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Like Leon Draisaitl, who scored his 50th goal the night before in Calgary.

“It sucks,” he said when I asked him about his frustration level.

“We have to figure this out and we have to be better as players. The 50-goals doesn’t matter at all today. It’s a team sport. If I score 20 goals next year and we make the playoffs, I don’t care. I’m happy. I’m happier than I am right now.”

Part of the solution, he said, is to figure out why a couple losses turn into seven or eight straight losses.

“When we drop low, we drop really low. We don’t lose two or three in a row we lose seven out of eight. That’s what kills you. It’s impossible to catch up in this league when you go on stretches like that. We have to stop the bleeding earlier than we have these past couple years.”

Nobody has gone through more of these days than Ryan Nugent-Hopkins.

“It’s hard not to get frustrated at this point, for sure. It’s my eighth year and we’ve been in the playoffs once. I’m getting tired of it for sure. I want to win.”

Again I asked what thoughts he had to express in the exit interviews.

“Consistency with player personnel. Personally with me, I had a lot of wingers this year and didn’t have a lot of stretches where I had the same line. You need time to build chemistry and that’s not something for me that happened,” said Nugent-Hopkins, who despite the shuffle still managed to have his own career year with 28 goals and 69 points.

“It would be nice to have consistency with personnel on and off the ice. We have a lot of key pieces and eventually we can get this thing on the right track.

“It wasn’t a lack of work. It was a lack of consistency. Some games we were a team that could beat anybody. I still have confidence in my eighth year that we can turn it around. But it has to be now. It can’t be another year and another year. We need to do this now.”

None of them went so far as to say the players who weren’t asked to be part of the media exit interviews need to not be invited back next year.

E-mail: tjones@postmedia.com

On Twitter: @ByTerryJones