You heard it straight from the source today: Ted Leonsis told the Junks that he is interested in buying the Nationals, and will “make a credible and strong offer” – perhaps the $2.4 million, or somewhere near it, the Lerners reportedly want because that’s what the Mets sold for.
“I think so, I think it makes a lot of sense for us,” he said when asked about making another bid. “From a strategy standpoint, it makes sense, but the team's not officially for sale. We're very close partners with the Lerners and so we have nothing but friendly relationships with them, but they're business people and we're business people, so we will make a credible and strong offer, and we'll continue speaking. I'm very interested but there's no rush; their season just started and the Mystics season is starting tonight, we all have other pursuits – but they're not going anywhere, and I'm not going anywhere either. We’ll do it in a dignified way, and it’s possible they may not want to sell it.”
Leonsis added that the report he offered $1.8 billion for the team was ‘way low’ and his offer was ‘very credible,’ but ‘there was a lot going on with the family, and these are assets with a lot of emotional and community attachment to them.’
In his visit to the Junks Tuesday, Leonsis broke news of two Mystics games in June moving to Capital One Arena, then doted on 25 years of owning the Capitals – and within that, Cakes flat out asked, after Ted noted how challenging owning multiple teams is, if he would be interested in adding to the Caps, Wizards, Mystics, and Go-Go.
And of course, that answer is yes, and Ted would love to be the only owner to have three major pro teams in the same market.
“We want to make Washington DC the greatest city, we wanna make our network the most important local network, and we need year-round programming. We need to have scale so that we can compete with the New Yorks and the L.A.s as a community,” Leonsis said. “So having winter programming with Caps and Wizards, and then summer programming with a baseball team and the Mystics, and owning the venues, I think we can compete from a business standpoint and from a revenue standpoint with those really big markets. And in baseball, you need to have a big base of revenues to be able to afford putting great lineups out there – look at what Baltimore has done, which is remarkable.”
As Ted has learned from what he does own, ‘I don’t think I can add that value’ in day-to-day operation, choosing to trust his sports people, but ‘it makes sense for sports fans for us to have DC, a small city compared to New York or Los Angeles, get that feel.’
“If we could build the revenues, we'd be the only organization on the planet that owns basketball, hockey, baseball, the venues, and the network, so we should be able to continue to feed the excellence because of the business model,” he said. “It makes sense to be able to have year-round programming, especially if you own your own network.”
And if you didn’t think Ted was serious about being all in on DC after keeping Monumental here?
“I’m going to Las Vegas soon to sell tech companies and other outlets on coming to DC – a radical change in strategy in a couple months,” he joked. “You never know how things are gonna end up. That's what I told our mayor: let's be nice to each other, continue to be straightforward and communicate, because you never know what the outcomes are going to be. Yesterday, I read in the paper that the Waldorf Astoria is having a hard time downtown; they're looking for a new owner, so I sent an email saying, you know, that couch that the mayor and I met on all the time, we got to buy it before it goes in the foreclosure, and have it as some kind of trophy somewhere, either in our building or in City Hall.”
Listen to Leonsis’ entire segment above!
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