Picking Splinters

As Caps Rebuild, Leonsis Looks to Internal Foundation of Youth

By Mike Hume

“Did you see the game?”

It’s a day after Team Russia’s victory over Canada in the Olympics and as Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis moves around his office at AOL, he is psyched — and with good reason. Not only has first-season wunderkind Alexander Ovechkin just sent the gold-medal favorites home to the Great White North, but the Russian team, heck, Olympic hockey as a whole, is validating his team’s year of hardships.

Two years ago a fire sale of high salaried players that included favorites Peter Bondra and Sergei Gonchar left a bitter taste in the mouths of Caps fans and last year’s lockout let that taste linger. Even now, Washington’s 45 points position them as the owners of the league’s fourth-worst record. Such a gloomy past and lackluster present might be cause for an owner who has lost millions on this team to despair. However, watching the Olympics, Leonsis sees the future.

It’s all falling into place now. It’s starting to pay off. Gone are the blasé attitudes that made the Caps perennial underachievers pre-lockout. Taking their place, and their contracts, are fresh faces with young legs and a determination to achieve all they can while playing the game they love. That combination, coupled with team unity, is what Leonsis and the Caps are striving for as the franchise moves forward.

“You can’t undermine the importance of a cohesive locker room,” says Leonsis. Before the lockout, under former head coach Bruce Cassidy and with an unhappy Jaromir Jagr, accounts of the Caps’ locker room indicated it was about as cohesive as oil and water.

Leonsis says the team is now pursuing “players that over-index on coachability and team togetherness [rather] than sheer raw talent.

“The Russians, who have always had a lot of talent, are playing well because now they’re talking about team and heart and grit, not ‘how many goals did I score.’”

The unity and increased effort the Caps have already demonstrated prior to the Olympic break has seemingly resonated with fans. After sporting the largest post-lockout attendance drop-off and the smallest crowds in the league at the start of the season, the Caps have recently climbed out of that particular basement and passed Chicago, Nashville, Anaheim and Florida in total attendance.

“I think the Caps are on an upswing,” Leonsis says. “The mistakes that we make are from inexperience, not from lack of effort. I think that’s what the fans are coming to love about this team.”

It’s not all sunshine and lollipops for the Caps quite yet. The team still figures to finish the season in the red, and attendance is still poor (their mark of 13,684 is the second lowest average in the league). Due to the drop, Leonsis anticipates losing $3 million in gate revenues from 2003-04. Aside from Ovechkin (70 points), no other Capital has more than 30. Nonetheless, Leonsis sees the tide turning and uses the Olympics as evidence.

“I watch what happened to the American team and I don’t think it was an upset,” Leonsis says. “I think the new NHL and the way the Olympics are constructed — it puts a lot of emphasis on young legs.”

Young legs are something the Caps will have in abundance thanks to the pre-lockout trades and what should be another high draft pick after this season. They also might be adding some youth before the trading deadline. Leonsis indicated that both veteran defenseman Brendan Witt and forward Jeff Friessen could be changing sweaters before the end of the week.

While Leonsis believes the Caps need to add blue line and scoring help, he says the team’s top need is for a swift and (here comes that word again …) young centerman. Fortunately this year’s draft class contains several such players who could fit that bill, such as Phil Kessel (U. Minnesota), Jordan Staal (Petersborough Petes, OHL) and Peter Mueller (Everett Silvertips, WHL)

That need will likely not be met through free agency, however. Not only does Leonsis believe it judicious to wait until the free agency limit creeps down from 32 to 27-years-old before diving back into the market, but he’s also cautioned by the failed example of the Pittsburgh Penguins’ premature spending.

The challenge for Leonsis’s slow growth plan will be to keep the fan base stimulated. Even during the best of times the Caps have had trouble filling seats. When the team made its run to the Stanley Cup finals playoff tickets were readily available.

Leonsis admits that D.C. has never proven to be a great hockey town, and that it’s up to the Capitals to change that. Since the high-priced free agent route didn’t fill seats, Leonsis is now hoping that building from within will generate fan attachments to the team’s core players.

“The community needs to feel they know the players and they’ve grown up with the players. We want guys who wear Eric Fehr Hershey Bears jerseys,” he says, referring to one of his top prospects.

He does not believe the attendance problem is due to geography or disinterest in the league. League wide, Leonsis says that the NHL sells just as many tickets as the NBA. However, the NBA receives exponentially higher revenue for its first few rows of seats and from its national television deals.

In order to reach that status, the game is going to have to grow and that’s why he’s excited to see the NHL sign with Comcast’s upstart sports channel OLN rather than with old partner ESPN.

“It was really about who will help promote game in the post-lockout era and who really wanted the game,” Leonsis says. “And I don’t think we really got that feeling from ESPN.”

He believes that the cable giant’s plethora of channels, such as Comcast Sportsnet, will help bring the game to more living rooms, increasing the game’s exposure.

Continued participation by NHLers in the Olympics will also help the game’s exposure, though the status of the league’s participation in the 2010 games in Vancouver is up for debate. For his part, Leonsis believes that decision ultimately won’t lie with the owners.

“From a business perspective it’s a bad thing. It plays havoc with your schedule, it takes your most important product — your players — and if a player gets hurt they’re under your contract … if a player sustains a career-ending injury, you pay for it,” Leonsis says. “But we’re a players league and if Alexander Ovechkin really wants to play for Mother Russia in the Olympics, then we have to be supportive of our players. If players really want to go, and go to the league and the owners, and say that this is really important to them, then we’ll be going.”

And if things go according to plan, then come 2010 Leonsis could be boasting about the Olympic performances of more than just Alexander Ovechkin.