Mike Babcock Team Quotations

We're going to have to evaluate our team this summer. And if we have to make changes, we will make changes.

Four games in five nights and playing a good defensive team on the road, we must be doing something right.

He's been a courageous competitor. He probably shouldn't have played tonight, but he perceives this as his team and he wanted to lead them.

He's good defensively, but tonight he made plays with the puck, which was nice to see. Sometimes as a defensive defenseman on an offensive team they always want you to do more than you're capable of doing. His game has gotten much better with the puck.

He's good defensively, but (Monday) he made plays with the puck, which was nice to see. Sometimes as a defensive defenseman on an offensive team they always want you to do more than you're capable of doing. His game has gotten much better with the puck.

Just like everyone here, I'm shocked at our situation. It's hard to look at our team and think we didn't do a lot of good things to prepare for the playoffs and you would expect to have success.

We just did a good job on the specialty teams. They (the Blue Jackets) played with a lot of passion and urgency. (But) what do you do when your (the Blue Jackets') power play isn't putting them in, and the other team is?

We have a good team and the guys came out and played hard. With a short group you don't want to get behind and battle back. We talked about being ready right from the start.

When you're on a roll, the opposing team comes in a little excited and a little bit fearful. We have to fear the opposition, too.

We've played hard as a team and found ways to win. We've done that a lot, and you're optimistic those things can continue.

We've got veteran, veteran guys. They know what they're supposed to be doing and they just do it. They expect to win. The other thing I like about this team that I like ... when we don't have success, you know we're having success the next night.

I wanted to have a competitive training camp. So we went through and put the lineup together. We used Jimmy Nill's advice on all the young guys because I don't know the young guys, and then we tried to get the guys who played in the national league and played on our team to be as competitive a group as we possibly could be, with leadership in all groups.

Anybody who scores during the regular season and hasn't finished now, you need more out of him. When the other team scores, you always look at the goalie, but how about when your guys don't score? The shooters have to score, too. Guys that score have got to score.

The biggest difference to me was we're a little deeper. We think we have a real intelligent team that knows how to play without the puck. We really believe that the better we play without the puck, the quicker we are on offense.

Can you replace anybody? Yes. Can you replace him with the same person? No. His contribution to our team is not just measured in what you see, no question about that.

I don't know if you can imagine how hard it is to beat a team three times in a row. But you've got to give our guys credit. We hung in there and it wasn't pretty, but we found a way.

When you don't make people accountable, it leads to a superstar mentality where not everyone on the team is important.

You know what happens to guys? There's what I call the individual time of their career, and the team time of their career. This is the team time. You don't care about all the other stuff. You just want to live in one place, and watch your kids grow up and go to the same school. You say, 'Hey, maybe I'd better play well and be a good enough guy that they keep me.'

You can try to bag the puck out of the zone, but we wouldn't be the team we are if we did. Those were both situations where we had time to make plays.