TSN’s BarDown had a fun sit down with the Toronto Maple Leafs before the season. The Leafs played a game where they had to call out teams around the league when given various topics like worst visiting locker room, team you hated as a kid, and fanbase with the wildest chirps.

One of the topics that got the most reaction out of the players was the team with the worst jerseys. Out of the seven players that had their answers featured, two picked the Washington Capitals for having the worst sweaters in the NHL.

“I’m gonna go with the Caps,” Ryan Reaves said. “Not a huge fan. You know what it is? It’s the ‘capitals’ in the lower case letters. I think they really dropped the ball on that. Figure that out, please.”

Reaves’ jersey pick probably isn’t surprising considering his noted disdain for playing against them. Plus, he had a front row seat to their jerseys lifting the Stanley Cup in Vegas as he had to watch from the press box as a healthy scratch.

Mitch Marner’s response was more tame.

“I think all jerseys are pretty sick,” Marner said. “Maybe just Washington because they don’t have a lot going on color wise or anything but I still think their jerseys are pretty clean.”

Worth noting: Marner plays for a team that wears just two colors on their jerseys.

Marner and Reaves’ opinions match well with the general opinion around the Capitals’ current uniforms. In a survey done before the preseason started, JFresh, advanced analytics writer and visualization guru, got results showing just that.

The Capitals finished 31st in home uniform voting and 31st in best logo voting in JFresh’s polls. But, the Capitals may have an easy solution to fix things.

In an additional poll, the Capitals’ vintage Screaming Eagle logo finished as the sixth-best vintage logo in the league. The team used that Screaming Eagle logo for both of their Reverse Retro jerseys which gave them arguably the two most successful releases of that program leaguewide.

For example, the Capitals had the top-selling Reverse Retro jersey in 2020. The jerseys sold out in minutes online after their release on Shop.NHL.com. NHL players voted the Capitals Screagle design the fifth-best in the NHL. In an RMNB poll, Capitals fans also voted the Screaming Eagle to be the most popular logo from the Alex Ovechkin Era in DC.

Alex Ovechkin scored in every game he wore the black Screaming Eagle RR sweater last season and made a public plea to bring it back.

Headline photo: Alan Dobbins/RMNB