“I just think the program went through a bad couple of years,” Granato said. “It doesn’t take much to turn it around and go the right way. It doesn’t take much to turn it around and have things go poorly for awhile. I don’t think they are bad players here. I think things just didn’t go well and then it snowballed into a lot of bad things.

“I think the players are a lot better than they performed last year. Sometimes it just happens. When things start going bad, you’re afraid to go on the ice, you’re afraid to make a mistake, you’re afraid to touch the puck because you think something bad is going to happen. I think that’s the kind of feeling that I got from most of the guys when I got here, that they were on the defensive all the time. They thought, ‘Geez, I don’t want to make a mistake. We’re in a close game again and I don’t want to be on the ice because I’m afraid I’m going to do something wrong.’ We want the opposite. We want guys that want to make the plays. We want them to feel confident in themselves. We want them to want to be over the boards. We want them to make the difference for us to win the games. That’s just basically a mindset.”