The hype and at times smothering attention is almost over. Once the Winter Classic ends – hopefully sometime around 11 p.m. tomorrow night, weather permitting – the HBO cameras will depart for good and the Capitals will again become your run-of-the-mill Stanley Cup contender. No more, no less. For the next three months they can just focus on playing hockey again.
“Five months?”
Um…oh, yeah. Sorry about that Brooks Laich. Didn’t mean to imply you were headed out in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs again. In that case, though, we might as well go for five-and-a-half months. That should put the Caps well into the Stanley Cup finals. Whatever. It will be a welcome change for a team that has been in the spotlight all season – thanks in large part to the HBO documentary “24/7”.
“I think the HBO thing was announced and people were really excited with it and they said they were just going to be like a bug on the wall,” Laich said. “But it’s been a lot more than that. It’s been a pretty big production and at times sort of like a circus event. But teams, I think, deserve a lot of attention and the game hopefully turns out to be a really good game. And then after this it’ll be nice to have a break from all of this and just show up to the rink and play hockey and not have all the stuff that comes with it.”
Because as much as players from both the Caps and Penguins have tried to downplay the affect having cameras around has made it still changes things. Anyone who has ever watched an episode of MTV’s “Real World” series knows cameras change behavior. It’s human nature. No one in Washington was using them as an excuse for the 0-6-2 winless streak earlier this month. But having millions of viewers witness their frustration didn’t make things easy.
“The fact that we were on national TV all the time definitely made it tougher,” said Caps forward Eric Fehr. “It was tougher for the coaches to coach the way they wanted, for the players to get on each other if things aren’t going well. It’s stuff you can’t necessarily do in front of cameras and I think that made it tougher for us.”
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