David Quinn spoke after the Rangers win over the Islanders and said (MSG, NYR):

• How confident were you that they would bounce back, “I was 100% sure we weren’t going to be as bad as we were the other night. I gotta give a bunch of our leaders a ton of credit, Jacob Trouba stood tall tonight and played one of his best games as a Ranger, but the stuff he did between the last game and tonight went a long in us putting us in the right mindset. Mika, Kreider, Bread, all these guys…no one was happy with what happened the other night, it was an embarrassing performance, but it’s all about how you respond to that. I’m hoping everybody is off the GW bridge by now and everything is right after tonight.”

• Did the alternate captains speak up, “I don’t think it was strong words, I just think that everybody kept everything in perspective. The other night was what it was, a bad night. These are unique circumstances, I wish I could give you an answer why it happened. I was pretty confident we would come out and play a lot better, you just want to play well to give yourself a chance to win and we certainly did that tonight.”
• On young players and older players, “I don’t look at it that way, from a young guy/older guy division. Obviously the young players, the newer ones and rookies are playing their first game and there are nerves, but we have guys who are young but have played a lot of NHL hockey. It was really just the feel, bad vibe, no energy. All the things we had in camp that we didn’t have that night. You can’t have nights like that very often in the NHL, ours happened to be opening night, but how do you respond to it? That tells you an awful lot about your group and I think we answered some questions tonight in a lot of ways.”
• On Buchnevich, “I just enjoy him, I love the guy. Taking hockey aside, I know I dubbed him ‘Captain Happy’ a couple of years ago. He’s working hard, he wants to get better, is coachable, he’s just really growing up. I’m just so happy for him that he is getting rewarded statistically, but he’s doing all these other things that he wasn’t doing two years ago. Now he’s a penalty killer, who would have ever thought he’d be a penalty killer. He’s done a good job at it. It’s just fun to watch people grow and give him all the credit, he put the time in, wants to learn and I’m just really happy for him.”
• On Kakko, “Guys want to score goals, he’s been a goal scorer his whole life. Anytime you get a goal, all the sudden, you just feel a lot better about yourself and he should feel better about himself. He played a lot better tonight, he was on pucks, a pace to his game. It’s nice to see him score and smile the way he did after he scored. He’s going to be a big part of what we’ve got going on here and I’m just glad he got rewarded tonight.”
• On scoring early, “It certainly helped, we needed to get off to a good start, we needed something good to happen early. It did and we deserved to have something good happen early. I thought we really skated tonight, played at a pace, our pace didn’t fall off, we just kept coming and coming and got better as the game went on, too. Early on we were skating but there were elements of our game where we weren’t playing fast enough. We added that as the game was going on, our PK was really good, Jacques has done a great job with our PK. Buchnevich and Kreider, two guys that have never killed, they are doing a really good job. Our PP looked good early, we just couldn’t get a goal. We get one at the end there and it was good to see them rewarded, too. Georgie played well. He had to make saves early, as most goalies do in this league. It was just a lot of good things tonight. We have to enjoy it, have tomorrow off and get ready to play the Devils.
• Did you see Miller and Lafreniere look more comfortable, “they both played a much better hockey game tonight, they played with swagger. They weren’t intimidated, this is a hard team to play, it’s a ‘man’s’ game every time you play the Islanders. For those two guys to step forward and not be intimidated and play with the passion and swagger that they played, it’s a great sign for us.”
• What was the difference defensively, “there is so much talking about our D-Zone and structure, but when you give the puck away and make high-risk plays over and over again, you have no chance to have good structure. One of the reasons the Islanders are so sound structurally is their puck management. They led the NHL last year in dump-ins, so when you get pucks behind people, you are always above the play. We are a team, at times when we are struggling, we force plays offensively which puts us on the wrong side of the puck over and over again. It’s not so much our defensive structure, it’s our puck management and that is something we talked an awful lot about going into this game and making good decisions with the puck, because when you are playing offense and you make a careless play and all the sudden, the other team gets it. you can’t be in good defensive structure, you just can’t. I thought we did a much better job of putting ourselves in a situation where we were going to be in good structure.”