Jim Benning on Virtanen: “We were on the road and he played in MTL, OTT, and TOR. The TOR game didn’t go well for him. At the end of the trip, I asked him to go down, play a couple games, get his confidence and then he was coming back. He came back on Sunday so he was an extra player for that game. Tuesday was a coaches’ decision, we left that up to Willie. We met as a group and talked about what’s best for Jake’s development. He’s a 20 year-old player, he’s an important player for us going forward, the best course of action was to get him down the AHL, get him practicing, get him playing lots of minutes, keep developing as a player.”

Jim Benning on trade rumours: “I’m not going to talk about players on other teams. We’re in the marketplace, I’ve talked to all the other GMs. We’d like to add a forward with speed and skill. Whether we can get that done remains to be seen, but we’re in the marketplace trying. We have depth on defense – that’s a position where we’ve rebuilt it. Tryamkin’s 22 year-old, Stecher’s 22 years-old, Edler at 30 is our oldest defenseman. We have a young, good group back there. If we look to make a move, we’d have to  use some of our depth on the blueline to add a forward.”

Jim Benning on the waiver wire: “We look at every player that goes on waivers. We ask ourselves ‘Is this a player that’s going to help our team now or can he be part of our group going forward?’ If the answer is yes, then we’d look to pick up that player. We signed depth players this year (Megna & Chaput), so we have some players in Utica that we want to give a chance to before we look at the waiver wire.”

Jim Benning: “We said we wanted to be competitive in every game, that’s what we said this summer. In being competitive, we wanted to try and compete for one of the wild-card spots. We’re three wins from being first place in our division, we’re two wins out of one of the wild-card spots. For the most part, we’ve been competitive and been in every games. We have to figure out a way to get to the net and score more goals. Hopefully we can continue to be compeittive and win some games and stay in the hunt for one of the wild-card spots.”

Jim Benning’s message to the “Draftists”: The Sedins are still our best hockey players. Some of our older players are the heart and soul of our team and are going to teach our young players and hold them accountable. I’m not going to make no apologies as to where we’re at. Our fans, I think, understand what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to be competitive and develop young players. We have some good, young players in our system. I say to them: Just be patient with us. We’re going to rebuild this thing and be a real good team in the future.”

Jim Benning on Desjardins: “Willie and his staff have worked real hard. Losing Hansen and Tanev are big losses, we’ve put other guys in the lineup. We’re competing every night. Hopefully we keep winning games but we’re going to keep monitoring things and seeing where they’re at.”