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A Capitals Examiner exclusive interview with Ted Leonsis

 

I want to thank the entire Capitals Public Relations staff and especially Mr. Leonsis for agreeing to this interview. You should find some very interesting stuff on what the team plans to do going into this year, what Ted learned from the 'Jagr years,' why he isn’t hands on in every area, and why Mr. Leonsis thinks that Alexander Ovechkin is even more impressive off the ice than on. Please enjoy!

 

 

 

Ted Leonsis: Yeah, of course.

 

 

TL: (Pause) Well I’m not sure what you were trying to get at with that question. …(Pause)… Well, so thirty teams start out each year and they have one uber goal in mind which is to win a Stanley Cup. So each year one team can say it had been successful, and twenty-nine teams can say they failed. And that is one harsh way to look at a season. And so Pittsburgh won the Stanley Cup this year and so twenty-nine teams failed in that quest. So just in the harsh light of sports reality, that is absolutely true.

 

I remember a poll in pro football about who were the biggest losers in pro-football history and the Buffalo Bills in a decade had been called the biggest losers because they had gone to four Super Bowls and lost all four times. Not that they had won four conference Championships, and sold out every game, it was they had lost four games, thus they had lost four Super bowls, thus they had become the biggest losers.

 

 

TL: (Interrupting) Yes I expected us to sellout every game this year. Which pretty much we did. We are sold-out right now, every game next year.

 

 

TL: Umm,.. I think it’s fragile. I think if we deliver on one of my goals which was to have a generationally great team where we are always in the playoffs, we are always competing for a Stanley Cup and we win one along the way, I believe we will be a hockey town, where we’re top of mind. (Pause)..Like when you go to Philadelphia, the Flyers are top of line, Boston, the Bruins are top of line. So why can’t we take the position as one of the top four sports? And depending on how good we are, the city can respect the hockey team as much as the football and basketball and baseball team. 

 

 

TL: Oh, youth hockey is booming here locally. I mean Kettler Capitals iceplex we built and we’re sold out every hour of ice. And it’s mostly youth hockey, junior hockey, pick-up hockey. So I mean we see it everyday. The parking lot is filled 24/7 as people use the ice!

 

 

TL: ...I would say that youth hockey is important. Although I would say that you can have the best infrastructure the best marketing, the best youth hockey, but if you don’t have a team that the community can fall in love with, and it doesn’t ultimately win, you can’t get to that point. You know one of the things that happened in our market is that we added a bunch of young players who are homegrown and are growing up. So our fans, they feel like these kids have grown up in front of their eyes. The passion for these players that we’ve drafted and developed, Alex Ovechkin, Nicklas Backstrom, Semin, Mike Green, is much deeper than a team that gets thrown together that has new players all the time because the fans don’t identify with them that much. Secondly the style that we play, we probably have the most exciting team in the league. We have the most transcendent star maybe in all of sports. I could make the argument that Alex Ovechkin is the most important player to his sport, than any other sports. Who is the Alex Ovechkin of the NFL?

 

 

TL: Who is it?

 

 

TL: So in the NBA you’d probably say…

 

 

TL: Right..you’d probably say LeBron.  Well that’s pretty rarefied company, right?

 

 

TL: Right, so we have a great team, that’s growing, and growing up together. It’s having good outcomes. You know we made the playoffs; we went into the second round of the playoffs, game seven with the eventual Stanley Cup champs. But we play an exciting game and we have this transcendent superstar player combined with up-and-coming players and it’s the combination of all of that, that makes this a hockey town.

 

 

LT: Yeah of course, you learn from your experiences, but also there was a new reality which was the salary cap. I look around the league right now and who is on the trading block around the league? And it’s high priced older free agents that are signed, that the teams want to get rid of, not our team! That other teams want to get rid of because they are hamstrung in the salary cap era. Right, so they sign a thirty-one year old player to a seven or eight year deal at eight million dollars or nine million dollars a year, and a year or two in they say ‘oh my god, what did I do!’

 

 

TL: We have great young players and great prospects. You know every team needs help on defense and we think we have two fine young defensemen who could perhaps make our team in Karl Alzner and John Carlson, Both first round picks. Very young, think they can top four defenseman in the NHL for a long-long time.

