Via the team…
Washington Capitals head coach Adam Oates on defenseman Tom Wilson’s performance…
“He’s had a lot of chances, and [rookies] don’t get that many minutes. Because of the score, I gave him a chance to go out there and I didn’t expect it to go that way but great for him. He made a great play on [Alexander Urbom’s] goal. He’s done a lot of good things for us, and I’m obviously very happy for him to get that first one.”
Washington Capitals head coach Adam Oates on the team’s power play execution…
“Our power play clicks almost all of the time. We talk about it all the time, ‘we stop ourselves.’ We should be in a position that we should feel that on a given night we stop ourselves, they don’t stop us.”
Washington Capitals forward Alex Ovechkin on being back on the ice tonight…
“I feel great. I felt pretty refreshed out there. Of course I had a few days off, had a couple of breaks, but I feel pretty good.”
Washington Capitals forward Alex Ovechkin on the power play…
“Everybody did a pretty good job out there – don’t make fancy play. We do exactly what we have to do, and all the goals were hardworking goals and what we are capable of doing out there.”
Washington Capitals goaltender Braden Holtby on the three consecutive wins…
“It’s big. I think it is more the way we are playing right now. The three wins, I think we played a very good game. Even tonight, they [New York Islanders] are one of the best skilled teams in the league offensively, and we kept just grinding them down in their end and forcing them to take penalties and we stuck to our game plan all night. It paid off for us.”
Washington Capitals defenseman Tom Wilson on his first NHL point and goal…
“It was a good night. I felt pretty good right from the get-go, and it all just kind of fell into place with a big win and a couple points.”
New York Islanders head coach Jack Capuano on the team’s start and how it unraveled…
“I thought we played pretty good up until all of a sudden, bang-bang on that power play, and we never recovered from that. Four power plays goals, that’s pretty good. That’s obviously attention to detail and something that we’ve got to get better at.”
New York Islanders head coach Jack Capuano on the Capitals power play tonight…
“Teams know what they’re going to do, but they do a good job executing, and we broke down on some details tonight. They’ve got weapons up top in 52 [Mike Green] and 8 [Alex Ovechkin] and on that weak side. It’s not like we don’t know what they’re doing, but you have to execute and we didn’t do a good job of that tonight.”
New York Islanders goaltender Evgeni Nabokov on the Islanders play in the second period…
“We lost the game in 15 minutes, it’s as simple as that. It’s a combination of everything, discipline and turnovers. It costs us a game…we’ll sit on it today and tomorrow we’ll go back to work and practice and get better and face the [Carolina] Hurricanes.”
New York Islanders forward John Tavares on the Islanders special teams play tonight…
“Obviously, our special teams weren’t very good. Our [penalty kill] has to be better. If we want to give those guys, 8 [Alex Ovechkin] and 19 [Nicklas Backstrom], those easy plays in front of the net, it’s going to make a tough night on our goaltender and we hung him out to dry.”
New York Islanders forward John Tavares on what went wrong tonight, specifically the second half of the game…
“We come here and we just don’t play our game. We start off okay, and I don’t know why we don’t stick with it. We have to challenge ourselves in here. We have to be better, there’s going to be adversity. Whether things are going our way or not, we have to stick with it, and we did a better job of that, obviously, last week. To come in here, I don’t think we competed at a high enough level the second half of the game, and that has to be there on a constant basis.”
New York Islanders forward Casey Cizikas on the troubles in the second period and how they can change that…
“[We] basically handed 20 minutes over, and the result was them scoring all those goals. It definitely [stinks] but that’s something we can learn from, and it’s something that we can come together as a team and figure out what exactly went wrong and how to make that better.”