Hitchcock keeps Blues' focus on winning, not scoring
/St. Louis Blues coach Ken Hitchcock, via The Post-Dispatch, on how to deal with a low-scoring stretch with your team.
"You've got to be really careful in how you deal with that," Hitchcock said. "The minute you start talking about not scoring ... not scoring, you're in dangerous ground. You're focusing on scoring and not winning. The next thing you know you score four and let in five. So you're going to go through phases and stages in a season where you don't score as much as you did before and you're still going to have to win hockey games.
"What impressed me is we didn't get discouraged. We stayed with it. We didn't get loose. What happened in the Philadelphia game, we had all those scoring chances in the first period and only scored once. I thought we got gambling trying to get a bigger lead and we paid for it. We started forcing offense. (The Flyers) scored the second goal because we were forcing the issue too much.
"You're going to go through stages where you're not scoring and you're still going to have to win hockey games. So if you've got to win for a week or 10 days, you've got to win 1-0, 2-1 ... you've got to do it until you get back engaged where you're going to score again."