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But he’ll be doing a game broadcast for Amazon on Thursday, when he returns to Capital One Arena to do color commentary for the Wizards’ game against the Milwaukee Bucks. That isn’t a coincidence. The organization is also honoring Wall, the team’s all-time leader in assists (5,282) and steals (976) during the game, which is being billed as “John Wall appreciation night,” part of multiple festivities honoring Wall, the top pick in the 2010 draft. “John is in our pantheon,” Wizards owner and governor Ted Leonsis said.
And that makes Thursday more special for Wall. “I think just feeling the love, getting that appreciation,” Wall said. “And I think most for me, just seeing my kids (Ace and Amir) there. That’s what it’s all about for me. They didn’t get to see me play in the element and be here, but they was born here. And they get to see what’s it’s all about. And I think bringing my friends back, everybody, kind of like when I came back and played, when I was with the Clippers. “Feeling that kind of love, but now it’s like I don’t have to play. I’ll be sitting on the sidelines, broadcasting, in a new career, new role for me.”
The team is not retiring his jersey on Thursday. The latest chapter in that saga came at Trae Young’s introductory news conference Jan. 9, when he incorrectly said that Wall’s No. 2 was going up in the rafters at this celebration. Honest mistake. But since Young brought it up: What about that, Ted? “No one should feel insecure about our relationship with John,” Leonsis said in a conference room at the team’s downtown offices earlier this month. “It’s not going to happen on bobblehead night. Really? Do you think we would do something big and important with a bobblehead? We’re not announcing anything (Thursday). “I look at it as, we’re in this long relationship with John. He’s the most important player since I’ve owned the team, and we have a great relationship. I don’t feel like I really need to address it. It will happen when it happens.”
Greg Rosenstein: Ted Leonsis says he wants to buy the Nationals and D.C. United. Called it a “mistake” to look outside the local market. On Nats: Leonsis has a good relationship with the Lerner family but “it takes two to tango and they aren’t ready to sell.” @CNBC #gameplan25
Ted Leonsis: “My teams aren’t for sale, but I’m rooting for them to get the highest valuation possible. It’s a gem of a property. My organization does more revenues than the Celtics. Now, I own a basketball team, a hockey team, a women’s team, the building, the network. I think that’s the trend. I think you’ll see lots of mergers. You have to get scale. If you’re to be a media company, you have to build the audience. You have to be able to build a way to cross-promote year-round. That’s why all these real estate areas are popping up. Hey, we’re going to bring people in, can they spend a couple hours beforehand or after the game? So we’re running these as really, really big businesses.”
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“We weren’t tanking. We were developing players. It’s a little different than maybe what some of the other teams’ strategy was,” said Leonsis, CEO of Monumental Sports & Entertainment, which also owns the NHL’s Capitals and WNBA’s Mystics.
Better late than never for Ted Leonsis and Muriel Bowser. The owner of the Wizards, Capitals and Mystics, along with the G League’s Go-Go, and Washington’s mayor took their victory lap Thursday morning, in what will, if all goes according to plan, be a centerpiece of an $800 million renovation of Capital One Arena. The renovation will keep the Wizards and Capitals in the building through their 2049-50 seasons and allow for additional future events to be held in the building, which is open approximately 220 to 230 nights a year.
“I think the mayor’s being modest,” Leonsis said after a ceremonial groundbreaking, which included NBA commissioner Adam Silver and local officials who helped get the legislation through the city council. “As we were starting to iterate our showings of preliminary plans, she said ‘make it more connected to D.C.,'” Leonsis continued. “‘Make it modern, airy, I want to see a lot of light. I want to see connection with the streets … there will be now, just as there is at the art museum across the street, a roof that will connect this. And this, still, you’ll be able to walk through from 6th Street to 7th Street. We’ve been able to amalgamate, if you will, a sizable footprint. And once you have the space, you can innovate, you can make those investments.”
