13 Quotes by Alexei Kovalev

We faced a lot of tough teams on this road trip. But we changed a lot of things before this game and played better defensively. We had better control of the puck. It's like we started from scratch. I've seen the changes, I think we can turn this thing around. We've got most of our guys back (from injury). Hopefully this was the start.

We're fighting for the eighth spot in the playoffs, we knew how important this game was.

On the road, just like anybody else, we try to be patient and see what they can bring. We expected them to be more aggressive at home, but it looked like every time we tried to push it there was no reaction from them. So we just continued to keep pushing.

If they don't suspend him and they suspend me, that's just ridiculous. Are we just going to watch that and wait until we get hurt? You have to protect the player and (the referees) didn't do it.

He tried to hit me and missed but I didn't miss him. I was lucky I saw him at the last second.

There are still a lot of games to play. It's only half-a-season. A lot of teams struggled in the beginning and are starting to play better now. With these new rules and everything, the standings change every day. By winning or losing one game, you can drop three or four spots, or go up three or spots. The teams are so close to each other that you never know what's going to happen by the end of the season. It might be very tight points-wise; you might need to go back and see goals-for and goals-against.

Keeping the same emotion and energy we had against Toronto definitely was hard to do. But it's something we had to try to do because we still need to play better and better each night to make the playoffs.

This tournament is all about mistakes. If you see every game, a team makes a mistake and the other team scores. All the turnovers because the ice surface is so wide you have so much space to make a play.

I've said many times, ever since I got traded to Montreal, to give that guy room and give him a chance to play so he can show how good he is. You can see the talent, you just have to let it go.