Quotable: the Flames lose to the Jets 4-1

I think we started the game good. I don’t know…. In the second period we don’t play together. We don’t get the puck out when we should and we’re not clean. Like, we’re just kind of throwing it away. We’re not playing as a unit of five out there in the second period and it cost us one or two goals in the second and then obviously working uphill all the third period is tough. It’s tough to do that every other game. You know, it sounds ridiculous because I think we’ve said it about a million times, but we’ve got to play a full 60 minutes. We start the game good and then second period is not good at all, and then third period we’re chasing the game. Yeah, sure, I hit the post. Nesty hit the post. We have some good looks. But, I mean, we’re chasing the game every third period it feels like. It’s not a recipe to win games. We’ve got to try to figure out how to play a full 60 minutes.

We gotta get better or we can stay bitter, that’s really our choice. And it starts with us being harder. Right now, we’re soft in a lot of areas of the hockey game. Let’s start there. We’ve got to raise our compete level. I thought tonight that a lot of the… when we get ourselves in trouble, the majority of the time they’re winning the races, they’re winning the battles, so we’ve got to start there. Compete level’s got to get higher.

And then we have to execute better in some areas. So, a lot of the goals that happened tonight were self-inflicted. We left Marky out to dry. Standing beside a guy on the first one. There were mistakes by us that, you know really, we’ve got to get back to playing to what our identity is and committed to the defensive details of our hockey game. I thought in portions of the road trip they weren’t in place and as a result, teams took advantage of it. So I come back to what I originally said: to me, that’s the decision we have to make. We have to make a decision to be better or we’ll just keep getting bitter.