Some Quotes

These are actually from last night, but I promise the ones from today will be on here well before game time tomorrow:

Coach Ruskowski last night on getting the win: This was a huge win. It’s absolutely huge. This really sets up for a big game Saturday, and we have to come up with a big game.
Pelletier played unbelievably incredible. The puck got deflected three or four times on one shot, and he still made a save on it. He was phenomenal. And finally, our power play came alive and scored two goals for us. That was very important, to get those and obviously kill the penalties as much as we could. Scoring those power play goals and having the opportunity for my goalie to play as well as he did was absolutely tremendous.

On improvements he saw in Game 4: In the third period, I thought we played a little bit better defensively. We have to take away the point shots a little bit more; they’re creating a lot of chances from there, and we have to take that away from them. I’m hoping we can, but it’s an ongoing scenario we have to be faced with. Hopefully we can take that and the rush – they rush four guys, so if we’re not prepared, they’ll come back hard and they’re going to have a lose guy who’s ready to score, so we have to be aware of that, also.

On playing Game 5 at home: The fans were great tonight (Thursday), and hopefully they can come out Saturday and root us on. If we have a lot of crowd, we seem to play a lot better, and hopefully we can do that and we can play that way and get the guys motivated to play because each game gets bigger and bigger, and Saturday night is huge. Huge.

On getting a home playoff win: I didn’t even think about (the fact that it had been so long), but it’s very important to have that happen and have confidence that if the guys play hard and well, and they play disciplined, we have chance. They have a very good team. Let’s call a spade a spade; they have a very hockey team. If we don’t play to the best of our ability, then we’re not going to win.

Todd Griffith on the reasoning behind his confidence the Bucks would win: I thought we had a good day of practice; the guys talked to each other and just really wanted to persevere. We said we’d get pucks to the net, and that’s what we did. I’m confident in our team, and I expect the same thing for next game.

On what the team did right last night: We worked a lot harder, guys were skating both ways tonight, our defense was strong, and our goaltending was terrific. Whenever guys are doing that kind of work, you’re going to win games.