Ted Leonsis said this week that he doesn’t understand the outrage online about the Caps and Wizards moving to northern Virginia, and that ‘the die has been cast’ for that move.
Bomani Jones actually was talking to Craig Hoffman about it for so long during a commercial break Thursday that producer Anthony Haynie had to come back from break and start the segment, so Craig figured why not bring in Bomani to tell his story on air?
“There are a million angles to this story from economics to class and race to all of these different things, and Ted gave the interview to Eric Flack of WUSA-9 and had the incredible self-awareness to say, I am surprised at the outrage that has happened,’” Craig laughed. “You seem to sit at least fundamentally at the highest level where I am, where it's like, do whatever you want with the Caps man, why are you bringing the Wizards out of DC? Where do you sit on this and what angle of this is most interesting?”
That’s when Bomani told a story of his original hometown…
“I was born in Atlanta and I’m a Braves fan, and when they moved from Turner Field to Truist Bank Park, they moved from the heart of the city – to be honest, not the safest place to be in the world – and ramrodded the stadium into Cobb County, and it was ugly,” Jones said. “I didn’t like it, but I did at least understand the argument that the fan base that you're talking about would probably get there more easily, be more willing to go there. The Braves can't fight that. I get all of that.”
So how does that play into Leonsis’ situation?
“If you want to move the hockey team to Northern Virginia, if I had to guess, that's where the fans are – a great example of that is in Miami, where they moved the hockey team out of Dade County, which is very, very Espanol, and moved it to Broward, which is very, very English speaking, so it made more sense for the team to be out there,” Jones said. “I get that with the hockey team. It doesn’t make the same sense with the basketball team, because we associate basketball with DC – and we're talking about high school basketball, college basketball. Even if you move this out to Maryland; when they were in Landover, it made sense for them to be there, and it would make sense to be in Silver Spring or Bethesda, or any of those Maryland areas, but that ain’t northern Virginia.”
So, he says, it comes down to the demographics of the area versus the fans of the sport?
“To leave out of an arena that you own, in a part of town that you guys basically took on the impetus of rebuilding and building up around this basketball team, and then moving out there?” Jones said. “You’re not gonna get no new fans there! Maybe if you win 50 games for the first time in my life, and I'm 43 years old, then maybe they'll show up, but anybody with a brain can understand, you can't sell this homey, this ain't it!”
Craig agrees that it is crazy, and thinks the economic argument is a specious one, based on who the fan base will be for the teams coming to the new arena – many of which will ‘not be the core group of people who have held up your sorry franchise, that has not won 50 games since 1979.’
“Once upon a time I was looking for work all I interviewed at the Comcast DC station, and something I always remember that they told me was that whenever somebody got a whiff the Wizards might be good, the ratings would creep up,” Jones said. “People have been waiting, just give us something to do and they'd go there. It will be absolutely terrible if they finally get there and you moved out here for these people. People don’t understand the clear delineation between northern Virginia, The District, and then when you get to PG and Montgomery County – I think of DC and those two counties in Maryland as being much more together and similar than I think of northern Virginia.”