, really good, again, talking about the first period. They came with a lot of pressure, and they ended up with some quality scoring chances in that shooting area, in the slot. The winning goal, I don’t like. He just pulled off the post too early. I don’t know what he was thinking, I can’t speak for him, but with the man driving to the front of the net, he was probably thinking he’s going to play that pass, rather than play the shot, and it snuck in the side. But overall, he played very well.”