OPINION:
Transparent Ted Leonsis is going to hold a block party outside of Capital One Arena Saturday night when his Wizards open their home slate of games against the Memphis Grizzlies.
He wants everyone to show up. They don’t have many parties down there these days.
They’ll have photo booths, meet-and-greets with Wizards alumni Michael Adams and Harvey Grant and a live performance by J. Addo, a DMV-based artist featured on the team’s DMV music portal.
And cops. They need them down there, especially when the party is over.
They’ll be giving away T-shirts for fans attending the game, courtesy of Robinhood, the team’s new patch partner. The typical giveaways are from retail stores in the neighborhood that still remain there. They are not partners.
It should be a festive atmosphere and a welcome one, because these days downtown Washington and the location surrounding Capital One Arena are no longer an urban revival model to be celebrated. It is a neighborhood that is fighting for survival.
Empty storefronts. Vacant restaurants. Petty theft, harassment and the smell of marijuana in the air. It’s not a wasteland by any means. But it’s not the commercial glory days, either.
The Washington Post reported that the District’s commitment to a police presence during games has decreased from 27 to just three. Transparent Ted’s company, Monumental Sports, has paid off-duty officers to be there. Sources said that the city and Monumental have also made a trade deal for more officers in exchange for recruiting advertising in the building for a chronically understaffed Metropolitan Police Department.
Mayor Muriel Bowser, who knows that crime is hurting her push to get federal workers back into empty downtown office buildings, introduced this week a package aimed at cracking down on “organized retail theft” and open-air drug markets. There certainly are parts of the District dealing with more serious levels of crime than downtown. But the lawlessness downtown has been enough to raise concerns about whether the city is doing enough to keep fans safe when they walk around the arena before games to shop, eat, drink, and gather. There is not always an opening-night block party presence and atmosphere downtown.
At a public meeting in Chinatown in August, a representative from Monumental Sports — the Leonsis company that runs the Wizards, Capitals and Mystics — complained about “open-air drug transactions” near the arena, according to the Post. And Republicans in the U.S. House have scorched the Bowser administration’s handling of the spike in robberies, carjackings, and homicides in the city.
Monumental’s advertising deal with the city speaks to the bigger issue facing the MPD — a lack of manpower. The department is down hundreds of officers and it has been difficult to attract recruits because of the police restrictions and changes enacted after George Floyd’s death in 2020. Bowser now wants to roll back some of those changes to make the job of being a police officer in the District a little less impossible.
If Bowser and her colleagues on the city council don’t turn things around, Transparent Ted has floated the possibility of moving his teams to a location in Arlington, Virginia, according to the Washington Post. Sources say those talks have cooled as the city and Transparent Ted continue negotiations over funding an estimated $400 million in improvements to the arena, which opened in 1997.
But safety issues and the lack of police coverage remain a hot-button issue in those talks between Monumental and the city, according to sources familiar with the talks.
After the arena initially opened for the 1997-1998 season, the Wizards drew 19,542, sixth in the league. But attendance dropped dramatically in the years that followed to about 15,000 per game, and the transformation of the surrounding downtown area that city officials hoped for was slow to materialize.
When Michael Jordan returned to the court in 2001, all that changed. The Wizards jumped to second in NBA attendance, averaging nearly 20,000 per game, second in the league, and downtown Washington became the place to be in the city. Jordan gave the arena the push it needed to become a destination spot and economic engine.
They’ve struggled with attendance, though, in recent years with a string of five straight losing seasons. Last year the team reported an average attendance of 17,328 per game, ranked 21st in the NBA. But they finished last in the league in the percentage of filling the house, at 84%.
With a team in rebuilding mode, there’s not likely going to be much of a party atmosphere at Wizards game this season. But at least they want you to feel safe down there. The basketball may be scary enough.
You can hear Thom Loverro on The Kevin Sheehan Show podcast.
• Thom Loverro can be reached at tloverro@washingtontimes.com.
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