Rinaldo Blog: Day 18

Voorhees, N.J. – Saturday, April 28 – 11:52 a.m.

It's been a ridiculously long week.

I love coming to the rink, it doesn't matter if there is a game next week or a game the next day. It's just another day at the office. I think everyone just likes being here, we're a really tight group overall. When practice and workouts are over, we go hang out with each other anyway.

Once we got our opponent on Thursday, it's crunch time again. We've been working and preparing to start fine-tuning some things.

It's good for us that we've played the Devils so many times this year. We know their players, we know their system, we know what they're capable of.

For the record, Brad Mills is the Devils player I've fought. We went twice in the preseason (once in NHL, once in AHL) and also one last April in the last week of the AHL regular season.

To pass the time this week, five of my buddies came down from Hamilton, Ontario, and they've been hanging out all week. They got to meet a few of the guys – Tom Sestito and Harry Zolnierczyk – and they've been loving the shopping. For them, there is no tax on clothing, unlike in Canada.

That makes a huge difference. Them kids love to shop.

We've gone out to dinner a few times. I took them to P.F. Changs on Friday night, that was their first time there, and that was really cool. They loved it.

Other than that, we hung out and watched the other Game 7's this week.

We had a good time. But now it's back to work.

Flyers forward Zac Rinaldo is blogging the Stanley Cup playoffs for Philly.com. Read more of his posts here. Follow Zac Rinaldo on Twitter: @RinaldoZac.