![]() ![]() He even established an email address to interact personally with kibitzers.īut this past June, as the Wizards pursued their race to the bottom, Leonsis announced he was discontinuing the back and forth. Leonsis, meanwhile, has tried to create a fan-friendly atmosphere of open communication since he increased his ownership stake from minority to majority in June 2010. Kornheiser says: “Since the Gilbert Arenas incident the franchise has just been crushed, and they get worse all the time. Leonsis and Grunfeld promptly traded him to Orlando, and today he’s playing basketball in China according to the Washington Post’s Michael Lee, the Wizards, nearly three years later, remain “haunted” by the incident, which Barry ruefully characterizes as “people pulling guns and all that kind of crazy stuff.” (Arenas apologized and pledged “to do better in the future.”) The NBA commissioner suspended Arenas indefinitely a month later after he jokingly formed his hands into pistols and pretended to be shooting his teammates during a game against the 76ers in Philadelphia. ![]() In an insane display of oneupmanship, Crittenton allegedly produced his own gun and chambered a round. The situation turned especially dire during the 2009-10 season, when all-star guard Gilbert Arenas-he of the six-year, $111 million contract-brought four unloaded handguns into the Verizon Center locker room amid a long-running trash-talking dispute with Wizards teammate Javaris Crittenton. “In this game, your general managers and coaches don’t stay long if they’re not winning.” “Too long,” Barry says with a mirthless chuckle. Yet it’s hard to remember the halcyon days of Wes Unseld and Elvin Hayes, much less the excitement of the early 2000s when Pollin lured Chicago Bulls deity Michael Jordan out of retirement to be the Wizards player–president–minority owner before Pollin fired him after two seasons, Jordan led the team to the sort of respectable won-loss record it can only dream about today.Ĭoaches and players have come and gone the Wizards changed their uniforms (from red-white-and-blue to teal-and-gold and back again) and their taglines (from the chest-thumping “Ready to Rule” to the appropriately humble “Character, Commitment, Connection”), and Marion Barry is not alone in marveling at the miraculous survival skills of president of basketball operations Ernie Grunfeld, who assumed Jordan’s duties in June 2003 and remains to this day. In the Wizards’ incarnation as the Bullets (a name that was changed in 1997, during the second Barry administration, out of then-owner Abe Pollin’s wish to dissociate the team from D.C.’s rampant gun violence), they actually won the championship in 1978. It’s difficult to pinpoint when-and especially why-things began to turn completely sour. “It seems at this point that dysfunction and defeatism are institutionally baked into the culture of the team.” He spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to antagonize former AOL mogul Ted Leonsis, the Wizards’ current owner. “It’s just too painful,” says a wealthy fan who, with an associate, spends over $100,000 a year for four seats on the floor and sometimes has trouble filling them. “For a dollar, you could bring a date and still have enough money left over for bubblegum.” ![]() “At one point tickets were selling on StubHub for as low as 35 cents,” Russert says. Yet many fans are simply not showing up, leaving plenty of empty space these days in the 20,000-seat Verizon Center. “Right now, I have more hope for Congress than I do for the Wizards,” says Russert, who loyally (masochistically?) attends almost every home game. They are looking at an actual cliff that they could go over.”ĭiehard Wizards fan and season-ticket-holder Luke Russert, son of the late Meet the Press moderator Tim Russert, sees Washington dysfunction every day as a Capitol Hill correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC. “I don’t think the Wizards are looking at a fiscal cliff. “I don’t know that when people look at the Wizards, gridlock is the first thing that comes to mind,” Kornheiser says. At which point the Wizards might even surpass Congress and the White House as the gold (well, maybe the fool’s gold) standard of Washington dysfunction. ![]()
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