Selected Quotes from the Homestand

When accumulating quotes for other pieces at the Saddledome, you happen to grab more audio than you need. In the interest of providing some context to the craziness of the last five-game homestand – which somehow saw the Flames run the table and go 5-0-0 – here is a selection of quotes from the past week or so that I couldn’t turn into full-fledged articles, but still find pretty interesting.

“Yeah,
I think for sure. It’s just something that you don’t really want, and
it kind of dragged along for awhile there, and hopefully it’s just
the end of it tonight and it kind of puts it to rest. I’m sure it’ll
be another story in March or whatever when we play them in Boston,
just going back there with their fans I think it’ll be different, but
kinda nice to just put it away now. And nice that we won, obviously.” –Dougie Hamilton.

“We’re
six points behind [San Jose] coming into tonight. A big regulation win
obviously goes a long way. We got a big hill to climb. We know that.
I’m telling you if we can keep rolling here, we’ll get back into the
picture sooner rather than later.” -Flames captain Mark Giordano assessing the Flames’ placement in the standings after their win over San Jose.

“When
I used to work at the plant, I liked overtime. It was time and a
half. Over here, wins in regulation are a little easier on the coach
and the general manager.” – Flames head coach Bob Hartley, asked by a media member post-game about the game ending in regulation.

“Right
now we’re pulling out of a hole that we created for ourselves. And
the good thing is when you look at the standings, we’re right there.
We’re right there and I like the way that we’re progressing as a
team. We have lots of youngsters; the Bennetts, the Hamiltons, Monny, Johnny, Granny… There’s still lots of young players out there, and they’re playing some pretty solid minutes for us. They’re learning while we’re winning, the veterans are doing a great job leading the way. So we’re moving in the right direction.” –Hartley, assessing the Flames’ recent performance.

“It
might be next week, it’s still iffy. He’s doing good, but there’s
still, remember that miracle of science and our medical staff have
done unbelievable work with Booms, and to Booms’ credit, he put in
lots of work in the gym. He shouldn’t even be on the ice at this
time. He’s way ahead of schedule, but at the same time, he’s not
ready to play.” –Hartley, assessing Lance Bouma’s health status and potential return to action.

“If we wouldn’t have pulled him out, Kris Russell would play on one leg, with one arm, with one eye, that’s who he is. So you need to pull the plug on him because he’ll never stop. And he wasn’t happy, but he understood it was the right thing to do. He worked extremely hard on the ice, he skated with Ryan Asten our conditioning coach. Even yesterday when we gave a day off to the boys, he came to me and said ‘I need to skate,’ so we skated with him yesterday morning. He said ‘I want to play.’ This afternoon we talked to the medical staff and they gave us the green light, so it was great news. He’s an unbelievable competitor.” -Hartley, assessing the impact of Kris Russell’s return to the line-up.

“He played okay. I thought that he gave us a chance. He’s recovering. We had two goalies this morning and the fact of the matter is, even this morning, we waited until after the morning skate, talked to both goalies to see who felt better. They were not at 100%, both of them, they told us but we felt that Jonas felt better than Rams and we went with Hills.” –Hartley, assessing Jonas Hiller’s performance in his second consecutive (flu-addled) start.