Washington Capitals selling most useless NHL T-shirt of all-time

Let’s say there’s this professional sports franchise. It’s made the playoffs seven of the last eight seasons. In five of those seasons, it finished in first place in its division. In two of those seasons, it finished with the best record in their conference.

The result of all this regular-season success? Four second-round playoff losses and three first-round playoff defeats.

They’ve won five division titles and two regular-season conference titles, but haven’t even played in a championship round in the postseason.

That franchise, of course, is the Washington Capitals, who should be the last team in the NHL celebrate regular-season achievement. And yet as Saam Bozorgmehr noted, the Capitals had Presidents' Trophy T-shirts on sale roughly 10 minutes after clinching the League’s best record with a win over the Columbus Blue Jackets.

Who the hell is this for? Capitals fans that can barely enjoy the regular-season because of the pending doom of postseason failure? Hockey championship swag completests? People in need of a new dust rag in three years?

Dan Steinberg of the Washington Post spelled out two scenarios:

1) The Caps win the Stanley Cup, and you will happily run to your local sporting goods stores and buy all manner of clothing commemorating the first major Washington sports title in almost 25 years, depending on how you count D.C. United and Maryland basketball, but now you’re really nitpicking and ignoring the main point, which is that if the Caps win the Stanley Cup, your T-shirt of choice at the parade will not be a Presidents’ Trophy model.

2) The Caps do not win the Stanley Cup. In which case there is something like a minus-357 percent chance that you will ever want to wear a “2016 Presidents’ Trophy” T-shirt in public.

Look, the NHL never met a branded item it couldn’t sell, including these religious cult mass suicide robes. But selling a commemorative celebration of regular-season success to a Capitals fan is like gifting a bound collection of terrible “Batman v Superman” reviews to Ben Affleck: Like, they get it, OK?

That said: It’s red and has a Capitals logo, so they’re probably sold out in D.C. already. 

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Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at [email protected] or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

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