I finally cut the cord this summer. I won’t tell you which cable provider I had, but if you look at any ranking of the worst customer-service companies on the planet, I bet you’ll find them. Now I’ve got fiber optic, which means I can get called slurs by 12 year olds in first-person shooters with near-zero latency. It also means I’ve got to find a new way to watch Caps games without cable.
Please come figure it out with me. I’ve written a whole guide on how to watch Caps games – be it on cable or streaming or not – and it’s updated for the 2026-27 season. Refer back to it any time. Send the link to your grandpa.
Why I ditched cable
Simple. I watch Caps games only. I watch literally nothing else on cable. Aileen likes to watch the Oscars – that’s one night a year. I’ll figure something out. But I don’t watch ESPN, and I don’t even know who Pat McAfee is. I don’t watch cable news. When we watch TV shows, we’re streaming them, and even then it’s pretty much only Yellowstone. We watch and rewatch Yellowstone. When we finish the final episode, we immediately start over on S01E01, the one where the brother dies and then is never mentioned again.
Important: The previous sentence contains spoilers for the TV show Yellowstone.
How I watch now
You already know this, but the Caps are carried primarily by Monumental Sports Network, part of the corporation that owns the team. The two Monumental channels came as part of my cable package, but now that’s gone. So I subscribe directly to Zach & co through their Monumental+ plan. It costs $180 a year or $20 a month. I went with the annual plan, because I’m the kinda guy who buys socks in bulk.
In order to become perfect surveillance devices, today’s Smart TVs are just computers with huge screens. Mine is a Google TV. Maybe yours is an Amazon Fire TV or a Roku. In almost any case, there’s a Monumental app available on it. It’s free. I just had to search for it and install it. Now I open Monumental in the same way I might open the Paramount app, which is where I go to watch Landman, which is about a hot lawyer who keeps oil prices low. For Paramount and Monumental, I have to log in once.
It can be miserable to log into some apps on your TV, but Monumental isn’t bad. I entered my email, then it sent a code to my email address, and I just had to type that in on the screen.
I also have the Monumental app on my Roku TV in the basement, which I watch if Aileen wants to watch something else instead of hockey, such as Lioness. Plus I have the app on my phone, and I can stream from my web browser. You can get Monumental on:
- iOS
- Android
- Apple TV
- Amazon Prime Video
- Chromecast
- DAZN
- DIRECTV
- Fire TV
- Roku
- Vizio
- X1
- Xfinity Xumo
I didn’t know what DAZN was a month ago, but apparently it’s pretty big. You can add Monumental+ as an add-on package there – same with on Amazon Prime Video. I didn’t do that because I already had the direct Monumental+ subscription. The price is basically the same whether you go direct or through another service.
If you do that, it’s like you get Caps (and Wizards and Mystics) games as additional programming along side whatever garbage you watch on those platforms while I’m watching Tulsa King.
(Monumental didn’t pay us for this story, by the way.)
My Monumental+ review
When I stream Monumental on my fast new wired connection, I get good quality. Specifically it’s 1080p resolution and 60 frames a second, with 20 Mbps coming down. That’s a crisp picture, and – supposedly – slightly better than you’d get over a compressed digital cable signal.
The real AV dweebs will correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the best signal you might get would be with an HDTV digital antenna, which delivers an uncompressed signal, though with the same resolution and framerate.
I think 1080p60 is good enough to avoid the motion blur that annoys snooty viewers like me. Some RSNs say they offer 4K, but I suspect they’re just upscaling 1080p feeds most of the time. 4K would look great on Monumental+, even if it were just upscaled.
(Tangent: To me the dream is high-framerate streaming for sports. At 30 hertz, the average hard shot on goal – lets’s say 80 miles per hour from 20 feet out – is on the screen for just 5 or 6 frames. At 60, it’s double. I want pucks to see pucks moving at 144 Hz. No one offers this, but one day it’ll happen.)
When I watch a live game on my Monumental+ video feed, there are icons on the right side of the screen.
They display only things I do not want – like polls and gambling info. I can’t stand them, but I toggle them off using a gear icon.
I do that immediately. Problem is – the gear icon remains.
I really wish it wouldn’t. On my phone it appears in the black bar at right, which isn’t so bad, but on the TV it overlays the game action itself. I hate it, but I’m persnickety about this stuff. I can’t stand when someone is doing a screenshare and they leave their cursor on top of what I’m looking at.
If you get Monumental as an add-on through Amazon Prime, you do not get the gear icon and overlay. I can’t check DAZN, which I’m still pronouncing wrong in my head, but I bet it’s not there either. Please let me know in comments.
Monumental’s audio is stereo 95 Kbps, which is good enough for voices, but if you were watching something epic on it, like Dune or the Yellowstone prequel 1883, you’d wish you had richer data.
I think the Monumental+ game feed is about 20 seconds behind live action. I think that’s the case for all broadcasts and streamers these days; I think that started when the NHL started dynamically inserting board advertisements. Those things suck. I can’t detect a difference in latency between watching the Monumental+ feed on the web/app or on cable.
I’ve heard people complaining about instability in Monumental apps. I haven’t experienced any crashes, but I’m going to keep an eye on it.
If you have a different take, I’d love to hear it in the comments below.
