Skip navigation
Favorites
Sign up to follow your favorites on all your devices.
Sign up

Laich’s Game 7 advice: “You just have to let yourself be free”

Brooks Laich

If Game 7 experience matters, the Washington Capitals won’t be lacking in that department against the New York Rangers Saturday night at Madison Square Garden.

As CSNWashington.com notes, this “will be the sixth Game 7 in the playoff careers of Alex Ovechkin, Brooks Laich, Mike Green, Nicklas Backstrom and Alex Semin. For Caps veteran defenseman Roman Hamrlik, it will be his ninth career Game 7.”

Yesterday, Laich waxed rather poetically about how the Capitals need to approach Saturday’s winner-take-all affair.

“You can’t get froze up by the pressure or the intensity,” he said. “You just have to let yourself be free and enjoy it and then after that whatever you are, if you’re a skater, you have to skate, if you’re a shooter, you shoot.”

Laich added: “If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me? For I must be traveling on, now. Lord knows, I can’t change.”

The Caps are 2-3 in Game 7’s in what we’ll call the Alex Ovechkin era, but that losing record means nothing when you consider it was less than three weeks ago they went into Boston and beat the defending Stanley Cup champs in a deciding contest.