On Tuesday, a little more than a year after Leonsis and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin announced with great fanfare a deal to build an area in the Potomac Yards neighborhood in Alexandria, Va. — a plan that collapsed under fierce opposition a few months later — the D.C. City Council formally approved $515 million in public funding for Monumental. It will allow the company to transform the arena that has been the home of the NBA and NHL teams since 1997 and bring it in line with new arenas constructed in both leagues over the last three decades. The city will also buy the arena from Monumental for $87.5 million, in line with the city’s ownership of Nationals Park and Audi Field. Monumental would then immediately lease the arena from the city in what is known as a “sale/leaseback” arrangement. For its part, Monumental is pledging $285 million toward the arena renovation. Monumental currently manages the arena venue and will continue to do so in the new arrangement. Bowser said the deal would be a “catalytic” investment in the city’s future.
Ted Leonsis: But I understand that some people in the media felt this was a juicy subject to go after. I have to live with it, and I have to live with these people and communicate with these people. And everyone has their problems. I’ll use, as an example, Bradley Beal. He was one of our [Wizards] players. He had a no-trade contract, and he wanted to be traded. He went to Phoenix. When we announced we were moving, he found it necessary to get online and say, ‘You’re making a big mistake. You shouldn’t be moving.’ I thought that was gratuitous, but I didn’t say anything. They made the playoffs and got swept in the first round. And there’s a lot of criticism of Bradley Beal. That’s how life is, right? You can criticize. Can you take the criticism back? It’s the world we live in.
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Ted Leonsis: RIP to a legend and sports icon, Jerry West. pic.twitter.com/tSQTL3LqJi
RIP to a legend and sports icon, Jerry West. pic.twitter.com/tSQTL3LqJi
— Ted Leonsis (@TedLeonsis) June 12, 2024
One detail stood out to D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser on the December morning that the billionaire owner of the Wizards and Capitals, Ted Leonsis, announced he was moving the Washington teams to Virginia: He hadn’t signed a thing. There was no contract, “no real commitment,” Bowser (D) said — only a handshake with Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) that in Bowser’s eyes meant D.C. still had a shot. From that point, Bowser said in an interview Friday, she decided, “we were going to put our foot on the gas.” Over the next several months, periodically over drinks at the Waldorf Astoria, Bowser would quietly work to bring Leonsis back to the negotiating table, sweetening D.C.’s offer just as Leonsis’s plans were falling apart in Virginia’s General Assembly. She insisted for months publicly that D.C. remained in the game. Few shared her optimism at the onset.
Bowser and Leonsis’s rekindled negotiations started with a chance encounter at the Waldorf Astoria in mid-January, about a month after Youngkin and Leonsis announced the move. Leonsis’s investment company, Revolution Growth, was holding its annual conference at the glitzy hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, blocks from Bowser’s office at the Wilson Building. After remarks from Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), Leonsis stepped out of the ballroom into the lobby — “and I literally walk into the mayor,” Leonsis said. “Ted!” she exclaimed. “I said, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’” Leonsis recalled. She’d come to the hotel for an unrelated meeting. “I said, ‘Oh, let’s sit down — I haven’t seen you in a while,’” Leonsis said — not since he told her he was moving to Virginia. As Bowser tells it, the two embraced before sitting down to talk.
Leonsis called Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and the mayor of Alexandria, Va., Justin M. Wilson, early Wednesday afternoon to inform them he had reached an agreement with Bowser, ending Monumental’s attempt to move the Wizards and Capitals to a large, undeveloped site in Alexandria’s Potomac Yard. The proposed move to Alexandria, which was announced in mid-December, met a significant roadblock in the Virginia Senate, where key lawmaker L. Louise Lucas, the chairwoman of the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee, opposed the deal. “We made tons of mistakes,” Leonsis said Wednesday night when asked whether Monumental had made errors since the December announcement about Potomac Yard. “But we manage to outcomes, and the outcome is exactly the right one.” Bowser said: “We are the current home, and the future home, of the Washington Capitals and Washington Wizards.”