A remarkable thing happened this morning and I wish to thank you all.

I have received more than 250 emails and most of them are offering up thanks and words of encouragement to us as a franchise and to me personally. Your regards and good wishes are most appreciated by me and my family. Thank you. It has me energized.

Last night’s defeat was deeply personal and deeply agonizing to me. I feel like I let so many people down and my deepest desire is to build a franchise that is built to last. One that helps create wonderful lifetime positive memories between family members and between friends and communities of interest and to help bring a city closer together by winning a championship.

To fall short so early in the process this year is quite humbling.

But my personality and outlook on life is thus “if it doesn’t kill you–it will make you stronger”.

We won’t do anything rash or make any decisions out of emotional angst. We will collect our thoughts. We will be energized by our failure. We will seek to improve. We will be diligent in our research and we won’t deviate from our plan. We still intend to build around our core. We will make adjustments. We will keep our upside. We will accentuate the positives and we will tweak and change around the negatives where needed.

I am committed to hard work, to investment, to constant improvement, and to getting it “just right”.

I do not have a defeatist attitude and I am not being delusional. We have work to do that is obvious, but I am ready to get back at it starting today. Thank you for your support on this troubling and humbling day. As I have said…We have miles to go before we sleep. The woods are dark and deep. We are committed to improvement and we will be better next season. Onward. Thank you.

We lost. But Montreal won. They deserve respect and congratulations for a well played series.

They played committed hockey, they sacrificed, and they out worked us. I have never seen better D and more blocked shots in a playoff series. I think they blocked as many shots as we took last night. Another stat I had never seen before.

Their goal tending ended up being better than our goal tending.

They played a defensive scheme that was very frustrating. They used their match ups deftly. They were more patient than us. They were more committed to their scheme. Be patient– trap– transition to offense off of turn over’s score on power plays. Play low scoring games. We scored 3 goals in the last 3 games on more than 130 plus shots. That is just not going to get it done.

They took advantage of breaks and they scored on their power play opportunities. We didn’t.

They played committed team defense. They took our stars out of play all series. I believe our hockey IQ seemed low this series and we didn’t adjust well on the ice to the new schemes coming our way.

Live by the O and die by the O. We were horrid on the special teams. When you score more goals shorthanded than with a man advantage in a 7 game series how can you expect to win? To me this was the biggest surprise and disappointment. We just couldn’t score on the man or two man advantage thus we didn’t deserve to win. And our second line didn’t contribute to us the way they did during the regular season.

We had a goal scored called back. We weren’t mentally tough enough to overcome that and capitalize right away on the momentum that a visual of a goal in the net provided us.

Montreal deserved the victory last night. They beat us three games out of four at home in front of our rabid fans.

Congratulations to the Montreal franchise. They move on and we stay home and answer questions and do some serious soul searching. But the better team won fair and square.