Gerard Gallant met with the media following the win over Carolina and said (NYR):
- On the game, “I loved our game, we played a good game against a real good team over there. It’s sort of like the Seattle game, they put a lot of pressure on you, force into making some mistakes and Jaro was there when we really needed him. Third period we battled back and had some good legs and scored some big goals, obviously.”
- What prompted you to switch Kreider and Panarin, “You know what, I know what Kreids does with Mika all the time and I just thought we got a little stale there and things weren’t going real well. And that’s the thing with those guys, you can mix them and match them a little bit and it’s not going to hurt anything at all, skilled and talented players. It wasn’t like I was putting a fourth-line guy or an extra guy in the second line. It was Panarin for Kreider and. It worked for Bread.”
- Is it fair to consider this game like the playoff games from last year where the puck was in your end, but you guys were opportunistic, “That is 100% right, especially the first part of the first period, they really dominated in our zone. In saying that, we had two 2-on-1s, we had a breakaway in that first period and didn’t score on our chances, but we took advantage of some opportunities. They are one of the best teams in the NHL, they play hard, compete hard, dump a lot of pucks, put a lot of pressure on you and they got some good chances and Jaro was real strong the first 8 minutes of the first period and kept it 0-0 and that was key for us.”
- Was it one of Trocheck’s better games, “Trocheck was great, played really well and excited to play here against his old team. He played real solid.”