Ducks captain Ryan Getzlaf spoke to reporters for about 15 minutes Saturday during his season-ending interview. He talked about injuries, about the team’s turnaround after a 1-7-2 start to the season, about their Game 7 loss to the Nashville Predators and, of course, about the firing of Bruce Boudreau as coach. Here’s some of what he had to say:
On the team’s poor start: “It’s hard to put a finger on what exactly happened. I haven’t really been through such a turnaround like that during a season. I’ve been through a couple tough years now. Other than that, I haven’t been through anything that dramatic of a turn. The consistency is a matter of being together as a group every night and having a job to do and being excited to be there. I thought at times this year, we showed it. But at other times, we had trouble staying focused on what we needed to accomplish. And that, we’ll have to address as a group and with the group that we’re with next year.”
On shedding the reputation as a team that fails to win the big games: “That’s just it. The only way to erase them is to just do it. Whether we get the opportunity again to play in a Game 7, I will never know. Everyone calls it playoff trouble if you don’t win the Stanley Cup. There’s only one team at the end of the year that wins the Stanley Cup. There’s only been two teams that have done it basically in the last five years. Everybody else is basically in the exact same boat as us. Obviously, the Stanley Cup is our goal again. We want to get that Stanley Cup back here again, like we experienced as young players. In doing that, it is frustrating. It ticks me off. I’m a competitive person. I want to win, I want to be able to take this team to the next level and get the Stanley Cup again. I’ll work hard to try and do that again next year.”
On how much responsibility the Ducks players bear in the firing of Boudreau: “On how much do the players bear responsibility for firing: “Lots. I’ve only been part of one other coach getting fired and I felt the same way in that situation. Coaches can only do so much. They can only put so much on the ice. They have a responsibility like everybody else here. As do we. We have to absorb a lot of that, when you’re talking about going on the ice and playing and performing at the level that we should have been this year, throughout the whole year. Obviously, with the start we had, there’s always different reasons for different things. But at the end of the day, the players have to be able to perform and do what we need to do. And a lot of that falls on our shoulders and why he’s out the door.”