The revamp of Capital One Arena is coming, and the Junkies were hopeful that Ted Leonsis would tell them on Tuesday that getting the NHL or NBA All-Star Game to DC proper for the first time since 2001 (or ever for the NHL, technically, as the lone ASG hosted by the Caps was in Landover) would be an envisioned priority – but it seems not?
And that’s not because of anything he’s doing – Leonsis told the Junks it’s the league’s doing?
“In the NBA, the All-Star Game is under like a reconceptualization of what should we be doing to make the All-Star Game more than just a game – make it a tourist attraction, a concert and an event, and same with the NHL,” Leonsis said. “The league runs the game and that's always been my problem with it. We have such passionate fans, and let's say you've owned a Caps season ticket on the glass, and then the All-Star Game comes and the league reaches out to you and says your ticket on the glass, we're giving to our sponsors, and you can buy tickets first row in the 400 section. Our season ticket holders call us and go, this is how you're rewarding my loyalty? And we say, well, we don't run the game, the league runs the game, and that happens and that's kind of the feedback you get. And with us being such a busy building, plotting these in is maybe not a crucial deliverable for our fans.”
That said, if you ask for it…
“We listen to the fans, and if they think it's something really, really important, certainly we can't do anything while we're re-conceptualizing the building, and that's gonna take four years,” Ted said. “We can't do anything yet because we don't have the plans or approvals, and we also have to work in conjunction with the city and this downtown redevelopment effort.”
It’s that effort, to Leonsis, that might be ‘the most important thing we can do.’
“We can’t look at the arena just as a separate stand-alone thing, because we've seen how the mall next door went under, but now it has new ownership that’s fantastic and it is communicating with us,” he said. “We also have an office building on Sixth Street where we've moved the network, and we want to look at how we redefine DC and how we coordinate what we're doing. So we'll be pragmatic in terms of the building where we'll start on the bottom floor, we have to expand into the bottom floor of the mall where Bed, Bath & Beyond was, but that is mostly to help the players and the coaches and the employees just by giving more space. We want to make sure that we have a world-class facility for the athletes and coaches to be able to deliver, and to acccommodate concerts’ needs.”
Leonsis recalled a recent issue where a new team bus was too tall to get underneath the arena and had to deflate its tires to operate, so it starts in the undercarriage and then will move to the fan-facing areas.
“We'll start with the facility itself, then we'll move upstairs and look at what we can do in the bowl,” he said, “and then we’re gonna look at the building itself; we go up higher, could we do something on the rooftop for fans, or do a practice facility there? We were one of the first organizations to have our NBA and WNBA teams share facilities, but they might deserve their own world class facilities, so there's more flexibility in scheduling and the like. And then, it’s how do we integrate with the mall next door and connect downtown? There’s a lot of work being done with the Metro and with the city planners and the police about what's the art of the possible.”
So it looks like this year is planning and then next summer would be ground-breaking for the project itself…and then?
“This is a canvas, how do we take the dollars we are gonna spend in and around our arena and get this right?”
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