According to a source with knowledge of the situation, the Washington Capitals — more specifically Craig “Woody” Leydig and Brett “Stretch” Leonhardt — received a special shipment on Tuesday afternoon. The team received their new locker room playoff shirts.
“The design is catered towards White Zombie shirts from the 90’s, and the saying on the back is an inside joke,” the source said.
The tees have no reference to the Will Over Skill shirts that the Caps wore during the regular season.
The front
The very metal front of the Caps new playoff shirt features the type NEXT LEVEL and illustrations of hockey playing zombies skating through a graveyard. The gravestones say Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, and Round 4.
If the illustration is inspired by the White Zombie movie (and the White Zombie metal band that followed), the shirt has metaphorical meaning. My best guess is that if the Caps are to turn back into humans, they must avenge their past and defeat all four rounds of the playoffs.
Here’s the plot of the movie via Wikipedia:
On arrival in Haiti, Madeleine Short reunites with her fiancé Neil Parker, with imminent plans to be married. On the way to their lodging, the couple’s coach passes Murder Legendre, an evil voodoo master, who observes them with interest and manages to grab Madeleine’s scarf. Neil and Madeleine arrive at the home of the wealthy plantation owner, Charles Beaumont. Charles’s love of Madeleine prompts him to meet Murder secretly in Murder’s sugarcane mill, operated entirely by zombies. Charles wants to convince Madeleine to marry him and solicits Murder’s supernatural assistance. Murder states that the only way to help Charles is to transform Madeleine into a zombie with a potion. Beaumont agrees and surreptitiously gives the potion to Madeleine. Shortly after Madeleine and Neil’s wedding ceremony, the potion takes effect on Madeleine and she appears to die. After her funeral, Murder and Charles enter Madeleine’s tomb at night and Murder revives her as a zombie. Drunk and depressed, Neil imagines ghostly apparitions of Madeleine and goes to her tomb. Finding it empty, Neil seeks assistance from the local missionary, Dr. Bruner, who recounts how Murder turned many of his rivals into zombies, who now guard his estate. The two men journey to Murder’s cliffside castle to rescue Madeleine.
At the castle, Charles has begun to regret Madeleine’s transformation and begs Murder to return her to life, but Murder refuses. Charles discovers he has been tainted by Murder’s voodoo and is transforming into a zombie. As Neil enters the fortress, Murder senses his presence and silently orders Madeleine to kill Neil. She approaches Neil with a knife, but Bruner stops her. Neil follows Madeleine to an escarpment, where Murder commands his zombie guardians to kill Neil. Bruner approaches Murder and knocks him out, breaking Murder’s mental control over his zombies. Undirected, the zombies topple off the cliff. Murder awakens and eludes Neil and Bruner, but Charles pushes Murder off the cliff. Charles loses his balance and also falls to his death. Murder’s death releases Madeleine from her zombie trance, and she awakens to embrace Neil.
The back
The back of the shirt features typography inspired by a warning sign. It reads NOTICE: TERRY FREE ZONE.
A Terry, as longtime RMNB readers are already familiar with, is an inside joke started by Alex Ovechkin last year.
“Ovi said it one day and I can’t remember the context,” Schmidt told us last April. “It just kind of stuck around. I just remember everybody saying it after that. It’s like an inside joke. It’s random that it just kind of caught on. You know Ovi. Sometimes he’ll say something and guys’ll give crap for it.”
In an Instagram photo, former Capital Brooks Laich called Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom a “couple of Terry’s” in an Instagram comment.
Ovechkin and Backstrom look like big doofuses in the photo.
The joke came out shortly after a skit on Key & Peele aired where the term Terry is an abbreviation for a terrorist.
Last year’s Entitled To Nothing playoffs shirts also had a metal vibe.
Disclaimer: I did not confirm the authenticity of the shirts with the team before publication.
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