Advertisement

Mike Babcock addressed the media after his team’s 7-2 trouncing at the hands of the Boston Bruins in Game 2 of the best-of-seven quarterfinal series.


On whether he has seen a line put up the kind of production the Bergeron line has in two playoff games:

No, I haven’t. If I had, I’d try to block it out of my mind, probably, you know? Unless it was for my own team. Obviously, they’re dominating us. I actually thought we got to a pretty good start and the puck still went in the net. Give them credit. They’re playing real well. That line has been good on the power play and been good 5-on-5. Everything they’re throwing at the net is going in.

On what the team needs to do to bounce back:

We need to go home and get regrouped. That’s our first priority. We’ve got to go home and get out of here. Obviously, it hasn’t gone the way we wanted it to. We’ve given up a dozen goal in two games. We’ve got to get home and get some home cooking tomorrow and get our mind right and come back and play like we can. We’re a way better team than what we showed.

On where the bottom fell out after a good start to the game:

I mean, they got four goals on six shots. That was pretty much it. I actually thought we were really jumping. I thought we looked good. I thought we had energy. I thought we did, at times, throughout the game. I thought we pushed back. But the bottom line is you’ve got to keep it out of your net. They’ve done a good job of getting to the blue paint. Their skilled guys have done a good job.

In the end, I really didn’t like our Game 1 at all. I didn’t think we competed at a high enough level. I thought tonight, we started on time and did good things, but the puck went in.

On whether he is worried about confidence after the way the two games went:

Absolutely. 100%. In saying all of that, you spent your whole year working on your confidence. We’ve got 105 points for a reason. We’ve got a good team. We’re not going to talk about it tonight. There is no sense. No one is listening to anything anyway. What we’ll do is we’ll fly back and get together. We won’t practice tomorrow, but we’ll get together and get ourselves regrouped and count on our leadership group to help out as well, and get ourselves on track. Obviously, our fans will be in our building and they’ll be behind us. We’ve got to get off to a good start in our building.

On moving William Nylander to second-line centre:

Obviously, we got down right away. You needed offense more than anything. We’ve still got to come up with what we’re going to do when we get home. That’s not solved, by any means. Obviously, with Leo leaving the game tonight here, too, that made it a little bit different as well. Without Naz, there will be some changes.

The way I look at all of this: None of that matters. You’ve got to get your mind right and you’ve got to play right. Whoever puts on our sweater is good enough. I thought Kapanen and Johnsson were fine tonight.

On the decision to pull Frederik Andersen after the 3-0:

I’m not saying [any goalie would’ve stopped them]. Your job is to get hit, right? They were going in. It wasn’t going very good, so we needed to do something else.