“You don’t just bring in six fast skaters, it doesn’t work that way. The ‘faster’ we wanted was more ability to bring it from the back end, that’s where we wanted the speed coming from. I keep using that word ‘reckless,’ more reckless speed from the back end. That’s what (Petteri) Lindbohm does ... (Robert) Bortuzzo is not afraid to do that. We want to play our defense in a much more active role with the puck and a much tighter gap without the puck.

“The quickness is in the kids (Rattie and Fabbri). Some team isn’t just going to give you a really quick player, you’re going to have to develop that. But you can still play quicker, which is what we want to do. We have to play quicker. We need to get back to where we were before, in that we had the ability to play a little bit reckless in joining the play. We need to get back to that element of our game again.”

-Ken Hitchcock, head coach of the St. Louis Blues. More on the Blues from Jeremy P. Rutherford of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.