Steve Whyno covers the Capitals for the AP so he was at the big presser Wednesday night, and as he told Chris Russell and Lynnell Willingham he sees it a little differently than some: as a happy ending?
“I feel like it was the happy ending that DC deserved, and what the Capitals and Wizards deserved out of this entire process, that they’re ultimately staying,” Whyno said. “This is what should have happened all along.
It took a very winding roller coaster trip to maybe to go to Virginia, and calling the Governor of Maryland and all these other things, but ultimately, this is where these teams belong. This is an arena that revitalized the Chinatown neighborhood and will continue to do that with this construction project, and it really is the ending that should have happened. As soon as the Virginia announcement happened, what many of us said was they're not gonna really move, they're not gonna actually do this, because this is where these teams belong, and that's what it seemed like happened after all.”
The lease now runs through 2050, though, at which point even the revitalized Cap One will be 50-plus years old – so do we really see them staying there in a half-century old space?
“Let's see what the renovations do; I was just at Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia recently, a building around the same vintage of the mid-nineties, and they poured in $400 million there and that's a building that could last another 25 years,” Whyno said, “If the Caps and Wizards and Monumental do the right things in terms of upgrading the infrastructure there and do the right things to the arena, I could see them certainly being there in 2050, but certainly maybe 10, 15, 20 years from now starting to have a discussion about a new building. Who knows what's gonna happen to the RFK site, whether the Commanders are going to be there, or there's gonna be a Wizards practice facility there or in Chinatown, but there are other spaces in the city now that there's a working relationship between Monumental and the DC mayor's office.”
Mayor Bowser said the MSE deal doesn’t take the Commanders out of the running to come back to DC, even as Josh Harris says he’s talking to all three DMV locales, but could that RFK part of town end up actually becoming the nexus of the NBA and NHL teams instead?
“The door is open to that. The whole point of this agreement is it keeps the teams in the District of Columbia, and fighting over the lease is put to bed, and now it's the Commanders’ move, right?” Whyno said. “Once the land gets transferred to the District from the federal government, it is a matter of, can the commanders figure out a deal for a stadium, or a practice facility, or both on that space? And if they can't, the city can do what it wants with that land. Then it becomes an interesting question of does Ted Leonsis want to build that entertainment complex at RFK in Capitol Hill East rather than here, but right now, the focus is fixing up this arena, making Chinatown kind of the entertainment district Ted Leonsis envisioned, and kicking the can down the road on RFK.”
Take a listen to Whyno’s entire segment above, as he discusses possible capacity changes to Cap One as part of the renovations, the Caps’ current playoff push, and more!