Ken Holland Year Quotations

We're obviously very happy that we got Pavel back. He's a talented young player that had a very good year for us two years ago, and we're hoping for more of the same. With the new rules, I think skilled players like Pavel are really going to be helped.

With Mathieu and Chris, I feel very good about our defense for this season. Mathieu had a great year for us in '03-04 and we tried to sign him last summer.

Jamie hasn't really had an opportunity, and when he did have an opportunity, he didn't play nearly as well this year as he did in 2003-04 (before the lockout). We felt it was a little bit of an opportunity, maybe, for an upgrade.

Pavel and Hank are two young players who are very, very important to our franchise. In Hank's case, he's really coming into the prime of his career. I'm happy he made a long-term commitment; basically we bought ourselves one year of unrestricted free agency.

This time of year everybody gets anxious to know who your opponent is. Now we know who our opponent is, and we can go about the process of preparing for them. It gives both teams an extra couple of days to prepare for your opposition. We've been watching them. I'm sure they've been watching us live and on tape.

I stayed in touch for two reasons. If we didn't have Pavel, I wanted to make sure we had open communication for next year to get him back then. At the same time, I was also told by Gary that even though Pavel had signed a contract in Russia, his first desire was to be in Detroit. They were never saying it's a done deal.

This is a big stretch for us. We saw what happened to San Jose last year when they got off to a slow start and what happened to Dallas two years ago. The Western Conference is so close that if you get too far behind the pack ...