Washington Capitals
Shopping for a Capitals fan is either incredibly easy or damn near impossible depending on how well you know them. Try too hard to be basic and you’ll settle for a logo emblazoned coffee mug that never leaves the cupboard. Go with something too specific and you’ll find yourself neck-deep in jersey number controversy you don’t want any part of. We get it, that’s why we curated this list how we did.
We only included things we know a Capitals fan will actually use. Not because it was the top Google search result, not because it ships quickly (though it does). We simply asked ourselves; would a Capitals fan get excited if they received this as a gift? Asking that question eliminated a lot.
Caps fans are a unique breed. They stuck through the struggled years, they saw Ovi glide across the ice night after night like a heat-seeking missile of greatness, and they watched it all come to fruition in 2018. That matters. A truly great gift celebrates that history rather than overlooking it in favour of something generic that could belong to any other team in any other city.
Whether you’re shopping for the diehard who already has every piece of kit known to mankind or if you’re shopping for the person who just got hooked and wants something that official rather than store bought. You can even use this list for game day, birthday gifts, or a housewarming for that new apartment they just couldn’t wait to buy before the hockey season started. None of these gifts are here just to take up space.
We also understand that NHL merchandise can sometimes veer dangerously into ‘looks great for Instagram but serves no real-life purpose’ territory. Trust us, we kept that in mind when searching for stuff. If we felt weird thinking about actually buying something from a souvenir shop it didn’t make the cut.
Thanks to those rules you have a concise, thoughtfully edited list of items we would proudly give to the Capitals fan in our lives. That was our only criteria.