Gerard Gallant met with the media following the loss to Boston and said (NYR, MSG):
- On the game, “I thought we played a good game for probably 50 minutes of the 60, 55 of the 60, but then we played real bad and gave up some goals that shouldn’t happen. Two of their goals shouldn’t have happened, for me, if we played our game a solid 60 minutes it’s a different game, but for 50 minutes I thought it was pretty even, both teams had a lot of scoring chances and goaltending was good at both ends. We give up them easy goals and you can’t do that and their not goaltender easy goals, they are defensive zone, odd-man rushes, stuff like that.”
- On swapping Vesey for Kravtsov on the second line and do you have the lines the way you want them, “No, not at all. I’ve talked about our second line all year long, about playing better, harder defensively, not giving up the odd-man rushes and it continues to happen so I have to put somebody over there…and it’s not Kravy’s fault. He’s part of the line, but they got to be better than what they are. They create offense and they get good chances, but we’re not going to beat good teams if they continue the chance for them, chance for us, two for them, one for us.”
- On the chemistry between Trocheck and Panarin, “It better get better. It’s a good line offensively, but we need a lot more defensively and they are our top players and you need them. They should have scored 3-4 goals tonight, but they could have given up 4-5 just as easy and that is not what coaches want.”
- Was the difference that they finished their chances and you didn’t, “Pretty much, yea. I thought we played them pretty well, they are on back-t0-back nights and you jump on them a little bit, but I thought overall the game was good. Again, for five minutes we gave them some, I don’t know how many odd-man rushes they had tonight, but it seemed like a lot, but we created some chances too and had some odd-man rushes too and a couple of real good chances, Bread on the side of the net. We just didn’t bury them and Swayman made some big saves and our goalie was excellent too. It probably should have been a 5-4 game.”
- Are you not seeing enough of guys going to the net, “we score the one goal and we got somebody at the net. We made a lot of good plays and we probably should have had 3-4 goals, you gotta give Swayman some credit. I wasn’t disappointed with our chances, I was disappointed with our chances against. That is what disappoints me for tonight, I thought we had some good looks.”