Watching the Caps while traveling
Blackout rules are too complicated.
When I go to Boston (boo) or New York (boooooooooo) for work, I can still watch Monumental+ while I’m there. But I have to log into my device from home first, then I can go to my hotel room, order Shake Shack, and watch the game from my phone.
But that only works for a limited amount of time – I think 30 days. After that, I’m not considered traveling anymore – I’m just out of market. There are different rules there.
Watching the Caps from out of market
This doesn’t apply to me, but I’m sharing it anyway. The Caps have their own turf, and if you live north of Delaware, a good bit south of Richmond, or somewhere beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains, then you’re outside the turf. You can’t watch Monumental – not directly, at least.
So you’ve got to get a separate subscription so you can watch out-of-market games, i.e. Caps games. ESPN+ is the way to go, and you can get it a bunch of ways. ESPN themselves have two packages: ESPN Select and ESPN Unlimited. Sigh, this part sucks to explain. ESPN Select gets you ESPN+, but ESPN Unlimited gets you ESPN+ plus all other ESPN programming. You can also get ESPN+ through a Disney+ bundle. We need to break up these media companies, Teddy Roosevelt-style. As long as you’ve got ESPN+, you should be able to watch most Caps games carried by Monumental.
Clear as mud, I’ll try again.
If you’re not from around the DMV, you need ESPN+, which is basically the NHL’s out-of-market package, for most games. Check out our updated 2026-27 How to Watch guide for more info.
Non-Monumental games
In defiance of God themself, there are now 84 games in the NHL season. At least sixty seven games will be carried by Monumental, but 17 will either have alternate options or exclusive rights – that last one meaning not on Monumental at all.
Here is the breakdown:
| Network | Caps games |
|---|---|
| Monumental | 67+ |
| TNT | 8 |
| ESPN+* | 3 |
| ESPN | 4 |
| ABC | 2 |
For the games that won’t be Monumental at all, I need a new plan, just as Russell Lee Washington Jr. did after he refused to kill Dwight “The General” Manfredi before the events of the upcoming Frisco King series on Paramount+.
ESPN and ESPN+ (two very different things)
I get ESPN+ through the elegantly named Disney+, ESPN Select Bundle Premium subscription. The thing steals two burritos out of my budget each month, but it covers me for both the ESPN+ and ABC games. If you’re a CPA, please let me know in the comments if I can deduct this subscription. Since it’s all one big subscription and one megacorporation, these games are watchable through the Disney+ app, the Hulu app, or the ESPN+ app.
ESPN+ is different than ESPN. I hate this. Games on the main ESPN channel aren’t available through ESPN+ unless you have the ESPN Unlimited plan. I might be forced to get it.
ABC
It’s supposed to be free to watch local stations of big networks like ABC, but they usually black out sports. If I didn’t have another method, I’d probably get a digital antenna. They cost like 40 bucks, and they are supposed to get great signal. I may get one this winter, but there’s no rush: the Caps won’t play on ABC until March. NHL on ABC games are also available if you have an ESPN Unlimited subscription.
I don’t want to get a streaming TV service like YouTube TV or or Hulu + Live TV – especially since they both removed Monumental last year, making this whole progress way tougher. Doing the math, it’d be way cheaper for me to get six daily passes through Sling TV ($30 dollars for the season) than subscribe to ESPN Unlimited ($32 dollars per month), so I’ll probably do that.
TNT
I’ll need a solution much sooner for TNT, which will air the Caps-Pens game on October 7. TNT is a cable network, named for Ted Turner, who was nuts and the reason why I knew more about the Braves than the Orioles when I was 12. I lost TNT when I cut cable, which means I can no longer watch the last 10 minutes of The Fast & The Furious movies a dozen times a year.
One thing I could do is get a daily pass using Sling TV. I put the app on my TV, pay $5 and get 24 hours of streaming without any commitment. But I don’t need to do that. The orgy of corporate mergers in late capitalism has me covered. HBO Max, nee Max, nee HBO Max, simulcasts NHL on TNT games. It also has TruTV, in case you need to know who murdered a housewife (it’s the husband; it’s always the husband). I got HBO Max despite it not having my new favorite show, Marshals, featuring the youngest brother from Yellowstone, but not his wife, because she was killed offscreen, because the actor lied about being Cherokee. HBO Max will make up for that failure by showing me eight Caps games.
Solution and price breakdown
So here’s how I think it will go.
| Network | How I watch | Annual cost | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| MNMT | Monumental+ | $180 | Annual subscription, using Monumental app |
| TNT | HBO Max | $230 | An add-on to Amazon Prime Video, comes with other programming |
| ESPN+* | Disney+ | $396 | Bundled with Hulu and Disney+, comes with other programming |
| ESPN | Sling TV | $20 | Daily pass x 4 |
| ABC | Sling TV | $10 | Daily pass x 2 |
| TOTAL | – | $836 | That is way, way too much, but still less than cable |
If I didn’t have HBO Max and Disney for other reasons, I would save $571 just watching those games on Sling TV. And there’s always a chance a simulcast will make a game available on Monumental or ESPN+ too.
I think this is a total freaking headache, but for 80 percent of the season I can just turn on Monumental and hope for the best. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll just watch Dutton Ranch.
