Gorton on St. Louis' aura and how he can help the players in the room:
If you were in our room when he just spoke to the team, you would have had goosebumps. There's a certain vibe, there's a certain energy. We should be all feeling it now. He wants this job. We all say interim; well, he's putting it on the line. He's coming here, his whole life has been about "I'll show you" and our players felt that in his 10-minute conversation with them an hour ago. I felt it; I've always felt that about him. Kent feels that way. He's somebody you want to be around in hockey. He's always been a guy who we all knew was going to have success. I think it's going to help everybody. There's going to be an energy around the team right now that we need, there's going to be an environment. We need to evaluate players to move forward to make the right decisions. It's an exciting time for the players, to get a second chance here over last 37 games and have their season mean something right now.
Hughes on how he and Gorton came to the decision to select St. Louis for the role:
Whether it's someone we know or not, I don't think it's important. Whether Martin is a friend or not, it's irrelevant. We are looking for an individual who is focused on the process. That's how we want to manage this team. We have determined the type of coach we want first. Whether it was Martin or someone with no previous history with us who we met and who would have matched his qualities, we could have hired him. The decisions we make will always be based on this process. Obviously, when you know someone, you feel more confident that he can fulfill our needs. When you bring someone from the outside, we will rely on someone who knows their qualities. We will make our own decision. But if someone sits with us for 20 to 30 minutes, it will be more difficult to determine who will be capable of matching what we're looking for.
Gorton on how the coaching change can help him and Hughes evaluate the players on the roster:
If anybody's watched our team recently, it's been a really difficult year for a lot of different reasons. To start off with the short summer they had coming out of the Stanley Cup Finals, the injuries, to the quality of players that were out, the type of leaders that are out of the room, COVID, the injuries, everything that added up on this team even before I got here was massive and a lot to overcome. We all understand that. But, as we headed into the break, our team... the energy level and effort had dipped, and it was becoming increasingly harder to evaluate people in that situation. So, trying to create a new environment where we can see guys, hopefully, closer to their level was something we talked about a lot.