 

The center position is becoming more and more important, especially in light of the two teams who were in the final the last two years, Detroit and Pittsburgh have unbelievable strength down the middle. Our pick last year, the first round pick Brent Gustafson is a center and we’d like to see have a chance to make the team, but we think we need more strength and depth at center.

 

And then goaltending, we think we’re unbelievably well positioned at goal. Varlamov, Neuvirth, Jose Theodore, Brent Johnson, we have too many good goaltenders! (laughing) And then wing! Well I think we have some of the best wings in the league, with Ovechkin and Semin.

 

 

TL: No, not at all. (I’m assuming from the tone that this means no they won’t be strong players.

 

 

TL: Bruce loves his job. Probably because he toiled so long in the minor league and he realizes what a joy it is to be in the NHL. And he’s made our team a happy team. The team has great chemistry, great camaraderie, and I believe that’s been a great part of his performance improvement. They like each other, they like the fans, they like the city, they like the franchise, it’s an upbeat positive team, not a cranky team. That’s kind of my personality (laughing) that’s kind of Bruce’s personality; the teams become reflective of their management and leadership. You know Bruce thinks these young men have to embrace and really enjoy it, and if they play that way, they’ll get better results.  

 

 

TL: (Interupting) You know it’s funny that you say that...

 

 

TL: Well I’ll give you a great example. So I was in Las Vegas for the award ceremony and I was with George McPhee on three separate occasions and then I flew back over the weekend and then yesterday I was working at another one of my offices and I came into to the Caps office at around three o’clock and I came in to the office and turned on my computer to read my e-mail that we had hired an assistant coach. And I laughed because I didn’t know if we had interviewed anybody and I certainly wasn’t asked permission and I said, ‘if only people knew!’ They probably think the owners like me are deeply involved but I read that we hired Bob Woods!

 

 

TL: Nope. Now why is that? One, I trust Bruce. George trusts Bruce. Bruce has to make that decision on who his coaching assistant is gonna be. How could the owner tell a coach, ‘this is who you're gonna hire as your assistant.’ Someone is gonna run your practices and travel with you, and be in the bunker with you. And the guy they hired just won a championship in the AHL. So, I mean they made the right choice and no they didn’t have to run it by me. So yes I guess I am hands-on, but there’s a real life case, you can’t be that hands on!

 

 

TL: Well I’m obsessive about that. I want to make sure we innovate, I want to make sure we invest in it; I want to make sure our fans can always count on us to have the best platform for interactivity, and I talk to those people all the time.

 

 

TL: No I’m not amazed. He is a remarkable young man and a very gifted young athlete. He amazes in ways most don’t see. I just remember the beginning of last season he showed up early to the office before the veterans are supposed to report, and the rookies were practicing, and he came in the second day and said to Bruce, ‘I want to play with them, I’m here, I’ll play with them.’ So here’s Alex Ovechkin the reigning MVP playing, playing his butt off with a bunch of undrafted rookies. Two days later our rookies are playing the Flyers rookies at a 3 o’clock game, and Alex came in the morning and skated, and he comes back and he watches our rookies play the Flyers rookies. And we beat them 7-1. Alex Ovechkin is a rink rat! He came to our rink to watch our rookies play the Flyers rookies! Then a week later we have our first exhibition game, and he plays in it. And then the next day we have a practice and then the team takes a bus to Philadelphia to play the next night in Philadelphia, and the coach says to Alex, ‘you’re not playing. You’re not going to Philadelphia. There’s no need for you to play back-to-back games, and play an exhibition game in Philadelphia.’ So the bus leaves with the players, and I’m home that night and George McPhee calls me and says, ‘you won’t believe this but Alex and his brother drove to Philadelphia on their own to watch the team.’

 

 

TL: Right! So you go, ‘who does that?’ I wouldn’t have asked him to do that, and if I would’ve asked him to do something like that he probably would have said no and I wouldn’t have been offended.  But those are the kinds of things that an MVP, a real leader does. You can’t script it, you can’t ask for it. It’s just remarkable and it’s just instinctive. So what he does on the ice is amazing but it’s often what he does off the ice that is even more impressive.

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