Coffee with the Caps, Friday March 5

Happy Friday Caps fans, hope you all are feeling some spring vibes now that we are firmly in March.

This week was a vital one for Vancouver, with the biggest news drop of the year ahead of the 2021 season. It really is hard to see how the team will top this when they sign a DP number 10.

I am talking, of course, about the kit reveal.

The annual unveiling of whichever new jersey for the upcoming season is always a moment treated with equal doses of anxiety and excitement. The skepticism comes from the fact that Adidas’ MLS offerings (with a few limited exceptions) have all the adventure of a piece of Wonder bread — which, incidentally, mirrors the bland white color used for so many of the kits across the league.

Still, there is a bit of a child-like sense of anticipation, the equivalent of opening a present a Christmas morning, even if you (like myself) haven’t bought a new kit since the early days of the Obama Administration.

If we’re being honest, the Caps usually make out pretty well on the jersey front. It is hard to screw up the color combination the club rocks (although Adidas often tries their hardest). But we were all pretty blessed by the 2019 hoop kit and I think every fan was well aware of how lucky we were that we didn’t just get a boring, cookie-cutter offering.

The worry was the hoop would go away in 2021 but fear not, after a tease from the Caps last week, Hoop 2.0 is here and it is glorious.

This might be blasphemous but I actually like this version better than the first — moving the thin blue stripes off the dark blue background pops a little more for my eye and they appear to be moving away from having the names in red on the back, something I found pretty maddening at the beginning of the 2019 hoop kit’s lifespan.

This has brought on perhaps the rarest event in MLS: Near universal praise for a kit announcement.

The question now becomes how many people will buy it. Between the team’s efforts to frustrate fans in the last few years, its off the pitch troubles and, after this offseason, the enduring presence of Bell as a sponsor, I have to think there is a core group of supporters who aren’t interested, even though it looks pretty.

How big that group is, however, is unclear. The folks on Whitecaps Twitter (TM) and those who comment on this blog aren’t representative of all fans and I suspect there will be many more who are enraptured by the siren call of the hoop.

With no matches to wear it to, such a purchase might be a bit superfluous until next year, however. As for me, I’ll probably be sticking with my Sea-to-Sky kit, while hoping it starts bringing the lads a bit more luck than it has the last couple of seasons.

Still, let us know in the comments if you’re going to be in the market for a new kit — and if you have any beef with the hoop.

Shameless Self Promotion

Business is picking up over at the Caps’ training center and Sam Rowan has updates from the first week of preseason

Best of the Rest

Fredy Montero has officially departed Vancouver to return [sighs] to the Seattle Sounders for a second stint with the club. Wishing Fredy all the best — plz don’t hurt us in the Cascadia Cup.

The Province on how Marc dos Santos and Co. are enjoying a season where there hasn’t been a massive amount of turnover.

A look at the way forward for the Canadian Women’s National Team ahead (maybe?) of the Olympics.

MLS announced it is formally reviewing Inter Miami’s capture of Blaise Matuidi, who somehow is on a TAM deal, to see if they cooked the books to avoid using a DP slot on the French midfielder.

Some deets on the Canadian Championship, which appears set for March 20.