Trying to Convince the President to Come to a Hockey Game

For a number of months now, Washington Caps owner Ted Leonsis has been undertaking a low key public effort to make the new president know that he's welcome at Verizon Center for a Capitals game. This past weekend, the issue came up again, this time raised by veteran play-by-play voice, Mike Emrick.

That led Johana Neuman, a political reporter for the Los Angeles Times who doesn't think much of the local owner's efforts to get Obama out to a game, to throw a whole lot of cold water on the entire enterprise:

"A local sports team known as the Washington Capitals has managed to force the first-round National Hockey League playoff series to a seventh and final game."

She continued: "To most Washingtonians, this is something of a yawn. This is a Redskins town of football nuts, a metropolitan area of Wizard basketball fanatics. Even the Nationals, worst team in baseball, have a loyal fan base. Also it's 90 degrees here. Hockey is a winter sport, played on ice."

Far be it from me to dispute the popularity of the other teams here locally -- though, truth be told, collectively, college basketball is far more popular here than the Wizards -- but one wonders what the Capitals have to do to convince some of the more willfully ignorant that they're starting to matter around town. At last report, local television ratings for the team are up 140% on Comcast SportsNet, while it's also clear that the Washington area has helped drive the growth nationally of the Versus Network, the NHL's home on national cable television.

I sent a note to Nate Ewell in the team's media relations office to get a better idea of just how well tickets sold this year. Stop me if you've heard this one before:

This past season, Washington had a club-record 29 sellouts at Verizon Center.

• 25 of the last 27 games were sold out;

• Washington's 29 sellouts were more than triple the total from 2007-08 (8);

• The Caps didn't have their second sellout last year until Feb. 24; since then 36 of the Capitals' 52 regular-season home games were sold out;

• The average attendance of 18,097 was up 17% from 2007-08 (15,473) and up 30% from Alex Ovechkin's rookie season (13,905)
  

• The team is sold out of season ticket packages for 2009-10.

Oh, and here's a kicker: Acorrding to Neuman, the Wizards are supposedly far more popular than the Caps. Unfortunately, the numbers as reported by ESPN.com (click here and here) don't support that contention. This past season, the Caps outdrew the Wizards at the gate (1.45 million to 1.38 million), while also selling a higher percentage of total seats available (96.9% to a paltry 82.4%).

While those numbers do help establish some incontrovertible facts -- such as the understanding that the Caps have more than a few fans in town and are kind of a big deal, despite what some might think -- there are plenty of other intangibles to address. Like the fact that the team features Russian winger Alex Ovechkin, the best hockey player on the planet and reigning league MVP. The Caps also boast the presence of veteran center Sergei Fedorov, generally acknowledged to be a future Hall of Famer and also universally loved back home in Russia.

Toss in rookie goalie sensation Simeon Varlamov, high-scoring winger Alexander Semin and veteran Viktor Kozlov, and the Caps aren't just a local story, they're an international story. The Caps have more Russian players on their roster than any other team in the NHL, something I'm sure the Russian embassy would have been more than happy to pass along to a reporter who had taken the trouble to call up and ask.

One wonders why Neuman didn't bother.