Carcillo On Return To Pens: "I Think They Know What I Bring To The Table"
PITTSBURGH (93-7 The FAN) - The Pens added six new players to the roster this year through trades and free-agency that likely will make the club, but no one carries more baggage than one without a contract.
Free-agent forward Daniel Carcillo is in Pittsburgh on a tryout after what he says were good conversations with general manager Jim Rutherford.
"I think they know what I bring to the table and what I can do," Carcillo said. "I'm just here to try and mesh well with the guys and see where I fit in. And, hopefully, I get slotted in somewhere at the end of camp and the beginning of the year."
The Pens saw Carcillo last year as a New York Ranger, he played three games against the Pens in the post-season with no points and 4 penalty minutes. But it was another incident in the following series that brought the spotlight on the light-scoring winger. Carcillo hit linesman Scott Driscoll in the face as he was trying to restrain Carcillo from getting involved in a fight in game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals and was suspended 10-games, that was eventually reduced to 6.
"You just have to walk a fine line, and obviously, everyone knows what happened last year. You got to take it in stride, I made a mistake. It was an accident. Apologies were said and hopefully I can move forward from that," he said.
Carcillo said he will bring the same aggressiveness with the Pens, because if you took that away, he would stop playing. In his NHL career (Phoenix, Philadelphia, Chicago, LA and NY), the left-hand shooting forward has 44 goals in 390 games and 1,179 penalty minutes. Carcillo thinks he can bring something that was missing.
"I'm not going to sit here and bash what they did last year, but it's been echoed to me that we need a little more push-back, a little bit more grit. And you can see that with a few guys they brought in."
Carcillo was selected by the Pens in the 3rd round of the 2003 NHL Early Entry Draft, but never played for the NHL team and was traded to Phoenix for fellow enforcer Georges Laraque in 2007. Pens AHL assistant coach Alain Nasreddine was Carcillo's captain when he played for the AHL Penguins. That 2006-07 season, Carcillo averaged 5.9 penalty minutes per game.
In the time he's been gone, he's fought, or at least agitated, dozens in black-and-gold. Carcillo even won a fight against Max Talbot in the 2009 Stanley Cup playoffs when with Philadelphia, that Talbot and the Pens used to turn the series around. The famous Talbot "shushing" of the crowd in Philly, was after he lost a fight to Carcillo.
"I think everyone has a short memory and once you see a guy in your room, you shake his hand and that's that," Carcillo said. "And now you're teammates. It's nice to be able to shake the hand of a guy like (Steve) Downie and (Craig) Adams—guys that play really hard. It will be a lot easier for me not chasing Sid and Malkin around."
The 29-year-old Carcillo says he can play minutes with top talent. He believes injuries have slowed him down in the last few years and he still has a lot of game left.
"You look around the room, you look at the names that are here and the leaders who are here and they've won before. So they know what to do. At this point in your career, when you are in the middle or towards the end, you want to have a chance to win every year. I've had a little taste of it and wanted to be a bigger part of it. I still want to be a bigger part of a team that wins. So that is my goal."
Daniel Carcillo
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