Quotes About Hockey

You're looking for that prototypical second-line center man. They're not out there. They're just not out there. No one's selling them. No one's giving them away. So we have to produce our own. That's the best way to do it.

Hockey suffers from being compared to itself in ways that other sports are not. Every four years, some of us fawn over Olympic hockey, a great event with bigger rinks, minimal goonishness and national pride in addition to the heightened skills of veritable all-star squads.

My job is to suggest and ratify and use any expertise that I might have gained over the 23 years in professional hockey to make our game a better game.

Brennan remembers a Nortel recruiting truck showing up at a Newbridge mass termination meeting at the local hockey arena and offers this practical advice: "If all the meeting rooms are booked at the same time, it means something's up." By "something," he means firings.

After his hockey days, my dad became a photographer, and a really good one, at that. He used to shoot the Expos and Canadiens, and he'd give me five bucks to haul around his equipment during games. He never had to ask me twice to do it.

Ninety percent of hockey is mental and the other half is physical.

In the '90s, when I started, it was still a rough-and-tumble, physical league. You take the hook and holding and a little bit of the physicality out of the game, and the speed ratcheted up two-fold.

In football, every play, play after play, there's that physicality. Football players only play once a week, so they must really need to rest. That does kind of tell you how physical the sport is. But in hockey, you have the boards. I just couldn't say which is more physical.

Maybe playing in the NHL would be pretty nice, but that's more of a pipe dream for me.

My wife likes the hockey smell because it's the smell of a warrior.

Anyone who plays in the NHL dreams to win the Stanley Cup and I dreamed as well to be one of them and raise the cup in Washington and bring it home to Moscow and celebrate with my friends and my parents.

A lot of funny stuff happens in Canada.

My dad used to be a goalie. He actually won a bronze medal with Team Canada in 1956.

Playing for Canada changed my career.

A lot of the players that I play with who are Canadian, they call me Patty. Before then, I never heard it. I didn't mind Patty.

I've been very supportive of the Islanders. I'm at every home opener.

I found during my time covering the NHL that the enforcers were some of the most accessible guys and the most low-key guys. I think that's somewhat of a natural thing. I don't know if that's because it's the big guy that everybody fears, and then you're sort of surprised and taken by the fact that he's actually a nice guy.

I would be surprised if there weren't some owners who didn't want to get a deal done right now and get back to playing hockey.

Probably the biggest thing that surprises people is that I am obsessed with hockey. I grew up in the Boston area so I am obsessed with hockey since I was a little kid.

Why doesn't the fattest man in the world become a hockey goalie?

I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?

I love those hockey moms. You know what they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull is? Lipstick.

Hockey is my life and money is money. If you think about money, you stop playing hockey.

We know that hockey is where we live, where we can best meet and overcome pain and wrong and death. Life is just a place where we spend time between games.