Alex Ovechkin photo provided with permission from Gary Kriebel of On Frozen Blog/Old Dominion Productions

At the 2nd Annual Washington Capitals convention, the team revealed its special sweater will basically be a throwback to the team’s original look. However, upon closer inspection, it is readily apparently that this sweater is pure fauxback. Unlike the original sweaters, the Winter Classic ones have the team’s script applied as one big patch, instead of each letter being sewn on individually as shown below:

That is my authentic 1978 Mitchell & Ness throwback which I bought on ebay when I got word the team was officially switching back to red, white and blue. I got it in case I didn’t like the new red, white and blues. I do, but this turned out to be cheaper, so yay.

Back on topic of this year’s Winter Classic sweater — I’m part of the chorus on this one. Hopefully, by airing this grievance, Reebok and the Caps will do the right thing and go all the way with the Winter Classic throwback. The ones they put out at the convention look like replicas/knockoffs and that is not good enough for this and many other Caps fans.

By the way, now that we have the Nationals in D.C. and the Caps wearing the correct colors, I’d like to point out how much I enjoy them having the same color scheme. The Nats cap and Caps sweater is complement each other well. Only a few other markets (Pittsburgh and Long Island — Mets and Islanders) have their baseball and hockey teams wearing such similar colors.