When Capitalism Meets Stewardship
Take the Money and Run, but Don't be Upset if You Have to Walk it Back.
(Photo credit All-Pro Reels)
There hasn’t been much to be happy about in 2023 as a Wizards fan, but tempered expectations on the court were to be anticipated given the team's clear path towards a franchise rebuild. After firing team president Tommy Sheppard and trading away franchise player Bradley Beal to the Phoenix Suns it was very easy to understand that the Wizards would take a few years to get back to playoff contention, but what’s not easy to comprehend is that whenever the Wizards do reach their on court goals it potentially won’t be happening in the District.
Wednesday morning the Wizards officially announced that they have reached an agreement on the framework of a partnership with the state of Virginia to create a new business district in Alexandria's Potomac Yard area that will ultimately be the new homes of the NHL’s Washington Capitals and the NBA’s Washington Wizards. The Wizards have been in downtown D.C. since Abe Pollin moved the team there in 1997 playing in what once was the MCI Center, the Verizon Center, and now Capital One Arena.
In 1997 downtown D.C. was in total despair and the building of the MCI Center was the catalyst in revitalizing D.C.’s Chinatown area for the last two decades. From a November 30th, 1997 Washington Post article, Pollin is quoted as the building of the downtown arena as some of his life’s most important work.
"I walk through that building [and] I get tears in my eyes. . . . It's unbelievable," Pollin said. "I've got everything I've ever done in my life on the line. I've pledged everything. My advisers think I'm nuts. But I wanted to do something special for my town."
In recent speeches and talks around the city, Pollin has couched the project as a gift to Washington — his town — for helping make him a successful businessman.
"I don't want to sound corny," he said during a recent interview, but "this is the nation's capital. It's been good to me all my life. And I decided to do it. Not everything is dollars and cents."
The stark contrast in the difference between the approaches from Abe Pollin and Ted Leonsis has everything to do with being a steward of the community versus a billionaire chasing a bottom line. By potentially moving the Wizards out of D.C. and into the Commonwealth of Virginia, Ted Leonsis has let it be known through actions that he was never as committed to the revitalization of the city as he claimed to be. Monumental Sports and Entertainment (MSE) has leaned into representing D.C. this season in ways that make the announcement of the bolting for Virginia absolutely comical. The team’s hashtag on the social media platform X for this season has been #ForTheDistrict and they will still be donning the City Edition Jerseys with District of Columbia imprinted on the front, while simultaneously raising the question of what exactly the Wizards are doing for the District.
Let’s examine what the District has done for the Wizards in recent years. In 2016 when Ted Leonsis first started complaining about the mortgage on the then Verizon Center that cost him $36 million annually and called it “the worst building deal in professional sports,” Muriel Bowser and Events DC stepped up to help Leonsis and Monumental Sports.
At the time the Wizards had by far the worst practice court situation in the entire NBA as players were subjected to practicing on a single court in the basement of the arena that resembled something more like a small high school gymnasium, The city provided a solution by offering to build the Entertainment Sports Arena (ESA) on the St. Elizabeth’s campus in South East D.C. to help subsidize the Wizards, in the process using $65 million of taxpayer money to subsidize 90% of the cost for construction of the arena. Monumental Sports only had to pay $4.46 million, which accounted for 6.9 percent of the cost as an upfront lease payment to use the arena as the home for the Washington Mystics and the Capital City Go-Go and practice facility for all three teams.
Lost in all of the madness of the announcement of the potential Wizards move is what exactly now happens to the ESA? MSE also announced on Wednesday that they plan to move the Mystics back to Capital One Arena to play their home games. The upfront payment part is important because it leaves Monumental Sports with almost no future obligation to partner with the city on that venture once the Wizards bolt for Virginia, leaving D.C. taxpayers funding an endeavor that Ted Leonsis arbitrarily decided he no longer had use for. When the ESA was launched, Leonsis claimed to want to transform another neighborhood, but ultimately there has been little to no transformation in Congress Heights in the area surrounding the arena with even less incentive to build it up now that its occupants are leaving.
Congress Heights is just an ancillary victim in all of this, but Chinatown is the main casualty in the latest billionaire act of greed. The area has swiftly declined over the recent years after the pandemic and barely resembles the vibrant area that it once was during the 2010’s. Instead of being part of the solution to get the ball rolling on revitalizing the area, Leonsis has decided to take his ball and go to another court.
There has been a narrative building that seems to want to shift blame to D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser as if she did not act strongly or swiftly enough to make sure to keep the Wizards in the city and that only begets the question of who exactly is to blame? Sure Mayor Bowser may have been caught in a moment of naiveness of the timing of all of this, but she had been operating in good faith in the months leading up to this abrupt decision. We can’t get caught up in trying to blame Mayor Bowser and let the real villain, Leonsis walk scot-free.
It was always going to be a difficult task for the city to meet Leonsis’ request of $600 million to help renovate Capital One arena to modernize it, but my sources in D.C. government tell me that the line of communication between the city and Monumental Sports was free flowing up until the last week when Bowser and City Council Chairman Phil Mendelson were caught off guard by the news that the state of Virginia had made a substantial offer. More D.C. Council sources stated that before this week that the team leaving was not a topic of conversation in council meetings.
The assumption was always that once the city’s financial outlook was to become more stable that there would be an opportunity to make a legitimate offer. While city politicians are worrying about real world problems such as ear making extra funds for the city’s SNAP/Food Stamp program and helping residents literally eat, impatient billionaire Ted Leonsis allowed his eye to wander and seek out a better deal that worked for him financially.
It may have taken a few extra months for Bowser to find that money, but that’s the stressful nature of being a leader in a major urban city, and for the narrative to shift blame towards her is mostly unfounded. In the game of politics some people who are always looking to take shots at Bowser for any misstep, have certainly jumped at the opportunity to scapegoat her for not doing enough, when in reality there was almost no path to victory for her here. Once Ted Leonsis’ started looking at other options there was almost no way to stop him from doing what he wanted to do.
The reason Mayor Bowser made her last and final offer of $500 million is because this potential deal Leonsis has brokered with the state of Virginia is far from being completed and still has to be approved by the Virginia General Assembly and the Alexandria City Council. Not every Alexandria resident is as enthusiastic about the arena being built there as it would make an already bad traffic city borderline unbearable. If this grand plan were to fall through, Bowsers offer could become a safety net that will ironically save Monumental Sports’ bottomline, but ultimately no matter what happens almost nothing can save MSE’s and Ted Leonsis reputation for prioritizing their own needs over District community that he pledged to represent and steward.