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Nate Schmidt’s team won the Caps golf outing

By Elyse Bailey

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October 8, 2016 1:51 pm

On Thursday, Alex Ovechkin and Evgeny Kuznetsov posted videos from a Capitals recent golf outing on social media. After chunking a large piece of earth out of ground, Ovechkin hit the golf ball a mile and celebrated like he just won the Stanley Cup. After a miracle putt from the green, Evgeny Kuznetsov did the same.

Friday, Nate Schmidt joined Mike Vogel for the team’s Rinkside Update and talked about how that team-building event went.

“Real good, our team ended up winning. We were the ‘four man scramble’ myself, TJ Oshie, Lars Eller, and Christian Thomas.” Schmidt said with a smile. “It was a lot of fun.”

Schmidt also talked about his preparation for the upcoming season, how it feels to be back with the same seven defensemen, and how he loves just chillin’ with the guys.

I have a full transcription below.

Interview

Transcription

You’ve got the same seven returning defensemen how do you feel that sets you guys up this season?

Nate Schmidt: You get a lot of familiarity with the guys and the beauty of this preseason is that even though we’ve played with each other a lot, we get an opportunity to play with different guys and in different positions within the same group of 7, which is always great. Then you bring a guy like Aaron Ness in, who played some games with us last year, just trying to keep all of our guys fresh and you never know what’s going to happen with pairs or long shifts, so being able to play with a lot of different guys is really helpful for us.

I know yesterday you boys went golfing, how’d that go?

Nate Schmidt: Real good, our team ended up winning. We were the “four man scramble” myself, TJ Oshie, Lars Eller, and Christian Thomas. We actually won in a playoff hole against Carly, Brooksy, Bobby Shore, and Orly so it was a lot of fun. Went to dinner afterwards, it was great. Like I said, we were just around the guys, no phone, no nothing so it was great.

Two preseason games left before the start of the season, what’s the mindset here and what are you looking at as the season starts?

Nate Schmidt: It’s good to know where you guys are at going into the year especially when you have a little bit of congruency throughout the lineup and it really kind of makes it a lot easier on us when we go in and guys know their roles and what their jobs is, no real grey areas. I think this year is gonna be one of those things that, you know, the start of the year is going to be so big. We’re not going to sneak up on anybody anymore and I think that’s one of the things our guys kind of understood, that we’re a very good team and we have the opportunity to go out there and do something special but it has to start in October. You can’t just try and turn it on at the end of the year, that’s the reason I think a lot of our guys play a lot more preseason games and have been in the lineup a bit more. That way they can understand the job we’re trying to do here.

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