Greg Puhalski Quotations

We're getting a little better as far as not coughing the puck up as much. When we do, that's when we tend to give up more shots. That's something that has gotten better generally as the season has gone on.

We let up a little bit. We gave away two goals. We made some bad decisions and need to learn from our mistakes for success.

We've turned around our defensive play and our goaltending has improved with that. They go hand in hand. After some shoddy play early in the season, we've improved that (defensive) area.

This was as good as we've competed in awhile. It was a good bounce-back game from Wednesday. It was a good effort. It was a matter of playing better hockey. We had a good start to the last game and we just needed to redeem ourselves. We have to be a hard-working team and extremely diligent in our efforts. I thought we did a lot of the little things tonight pretty well.

We've seen the good things he can do for our team, having had him here before.

I don't know that it's anything specific. Generally we've been a pretty good club in the first period. I think it's just a matter of playing 60 minutes. Tonight we took some lazy, lazy penalties and it cost us.

I believe when we're all working hard, we're content with what we have. There were some opportunities to make trades, but we weren't able to make anything happen that would be right at this time.

He scored 34 goals in juniors (with Kingston of the Ontario Hockey league in 1997-98). He's more than capable of scoring 30-plus or 40-plus goals in our league. He just needs to get it set in his mind, and I think he's believing more and more than he has that ability.

He had a nice shot on a 2-on-1 and a nice power-play goal. It was good for him and good for the team.

He has been capitalizing on his chances more now than at the beginning of the year. It has been good for him and the club.

We took a couple unfortunate penalties, and that put us in a little bit of a bind.

We've got to play disciplined. Move your feet and quit running around like an idiot.

He didn't play too badly. It's just a matter of getting a little rust off.

It is good for our team to finish as high as possible.

I thought we had as many good quality scoring chances as they did. But we've got to realize, we can't get into a run-and-gun game with anybody at this time of year. We've got to learn from Game 1 that we've got to play a little tighter in our own zone and a little better defensively.

I think we've got a lot of room for improvement. The key to our game is we have to work hard and keep doing the little things. We're getting more consistency in the way we play. We're working smarter, but we've got to get a little sharper at execution.

Our penalty kill in the last month in general has been really good. That's an area, a reason why our goals against has been really down because of the improvements in our penalty killers and the goaltending hand-and-hand, everybody is getting more on the same page as far as responsibility.

Rockford will be the prohibitive favorite, and they should be. They've had an excellent season. We're flying under the radar, and we'll play our game.

It doesn't matter what type of player you are. Are you willing to go through traffic to score some goals? If you're not, shame on you. Really, shame on you.

We were very average. The biggest thing is we didn't have any sharpness to our game tonight. We made some very poor decisions that caused goals. We can't have that any time, let alone a week before the playoffs start.

We've got some versatility with our lineup. We've played without Colin in our lineup before and played pretty well. That's what we're going to need to do again.

Typically, if your veteran players are doing it, everyone else will, too. It's just a matter of the more you do it, the more that's where you feel you need to be. It's an attitude. Some players don't think they are able to do that, and they suffer because of it.

We've been getting production from a lot of different people and that's a real positive.

We had too many penalties in the first, and they were able to score two power-play goals. We battled back and played much better after the first 12 minutes. Generally our play got better as the game went on. It was a matter of not capitalizing enough.

We didn't do some of the simple things we had done the last two games. We didn't do them tonight and we got outplayed.

We'll take a point any way we can get it. We battled back the last two periods after having just a terrible first period. We were nowhere to be found. Our game slowly got better the last 30 minutes. We really played to our abilities and got three goals as a result of it.

We let one slip away. We didn't play smart with the lead.

We were not too bad for the first two periods.

When you go three games and only score three goals that is cause for concern. You just have to work through it, but there is no easy way to do that.

We'll just take the win and move on. We need to play two good solid home games and start the playoffs.

The opponent, at any time, and especially at this time of the year, is kind of irrelevant in that regard. There are some things you're going to look to counter against with certain teams, but it's mostly about taking care of your own business.

We had a good game. We played three good periods and it was a good road win. We just generated a lot of opportunities because we were moving and skating well tonight.

Our effort wasn't too bad but we didn't work smart at all. We didn't give up a lot of quality chances, but the ones we did, they were able to capitalize on them. The mistakes we made were just fundamental mistakes and you can't have that.

It's just the doctor's recommendation. It's just going to take too long for him to get back to healthy status anytime soon. This is what's best for the team and for himself.

It's a tough game to play as far as the way the game was called. It was just so poor that it made it a difficult game to play. In defense of especially our team, we felt like we couldn't do anything. The referee took everything away from what we were trying to do.

It's about getting consistent efforts. We can build off this game. It was generally a good effort and we'll need more of that this weekend.

It's a game of opportunities and making the most of them. We didn't, and they did.

It's all attitude. Some guys are willing to do it. Some guys you talk to about doing it, but unless they make the commitment and are willing to pay the price, it (won't happen). It's a real choice. It's an attitude about getting dirty. You're going to have to have ice packs on your legs and arms. Some guys are very good at it, and some guys need to work at it a lot more.

It's nothing serious. If we had to play him we probably could have, but we are erring on the side of caution.

It was a good battle with some good fights. We did what we had to do and scored some power-play goals.

At this time we don't think it's anything serious, but we're making sure.

I'm sure teams will try a few wrinkles here and there, but I think you just have to go out and play hard.

The emphasis for us is to keep playing well and keep getting wins. Let's take care of business day-to-day.