Wednesday was so important in DC sports OUTSIDE of the Commanders for a change that JP Finlay was actually in the studio on his first day back, as opposed to in Ashburn for Commanders practice and pressers.
And, so important that WaPo’s Neil Greenberg, who always joins the guys on Wednesdays to evaluate the Commanders by the analytics, scrapped both mantras to weigh in on the news that Monumental Sports made a deal to move the Capitals and Wizards to Alexandria.
“I was a little bit surprised that a deal was struck; DC apparently made a late push, but hey, it looks like the Capitals and Wizards are going to Virginia, and this is a big deal in the scope of money,” Greenberg said. “Historically, any time a government gets involved in the stadium business, it mostly never works out for the taxpayers.”
Greenberg thinks the chances of this happening, as opposed to when the Redskins tried it in the 1990s, are high, just because Amazon set the precedent for development there – and even with the downturn in economics in the Capital One Arena area, it took DC until the literal eleventh hour to announce their own plan to keep Leonsis in the city.
“There’s nothing down there; there’s very few happy hours down there, a lot of office space that's being used, and restaurants are having trouble,” Greenberg said. “It’s a hard sell to me. Pregame stuff was pretty strong in the pre-pandemic days, and that’s not the case anymore. From a business standpoint, when someone else is offering you other people's money, that's a tough thing to turn down. That’s how the rich get richer, so to be enticed by a clean slate, that’s tough to say no to.”
Later, when fellow WaPo reporter Teo Armus, who covers the Metro region overall, came on after attending the Alexandria presser, he echoed a lot of Greenberg’s thoughts.
“The biggest takeaway, which Gov. Youngkin emphasized, is that he was confident enough in this deal to make a public announcement,” Armus said. “He compared this to the Amazon dals, so there’s some level of certainty here. Obviously, a lot of questions, but enough certainty that a presser could happen.”
Armus did notice locals protesting before and during the presser with signs, seemingly not happy about the development, so there will be concerns from neighbors, taxpayers, and the Virginia general assembly alike – and there’s also the idea that Alexandria Mayor Justin Wilson, who is not running for re-election in 2024, could just be going along for the ride because he’s not going to be left holding the bag or responsible for anything.
Still, Armus talked to enough people that he also thinks the deal is pretty likely to go through eventually, even as polarized as the political climate of NoVa is with a Repubican governor but Democratic majorities at every level below.
“One of my colleagues who's based in Richmond and writes about the Virginia State legislature has reported is that literally the day after the election, Youngkin actually started reaching out to a couple of key Democratic lawmakers about some of this stuff,” Armus said. “So I think he’s certainly trying to build a coalition; obviously economic development and some of this land use planning stuff isn’t a partisan issue, so I think we're gonna have some really interesting conversations in the General Assembly about funding.”
The new Metro station at Potomac Yard, and the state of the Metro in general, vould be a big part of that.
“A lot of the reason that this is possible is that you have a brand new Metro station that just opened at Potomac Yard, but also the Metro system itself is facing a fiscal cliff,” Armus said, “so I heard from a number of Democrats who are basically kind of already trying to use this project as leverage to get Youngkin and Republicans in the General Assembly to commit to fully funding a functioning Metro system.”
Take a listen to Greenberg and Armus’ full segments above!
