David Quinn met with the media following the Rangers win over Washington and said (NYR, NHL Media):

• On the game, “I mentioned this the other night, when you are going through what we were going through and not winning games yet playing pretty well and then a bad performance against the Devils and finding a way to win against Philly, I actually thought we might have been worse against Philly than we were against the Devils, and to bring it all together and get back to doing the things that we are going to need to do, we’ve responded in this short season so far, you talk about that game up in Buffalo when we were 1-4 and got it done and won in OT and then two big games against the Bruins, played well, and a good stretch where we weren’t winning and a real poor performance against the Devils, come back to find a way to win and play the way we did today and go on the road and get four points against Philly and Washington, that is a pretty good road trip.”

• On the defense as a 5-man unit, “it’s big, you can’t have it unless you have everybody involved and in the right position, wingers in the right position and closing on people quickly and it gives you a chance to outnumber people. We’ve come so far this season from a defensive, structural standpoint. You guys have been watching us for a long time, our first two-years was a fire drill so many times in our own end and it was just a much more structured, calm look about us from a defensive standpoint and it gives you a chance. We are still working on the offensive piece of it, because I think you can do both, be productive offensively and structurally sound defensively and that is what we are striving for, that balance.”
• On Panarin and Mika together, “we’ve just been inept offensively and I’ve always been a big believer in putting your best players together to form a line, but just the way the year evolved last year and the balance that we had with two lines made us a unique team offensively and this year it hasn’t happened. I probably stayed with it too long, I might have put these two guys together earlier, I liked our balance with our lines today. Listen, if you don’t change things things stay the same. Maybe I should have done it sooner, I’ve been contemplating it and I did like the balance and looks of our lines today.”
• On Alexis Lafreniere, “goal scorers thrive off confidence and usually when one goes in it starts a snowball effect and we certainly hope that it happens for Alexis. He continues to improve and comes to the rink with a great attitude and work hard, as long as he continues to do that, good things are going to happen.”
• On doing the little things, “I just loved the way these guys came together and performed today, what you need to do during the course of a season – your going to have stinkers and you look back to the Devils game and if our record was different, you cough it up as a one-off, because it really was an outlier relative to the first 13 games of the season. I guess I was surprised to how everybody reacted to it because we’ve been playing some pretty good, hard hockey, we just weren’t winning. It was a stinker, no one will hide from it, make excuses for it, it was inexcusable, we found a way to win in Philly and now we played well tonight. It’s a long season, even though it’s an abbreviated season and it feels good that our guys won the faceoff battles, were way more structured, our puck support was 100 times better, one of the things we did yesterday, we showed the contrast between what happened against Philly and what we look like against the last time we played this team. Against Philly, every time we showed a clip with the puck, you couldn’t find three Rangers around it, whereas when we went back and showed the good things were doing against Washington, there were five Rangers in the picture and that is how we played today.”
• On Zibanejad after scoring, “if you look at his reaction you sensed relief, if you look at the reaction from some of the guys on the ice, you sensed relief. He’s getting out of it, he made a hell of a play in the first period with Bread, looked like his old self offensively, coming through the neutral zone and entering the offensive zone, made that fake, froze the defender, threw it over to Bread for a wide open net and Bread just missed it. It’s not going to happen overnight, he’s not going to go from where he is to where he was last year, we just need to continue to see progress and it was another step in the right direction today.”
• Is the PK better because of personnel or a new philosophy, “I think it’s a combination, probably. It’s something we talked an awful lot about this summer, our PK has been really good this year, obviously, I think they’ve been real sound structurally, a couple of tweaks personnel-wise, using Buchnevich helps, Rooney has made a difference, our D-corps has been better killing penalties, we’ve used Fox a lot more. All those things add up. I thought Lindy did a good job, I know Lindy took a beat, but Lindy did a good job, we had a lot of outliers and I think Jacques has done a good job as well, it’s a combo of all of that.”
• How encouraged are you with how they went to the net, “the thing that we’ve loved since we’ve been here, these guys have responded, when we harp on one thing, they do it. It isn’t easy at this level and these guys have bought into the things trying to teach them, we harp on one thing and there are only so many things you can coach, they usually do it. To see our guys around the net more and be more productive offensively, there were times in the second period where it was 1-0 and I felt like we could have had more, their goalie played well today. The fact that we got rewarded for going to the net will hopefully inspire these guys to go to do it a little bit more. The more you go to the net, you will shoot the puck more too, it’s a two-fold problem there when guys don’t go to the net.”
• On Kakko and the Covid list, “I really haven’t talked to him, this happened this morning so we haven’t had a chance to talk yet. Obviously you are concerned any time someone is put on this list. We will talk here shortly, see how he feels. From what I gather there haven’t really been any symptoms yet, so I’ll know a lot more later today.”