The dealmaking between Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Monumental Sports & Entertainment founder & CEO Ted Leonsis “accelerated over the summer” after local leaders -- including Alexandria Mayor Justin Wilson -- “were brought to the table” to discuss the proposed plan of building a new sports and entertainment district in Potomac Yard for the Wizards and Capitals, according to Cuneyt Dil of AXIOS. In early November, Leonsis said that he “wanted extensive upgrades to Capital One Arena,” but on the morning of Nov. 13, sources said that Leonsis and Youngkin “met in a Falls Church office” to put the "'final touches' on the megaplan for a 70-acre sports district." Sources added that “for weeks and into this past weekend,” Youngkin “lobbied key Democrats,” including U.S. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and state Senator Adam Ebbin. Dil reported those calls “culminated in a closed-door vote on Monday” when a committee of Virginia lawmakers voted unanimously to support the project. Dil wrote Wednesday’s announcements is also “one of the biggest embarrassments in years for the D.C. government,” which “looks outfoxed” by Virginia politicians. The “conventional wisdom” in D.C. was that Leonsis “would never really move to Virginia.” And that he was “just using the threat to convince the city to pour hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars toward renovating Capital One Arena,” but when Leonsis “first toured the site at Potomac Yard, he was blown away” (AXIOS, 12/14).
A LACK OF CONVICTION: In D.C., Candace Buckner wrote “like a child spoiled by a lifetime of ‘yes,’ and as the possessor of the shiny toy that all the other neighborhood kids want to play with,” Leonsis “snatched up his teams and left for a construction lot across the Potomac.” Leonsis is proposing to take professional basketball away from a “basketball-loving city.” For his team that claims its “#ForTheDistrict on its X profile,” however, this “isn’t just a move to another state.” Buckner wrote, in taking the Wizards out of D.C., Leonsis “threatens to take D.C. -- their very soul -- out of the Wizards.” If Bowser thought, “He’ll never leave D.C.,” then that “arrogance and gullibility should define her legacy as the mayor who lost two teams at once.” But Leonsis’s “rapaciousness to become a superpower in sports and forsake any civic responsibilities to a neighborhood at its most vulnerable time,” along with the District’s “dawdling, will mortally wound Washington as a major sports hub” (WASHINGTON POST, 12/14). A WASHINGTON POST editorial stated D.C.’s “lack of urgency was disastrous but, unfortunately, typical.” Too many city leaders, especially on the D.C. Council, “still think they’re operating in a pre-pandemic world” where downtown businesses -- and the revenue streams they generate -- “can be taken for granted. That world is gone.” City officials’ “relative indifference” to Leonsis’s “clear signals that he would move the Caps and Wizards is symptomatic of the city’s long-standing failure to understand what it takes to create and sustain a favorable business climate” (WASHINGTON POST, 12/14).
