I had to double check just now, but I’ve still got the email.
Ten years ago, almost to the month, Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis sent me a message with some career advice. At that point, I was a nobody. A 27-year-old copy editor at a newspaper who spent way too much time writing about hockey at a blogspot site. The path to becoming even a beat writer felt a long way away.
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At that time, however, there was a fledgling blog network called SB Nation, and it had just hired an ambitious new CEO named Jim Bankoff. And he was trying to convince me to join them.
It wasn’t until I heard from Leonsis that I understood what the opportunity meant.
“I am best friends with Jim Bankoff,” Leonsis wrote in the email. “He worked for and with me for 12 years at AOL. This will be a terrific opportunity for you.”
So I signed on to be the manager of NHL blogs. It was a turning point in my career, and, in some ways, it laid the foundation for what we’ve created here at The Athletic over the past 18 months. Bankoff, meanwhile, has become a media mogul, building the Vox Media empire into a billion-dollar company.
I first met Leonsis at a game in D.C., a year before the SBN offer. At the time, the Capitals were in a miserable spot at the bottom of the standings, and he was trying to change the culture around the franchise. One of the ways he did so was to invite plenty of bloggers into the press box to talk about his team.
For the final game of the 2006-07 season, that meant me. For some reason, Leonsis went a step further, inviting me to watch the game with him and his son Zach in the owner’s suite.
This was the piece I eventually wrote about that visit and our subsequent conversations on the phone, which were mostly about how he was attempting to fix the then-struggling Capitals. He was incredibly gracious with his time, more so than any owner I’d dealt with, then or since.
“I do have confidence now that I know how to run startups and turnarounds,” Leonsis said of how he decided to tear down their roster before getting Alex Ovechkin in the 2004 draft. “We weren’t achieving our goals. We had a team, on paper, that was very good and we were underachieving both on the ice and at the box office and we needed to fix that. The only way we could do that was by being a risk taker and saying ‘What we’re doing isn’t working — let’s be honest with ourselves. We need to establish a new team identity and we need to have a core of players that grow up together and are battle tested together.’
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“We were very fortunate to get Ovechkin in the draft, and (Alex) Semin came over and he was a very young player and a top 10-12 goal scorer and will only get better and our young defencemen are starting to play… They’re going to have their hard knocks, but they’re good young players. There’s no shortcut for it.”
As it turned out, that was prophetic.
I don’t imagine Leonsis ever envisioned taking “the long way” would mean it would be another 11 years before they finally won. But, as Dom Luszczyszyn pointed out in this great piece on Thursday, the Capitals have had so many good teams over the years — better than this one, in fact — that fell short.
Since my conversations with Leonsis, starting with the 2007-08 season, no franchise has put up more regular-season points than Washington.
So winning the Stanley Cup on Thursday was truly just reward for that period of sustained excellence. Excellence that started with Leonsis realizing 15 years ago that they had to rebuild and draft star talent — a group that included Ovechkin, Nick Backstrom, John Carlson, Braden Holtby, Dmitri Orlov and Evgeny Kuznetsov, who were all selected between 2004 and 2010, creating the foundation for a championship in 2018.
The Capitals’ owner helped lead the way to that rebuild, going the same route that the Penguins and Blackhawks did — albeit without the more immediate payoff those teams received.
What I learned back then is Leonsis is a very smart man. He could see what was and wasn’t working with his hockey team, in the years after he bought them back in 1999. But he could also see what was and wasn’t working in sports media, all those years ago, when he declared newspapers were dying and a site like SB Nation the future.
More than that vision, though, what impressed me about my experience with Leonsis was his humility. He interacted with everyone around the team. He embraced his fan base to the extent he opened the press box to those who wanted to write about his team. He was a champion of hockey’s nascent blogosphere when much of the league was very much against it, realizing that it would become a key way to connect the Capitals and the NHL directly to the die-hard fan.
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Ten years later, Leonsis has an incredibly successful franchise in a number of respects, with a massive base of support and impressive revenues. Unsurprisingly, some of the best team-focused hockey blogs, like Japers’ Rink, are Washington based. And few metropolitan areas in North America are growing faster in hockey participation than the Greater Washington area, something that traces its roots directly back to drafting Ovechkin and the Capitals’ subsequent success.
This Cup win will only accelerate that growth.
A lot of the credit for that, given where the Capitals were when he bought the team 20 years ago, goes back to Leonsis. He saw where the franchise needed to go and pointed them in that direction.
It just took a little longer than expected to get the ultimate prize.
Main photo: Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports