Coffee with the Caps, Monday March 23

Good Monday morning Caps fans, hopefully you all had a pleasant and socially distant weekend and are gearing up for another week of working from home (I’m already sick of it).

As promised, today begins the Coffee with the Caps Trivia Bonanza Round Two. To mix things up, I changed the format a bit instead of being just a potpurri of MLS/Caps-related goodness.

Instead, I gave between one and three clues identifying who a current or former Caps player might be. While I privileged the MLS years, there are guys from all across the club’s history. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to name each of the players. Once this is all over, I’ll grade them up and post the leaderboard here.

Now the ground rules. OK, it is really just one ground rule: please don’t just Google the answers. Not that I really think people are going to go overboard with the nominal competition involved in this but I also didn’t think there would be a global pandemic either. In any event, just do your best and if I made the questions way too hard we can try this again in a week or two.

The only other rule? Have fun. The link is here and I’ll leave it open for a week. Hopefully this gives you a few minutes of smiles and distraction as you go about your week.

Elsewhere, MLS has continued the trend of having each club’s eSports representative play out matches originally scheduled. While the Caps may be a force on the Connect Four circuit, this one didn’t go particularly well:

Ouch, I know its virtual but man that stings.

In what I’m sure is the coldest take of all time, this pandemic is going to be a massive win for eSports. Heck, I spent an hour yesterday watching a virtual NASCAR race with real drivers, in the comfort of their own homes, using the iRacing software to compete and honestly it felt almost like real life, which may more be a commentary for how desperate I am for sports.

In any event, I suspect we’re all about to get a lot more comfortable with video gaming as an actual sport, a logical jump many places around the world have already made (hello South Korea). I’ve long been of the opinion that eSports are quite interesting and clearly require an immense amount of talent (which I don’t have a lick of) but lack some of the basic pre-requisites to be, you know, a sport.

Either way, if it makes people happy I’m all in. Bring on Overwatch and Fortnite and whatever else the youths are doing these days—it might be the only live competition we get for awhile.

In the meantime, here are some links:

Shameless Self Promotion

To give us all here at 86F something to do, we have launched the March Madness you have all been waiting for. No, not that March Madness, the Best Whitecaps Goals Madness! Yes, we are doing a bracket-style competition to crown the best goal in the franchise’s MLS history and while Eric Hassli’s Puskas award contender is the overwhelming favorite, this is March Madness and upsets happen so go out and cast your vote friends

Best of the Rest

MLS is continuing their trend of airing classic matches each evening. Tonight that will be a deep cut—LA versus San Jose from 2003. Tomorrow it will be a bit more recent, with the 2016 Eastern Conference Semifinal between Toronto and Montreal

Everyone is so bored, Grant Wahl even brought back his always-entertaining mailbag column

ESPN has an interesting story, hearing from MLS stars on life at home and the frustration and uncertainty of it all

The All-Time Cult Hero XI, in which the aforementioned Eric Hassli makes an appearance