While putting together a piece about a hat, RMNB stumbled onto a meaningful nugget.
It turns out Matt Roy goes by the nickname "Cat." (Apologies to Dr. Seuss.)
The revelation surfaced during the early part of February, once it became known that the holiday present Aliaksei Protas distributed among his teammates — bespoke Goorin Bros. eagle caps — carried each player's locker-room moniker.
Inside the dressing room, Roy was asked by RMNB's Katie Adler which name Protas had stitched onto his cap.
The Capitals blueliner answered that it was "Cat."
When Adler pressed him on the reason behind it, Roy admitted he had no idea where it originated, saying she'd need to ask elsewhere for the backstory.
Asked who first coined it, Roy pointed her toward Nic Dowd, suggesting she put the question to him.
Tracking down an explanation from Dowd — a player whose own nickname, Judy, is every bit as absurd — looked like it would be straightforward. It wasn't.
The club then went quiet for nearly a fortnight amid the NHL's Olympic Break. After play picked back up, the veteran fourth-line pivot kept being out of reach in the room — sometimes putting in extra reps out on the rink, sometimes simply unreachable while we pursued other threads. As March opened and the deadline for deals drew near, Dowd got moved out to Vegas. Heartbreak gripped the Capitals over the deal, and we assumed our shot at wrapping the story was gone — right up until we recalled having a press friend based in Vegas.
Cue: Ken Boehlke of Vegas's Sin Bin site.
Being the generous sort, Boehlke agreed to float the question for us within the Golden Knights' room, ultimately landing Dowd's comment on the 30th of March — though he, too, came up empty for a string of days running because the forward kept piling up extra time skating. What a grinder.
According to what Dowd told the Vegas outlet, a cat holds onto plenty of secrets, and that was as far as he'd go.
Yet another wall. (Please do give Ken's outlet a follow everywhere as thanks for their help on this saga.)
Meanwhile, while we pursued Dowd's evasive reply from roughly 3,000 miles away through a middleman, the nickname kept gaining steam inside the room.
Matt Roy steps into the tunnel before the pregame skate
Here's how the exchange plays out (among the shouting voices, one almost certainly belongs to Connor McMichael):
The players let loose with a chorus of stunned yells — gasping, hollering "The CAT!", and even an exaggerated kitten-voiced meow — before Roy answered back by declaring himself the Cat.
To finish the clip, Roy and Ryan Leonard exchange a cat-claw double high-five, and Roy lets loose a meow of his own.
Matt Roy reaches the tunnel before game number 500
In the lead-up to that career landmark, Roy got a rowdy welcome from Tom Wilson and Connor McMichael.
McMichael bellowed Roy's name and congratulated him on hitting 500. Leonard let out a loud meow. Wilson, apparently ribbing the veteran for having a pair of given names where a surname should be, kept hollering "MY NAME'S ROY. MATT ROY." Rasmus Sandin chimed in to ask whether anyone had heard of the guy.
Matt Roy comes back from injury
After Roy finished rehabbing and slotted back into the roster, he got a welcome-back serenade from Alex Ovechkin — a personalized number built on Eminem's Without Me.
Ovechkin crooned a riff on the song, announcing that the Cat — the kitty — was back yet again, repeating that the cat had returned over and over.
Spencer Carbery gives Matt Roy a special shoutout
Coming off a 3-1 result against Philadelphia, the Capitals' Spencer Carbery, behind the bench, took a beat to single Roy out during the postgame address (roughly 33 seconds in).
Carbery told the group that Roy had competed his tail off the whole night and had played excellently.
With the room erupting, Roy threw up the clawed cat hands — and Martin Fehervary did likewise — before Roy, channeling The Office's Jim Halpert, located the lens and shot it a puzzled glance.
Fehervary later offered his own theory as we kept digging, saying it traced back to Dowd, though he couldn't pin down exactly how or when it began — the group simply adopted it. He added a preference for "Cowboy," the moniker a member of the staff applies to Roy.
Asked which staffer that was, Fehervary named Scotty Allen, repeating that "Cowboy" appealed to him more than "Cat."
When we put the question to Ethen Frank, he too professed uncertainty, guessing it had emerged on its own — one guy kicked it off, and the rest fell in line.
Then, at long last, a lead came from a corner we hadn't anticipated. Reserve Capitals blueliner Dylan McIlrath proposed that the answer was less involved than we'd assumed: Roy morphed into Roy-Cat, then trimmed down to Cat, with no particular reasoning. As with every bit of their dressing-room mischief, he noted, it ramps up on game days — the hollering, along with those clawed-up cat hands.
So what, exactly, does Roy Cat mean? Unfamiliar with it, I went hunting online for hints, yet the web couldn't spell out Dowd's meaning either.
No actual cat breed goes by Roy Cat. There is, however, a Final Fantasy character named "Roy Cat," a bartender stationed at the universe's edge. And in Vanquera, a science-fantasy worldbuilding and storytelling endeavor, the term denotes a sizable feline breed celebrated for its plush, fluffy coat.
My leading hunch, however, is that Dowd is pointing to a Jellycat plush. Some years back, the brand rolled out its Cordy Roy cat — a corduroy-textured plush in pink that fans often clip down to "Roy Cat." Dowd, who is raising three children, happens to have a three-year-old girl.
Cordy Roy Cat byu/w33b1t inJellycatplush
The takeaway: Matt Roy answers to "Cat" — though sometimes "Cowboy" — likely on account of a plush toy.
Maybe you're thinking, Come on, Ian, what a deflating wrap-up for an RMNB Investigates feature. Why'd I burn five whole minutes on this? My reply: this is precisely the absurd effort we'll throw at sorting out something utterly trivial and meaningless.
Picture, then, the approaches and debates reserved for the things that genuinely matter. We cover the sport for a living, in the end — we simply decline to be too self-serious about it.