Zach Bogosian Talks About

I talked to Zach Bogosian this morning after the morning skate and I thought what he had to say warranted its own blog post instead of a mention in the morning skate update. The amount of insight he had about the way the team is playing and the way he is being used helps you understand why he’s already an alternate captain. Here is what he had to say.

Do you feel like the team is turning the corner?

We’re getting there, but obviously the game against Washington wasn’t the greatest game for us and I thought we responded really well in the Ottawa win, but we can’t sit on that. We have to make sure we take the little things from the game that we did right and not just the fact that we scored six goals. We played well as a team from the start of the game right to the finish. We have to look at things like that. I don’t think we even need to look at the score. We just need to make sure that we do the little things right and hopefully go from there.

Was the biggest difference in the win just a matter of paying attention to the details?

I really think so. Obviously when you play well as a team and stick to the game plan no matter what you’re either going to win together or lose together, but you’re doing it as a team. When we stick to Johnny’s plan though we’ve shown that it works. If we come out every night and play as a team and not let anything else bother us we’ll be okay. We need to make sure we take care of our game plan first. That’s obviously to play defense first. It’s great to score a lot of goals but we need to make sure we play defense, especially against teams like Buffalo who are a hard-working team.

John hasn’t hesitated to mix up the forward lines but the defensive pairings have been very stable. Do you feel like you’ve gotten stronger as the year has gone on?

I think so. I’ve been playing with Ron for a while, but the other night when we had five dmen I played with Toby too, so I had two defense partners. I got to play with both. It was fun playing with Toby again but I like playing with Ronny too.I don’t have a preference for who I play with. We have a good defense back there and a lot of good players.

Do you think you play differently with Ron Hainsey than you do with Toby Enstrom?

I think with Ron they’re depending on us more to go against the top lines and I just have to be careful of how much I jump into the play. Different teams have different star players and we need to make sure we’re taking care of those dangerous players. A guy like Gaborik, you can’ t really let him go on the ice or jump up and leave him be. You have to always be playing defense and that’s something I’m trying to get better at. I’m trying to focus on not jumping as much.

Would you say that’s why your scoring has dropped off- because of who you’re out there against?

That’s part of it. You can do whatever you want every shift- you can jump in the play all you want, but if you turn over the puck a lot of the time it’s going to be in the back of the net, especially as a defenseman. If you screw up it’s usually a goal. I just want to play good defense with Ron and I feel like we’ve been better as the year has gone on. We’re playing against good players, and we have to play defense the right way against them or it’s going to end up in the back of our net. Like I said, that’s something I’ve been focusing on.