Ryan Leonard became a target of the Washington Capitals’ season-long prank war.
The Capitals rookie forward took the ice during practice on Saturday morning wearing Alex Ovechkin’s yellow skate laces. The fashion statement, however, was not a tribute to the game’s greatest goal scorer or a personal style change.
He was tricked into doing so.
“Looks good,” Ovechkin says in a Capitals video.
“No it doesn’t,” Leonard responded laughing.
The Capitals posted a clip of Leonard in the yellow laces (at the 50-second mark) in a social media video recapping practice.
“They put my skates the other way (in the locker stall) so I couldn’t see the laces,” Leonard explained after the skate per Monumental Sports Network’s Tarik El-Bashir. “Guys were just laughing.”
He added, “[Ovi] said I had a good day today.”
The Capitals’ yellow skate laces prank is a tale as old as time, dating back to at least 2019. In practice, the prankers’ target is always young and usually Russian.
Alex Alexeyev and Ivan Miroshnichenko have both donned yellow laces during development camp.
A source previously told RMNB, in Miroshnichenko’s case, that the players got help from the equipment staff so that the target of the prank would not have enough time to switch the laces out before the session on the ice.
While Alexeyev, Miroshnichenko, and now Leonard have donned yellow skate laces unintentionally during skates, the only other two players to do so in past Capitals games during the Ovechkin Era in DC were legends only: Sergei Fedorov and Ilya Kovalchuk.
