March 24 postgame quotes: Mike Stothers

On how big of an emphasis was put on the start and Stothers rolling out the first line often:
Well, we lose Brodz. There’s 25 goals out of your lineup. Tonight, if we got an offensive zone faceoff, why not put out Hensick, Mersch and Purcell? It worked. It doesn’t always work. We’ve got to try to play our horses here and guys, I thought everybody did a good job. Having said that, then you need a contribution from your other lines and Shoresy got himself his first goal and it was great. That’s what you need.

On the team being able to get over the first period where they dominated shots but didn’t score:
I think the shot clock was a little deceiving and that’s what I said between the first and second. Don’t get fooled by the shot clock. We wanted to make it interesting. Just the poorest decisions on penalties that we’re still seeing at the end of the year. It’s amazing.

On Mersch’s 2-on-1 shorthanded goal that ended up being the game-winner:
It was a great play. It was a great shot. I don’t know if their goalie thought there was going to be a pass across. You don’t know, is Mike gonna shoot? Is Mike gonna pass? So, I think it have everybody guessing but Mike’s got a pretty good wrist shot. And it turned out to be the game-winner, right? So, it’s pretty good when the game-winner is scored shorthanded. Which leads us the penalties again. We shouldn’t be shorthanded that much.

On whether the one negative was the amount of times the Reign were shorthanded:
Well, it’s hard to say anything’s a negative when you win. But yeah, that’s a negative. What’d we have, seven minors to their two? And it was the timing of them. We just kill one, we take another one. And it’s like slashing, slashing, hooking. Those aren’t penalties. So, we need to be better in that area.