The warning signs were everywhere for years, but they only look like warnings after disaster. Buying the team’s media outlets. Asking for public money to renovate the arena. Accepting investment money from sovereign wealth funds. Sanitizing the game day experience with higher priced tickets and sponsored segments.
For decades as the owner of the Washington Capitals, Wizards, and Mystics, Ted Leonsis cultivated an image as being a different kind of sports owner. Every public appearance included Leonsis talking about the importance of community. In his lectures at Georgetown University and in interviews, he often spoke of a “double bottom line:” a concept of making a profit and doing so in a way that helps the community.
With a press conference alongside Virginia’s polarizing governor Glenn Youngkin, Leonsis turned his back on the community that made him. By announcing his plan to move the Caps and Wizards out of Washington D.C., Leonsis revealed himself to be no different than any other owner of a professional sports team.
Like many other Caps fans, I am lucky to have met Leonsis multiple times at fan events. He would always stop for a picture or talk about the teams he owned. When Leonsis spoke at the Stanley Cup victory parade on the National Mall, in the shadow of the monuments for which he named his ownership holding company, fans cheered.
Leonsis enjoyed a polite respect from the people who paid ever increasing prices to support the teams that bear the name of their home. At least the Capitals and Mystics won one championship under Leonsis’ ownership. Wizards fans have no reason to support a middling franchise that consistently fails to live up to its own low expectations, yet they keep showing up.
Something changed at Capital One Arena after the 2018 Stanley Cup run. Something changed when the franchise dispensed with the organist. Something changed when the Qatari Investment Authority became sponsors, and then limited owners of Monumental’s teams. Prices kept rising and the atmosphere suffered. Attending in-person became out of reach for the fans who come for the game rather than to be seen at the game.
I am not so blind as to ignore the political and business sense of the real estate development plan in Northern Virginia. Youngkin’s other political plans have largely backfired on him and the Republican Party he represents in his tenure as governor. Considering how unpopular he is among heavily Democratic Northern Virginia, Youngkin needed a “win” to run on and secure his own political future. Leonsis wanted a new arena on the model of other recent projects in Edmonton (Oilers) and Atlanta (Braves) with attached entertainment and retail spaces.
For Leonsis, he gets everything the District cannot give him: Space to build, land to own, and something close enough to the border to keep calling his teams “Washington.” It should not surprise anyone that the employee of the owners, commissioner Gary Bettman, supports the move “four miles away” like someone who has never lived here a day in his life.
On December 12, 2023, Leonsis signed his own moral authority away to a nonbinding agreement to leave the capital city. Leonsis will chase the profit bottom line at the expense of his own customers, a community he steered from the days of Sold Out Section nights to one of the longest home sellout streaks in NHL history.
The Capitals and Wizards will join the ranks of suburban teams that play outside of the cities they purport to represent. The factors are different for each, but the model of the Florida Panthers (Sunrise), Arizona Coyotes (Tempe and Glendale), Miami Dolphins (Miami Gardens), New York Jets and Giants (Meadowlands, NJ) all drive down attendance unless the teams are good.
The hardest part to accept for Leonsis and the political brass of Virginia is that by 2028 when the Caps play their first games in Alexandria, the people may not come. Alex Ovechkin’s contract expires in 2026 and the team is primed for a rebuild the second the face of the franchise leaves. Unless the lottery balls fall right for the Wizards, there is no reason to believe they can turn around their moribund franchise by 2028.
At first, when I read this news late on the 12th, I wanted to pass it off as political maneuvering by Virginia. I wanted to take a breath and sleep on the news to see if I would still be mad. When I woke up, the anger was worse. Watching Leonsis debase himself in the name of his profit made me feel cheated and lied to. I looked up to Leonsis, believing him to be a model businessman and community leader. I would have given up everything to work for him. Now, I do not know what to believe about the man I thought I knew.
