Quips and Quotes: Flames lose to Penguins 9-1

The Calgary Flames lost to the Pittsburgh Penguins by a 9-1 score on Thursday night. Here are selected reactions from players and coaches following the game.

“I thought the first few minutes, we got a power play, we got some looks. And then they scored a few and we started taking some risks that obviously you can’t take against a team like that, who knows how to put the puck in the net. And it really snowballed and obviously a lot of us in here, it’s a tough feeling. I don’t think many of us have been through that, especially in your own building. We’ve got to really regroup in here. I feel like our past few games haven’t been good at all and tonight it’s time to sit down with each other and figure this out.” – Flames captain Mark Giordano on the loss.

“It’s too much now. Tonight’s obviously embarrassing on home ice, you lose 9-1 and give up quality chances shift after shift and obviously with the skill they have they’re going to capitalize. They capitalized on both power plays there and whenever they had a chance it seemed to go in the back of the net, so we’ve got to clean that up.” – Flames forward Sean Monahan on the loss.

As you’d expect, head coach Bill Peters had some interesting assessments of his team’s play in his post-game press conference:

“I think the late one in the first and the early one in the second, right? We sagged a little bit, didn’t have enough resiliency there.” – Peters on precisely when the game got out of hand.

“I think we ended up trying to do too much as far as do everybody else’s job instead of just do our job. I don’t think we did a good job getting in and being physical on the fore-check, so we didn’t have much zone time or as much zone time as we would have liked. And then the same thing in the defensive end: you’ve got to get contact, you’ve got to it stalled, you’ve got to make small fast and we didn’t do that.” – Peters on the many breakdowns the Flames saw during the game. (“Small fast” refers to short, fast passes on their breakouts from the defensive zone.)

“It’s definitely three games of being outplayed, there’s no question about that. We got out-skated in all three games. We’ve got to get our pace picked up and our puck speed and our foot speed definitely has to get up to where the National Hockey League is right now. I don’t think we’re at that pace.” – Peters on the trend of three games of being out-worked dating back to the beginning of their road trip.

“You don’t evaluate the goaltending in a game like this. I don’t, right? There’s numerous breakdowns and guys getting beat up ice and losing one on one battles and foot-races.” – Peters on how to evaluate the goaltending in a one-sided game.