Gerard Gallant met with the media following the win over Washington and said (MSG, NYR):
- On the end of the regular seaosn, “finally, I’m glad tonight is over.” (laugh)
- Was that performance what you wanted to see, “No, not really (laugh). Thought it was real sloppy, but, like I said, it hasn’t been that bad in two weeks, but when you clinch early and you have a lot of games you try to make them meaningful, but sometimes they are hard. Tonight it was pretty sloppy. Anyway, it’s a nice way to finish with the win.”
- On the Penguins, “I haven’t thought about it yet, honestly. Obviously we played them three real good games, but as far as I’m concerned that is not in the picture, just because we beat them the last three, that means nothing to me. We’ve got to get ready to play a real good team and it should be a good series.”
- Does it help that you’ve played them recently, “It’s gonna help with our pre-scouts and stuff like that, the same things it’s going to do for them. I think it’s good, but it’s not just good for us, but good for them too. But we’re confident, we played good in those hockey games and they were really good games and we played really well in all nine periods of them.”
- On Alexis Lafreniere, “I would have loved to see him get his 20th goal tonight, but he scored one and finished really strong and is playing with some confidence and that is really good for us and him, but he’s played well.”
- On getting two assists from Kakko and Schneider, “yup, it’s always good to get different people scoring some points for you. Hopefully we get a full lineup coming up here soon and the other guys are back this weekend, we’ll see.”
- On moving Lafreniere up during the game, “It was a stale game, just tried to move things around a little bit.”
- On the Penguins, “You know what you’ve got with Pittsburgh. They are a talented team, skilled team, have a lot of experienced guys, but I like our team. We have a good mix of young guys that took a step for us this year, big time, and I like what we are going to bring. You know Pittsburgh and Crosby and Malkin and Letang and all those players, but that doesn’t worry us. They are good players and we know what they are going to bring, it’s about what we are going to bring and we’ve done it all season and we are ready for this series.”
- On the season as a whole, “real happy, real happy. I’m glad we won tonight because we lose our prior three games, which, again didn’t matter a whole lot, but I’m glad we finished on a strong note because we deserved that. We had a good year, the team played really well and they had 110 points and it’s a accomplishment and they should be proud of that.”