They told me I'd never probably see the front-line area.

In terms of front-line players, it's the worst since I've been here. Last year, we probably had 10 more guys injured at this stage of practice.

We probably had three this year where he sees nothing but goal line in front of him and a lot of yardage, a big hit, and somebody dives and just nips his toe. But he'll get some of those before the year is over.

I told him angrily that I had been in front-line combat for over five months and no one would let me go back. Since he had just arrived, he sure as hell wasn't going back.

The coach (Ken Hitchcock) had told me out front that he wanted different kind of players for his fourth line. Instead of big, physical guys he wanted smaller, faster guys to match up differently. All you can say in that situation is thanks for being honest about it. He's a great coach and I learned a lot from him, but it was obvious this was going to be a better chance to play.

We're going to try to see if the front-line players are front-line players. We also want to look at the depth of our roster to make sure that we take advantage of the last evaluation for a lot of these guys. We're going to try to do it all in this game.