Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Hi, I'm Jason Kelly and I'm Alex Rodriguez. On this episode of The Deal. Ted leonsis all right. So ted leonsis Alex. He is the founder, Chairman, CEO of Monumental Sports and Entertainment the Capitals of the NHL, the Mystics of the WNBA and the Wizards of the NBA, plus E Sports plus the Arena. This guy has built a literal sports empire in the nation's capital.
He has, Jason, and it's what I call the most impressive flywheel of sports with all these blue chip assets in what he calls a super city, which was very educational for us. And I just think he does an incredible job. The most impressive part he's done it all under the umbrella of Washington, d C. One of the great cities in the world.
Yeah, and he's leaning into that act. He has made a career. He even set it himself of looking just around the corner and whether that is selling his small company to AOL and then becoming the president of AOL, being a part of the biggest and maybe worst deal in all of corporate history, but then seeing before many did, how to make a business out of sports and even bringing institutional capital, and he touches all of it.
All.
Right, here's Ted Leonsis. So we like to start the show by having our guests introduce themselves and tell us what you do.
I'm Ted Leonsis. I'm a founder and chairman of Monumental Sports and Entertainment, and we own the Washington Capitals, the Washington Wizards, the Washington Mystics, Little One Arena, and the Monumental Sports RSN Network, amongst some other sports properties.
All right, we're going to get into all of that, but before we do, we also want to know what would you consider your signature deal.
So far, I don't think I have one signature deal, although I was a participant in the world's worst big deal, so maybe yeah. Talk was AOL bought Time Warner and it was the largest acquisition in history. AOL was the first Internet company to go public. We were the fastest growing company there was a decade. We were the number one performing stock. I did the deal with Google, they were a part of us. We invested in Amazon, we were it, and we bought Time Warner. The cultures couldn't
have been more different. The dot com bomb happened. Basically, it destroyed value, it destroyed web one. Oh so I guess the signature deal that I would be involved with would be the Aol Time Warner merger. I think I've done dozens of smart deals to build relationships, build platforms and the like. And you know, I've always been not about the transaction but the relationship.
So what Ted, What did you learn from that deal? What were some of the lessons you took away.
It's better to be about Main Street than Wall Street. That deal was driven by investment banks. You know, the CFOs of the offices we went from. Remember in fact, I have the sign in my office. I stole it off of the walls when I retired. You're going to build the medium that is more valuable, more important, more secure than the medium before US television and radio. And we announced the merger and our corporate mission became generate
eleven billion dollars of EBITA. I don't have an employee, I don't have an associate a partner who gets up in the morning and says, I'm going to go generate EBITA today. I need that cash flow. And so if you stay true to a mission and you make great products, and you have an authentic relationship with your partners, with your board, with your with your community. The success comes. You can't measure and build from ebita out from cash
flow out. And you know, I've seen that happen. You know, Time Warner Then was bought by eighteen T. They spun it out pretty fast. Time Warner Then was bought by Discovery David Zaslov. And it's a hard business to run. And all we think about on some of these companies is their cash flow is there even as their earnings per share? You kind of lose your way. So I'm now at a stage of my life where i have just focused on is the product great? Is the service great?
Do they love what we do? Everything will flow from that.
And so what's the moment where you decide, you know, what I want to be in sports?
Well, I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. My dad was a Greek immigrant, and he of course became a waiter. And I'm an only kid, and my mom had to work and she was a secretary piary secretary, which was temp firm. And I'd go to school and I'd get out at three o'clock and they would get home about six thirty, So there was at three and a half hours and you had a study and you had to play sports, and if you didn't, you got in trouble. And so I played Little League baseball, I played club basketball,
I played touch football. And my mom worked as a temp at the Tops Baseball card Company in Brookland. Right we're the Nets practice now. And then she got a job working for Jonathan Bush at G. H. Walker and Company, and they owned the Mets. They were part owners and the Mets, and we couldn't afford going to Yankees games or New York Giant Football games, and he would give my mother tickets, and so I grew up going to Mets games, and then my dad. My biggest Christmas gift
was season tickets to the New York Jets. Seven dollars a ticket, wow, ninety nine dollars for full season. Wow. And it was sixty eight, nineteen sixty nine. Jets won the Super Bowl, Mets won the World Series, and I lived in this very interesting neighborhood by the Sunset Park, and the teams brought the community together. I mean when the Jets won the Super Bowl, everyone came out of their apartments and beeping the horns and hugging and crying.
And it's the only day I remember my mom and dad allowing me not to go to school because they had to work. You had to go to school so they could go to work. And we went to the parade, And when we won the Stanley Cup, I told all our play the Washington One. We had a huge parade and half a million people on the mall, and I told all our players, you make eye contact with every kid, because that was me, you know, I was like you,
Matt Snell, and it was so vivid. So when the opportunity came and I had the means to buy the team, I you know, that's what compelled me. So sports had always been an important part of my life, you know, I had built a business career, and then you could just see the crescendo. If you will, love sports is about sports to the fans. Sports is about unity and holding a mirror up to the people that you serve
in the community. That's like politicians are always around sports, but it's becoming a really big business and it was way undervalued until the last decade, I would say, And so you know, I'm at that point in my life and career where I can integrate all of those experiences and try to build something that you know, can build a great legacy for the fans. I mean when you win a championship, as you know, the fans, the mothers, the fathers, the sons, the daughters, the best friends, it's
their reference point. I was there when, yeah, you win a championship. It's a mortal yeah, and the fans share in that. I've taken companies public. I've launched products that are billions of dollars. No one cares, okay, but my name's on the Stanley Cup. I have you know a ring in the NHL. You get the World Series ring?
You so tortality.
Yeah, and it's that's that's the thrill of the business to you.
Talk about integration. But before there, I've I've had the great four to sit in a seat as one of the governors in the NBA and watch what a foresh you are in that room. What a great leader. I grew up in Miami and there was a gentleman by the name of wayn Heinzinger, Yeah, who was way ahead of the curve and a pioneer. Healed the Panthers, the Dolphins and the Marlins. Won a championship with the Marlins.
But one thing is buying one team. But you're creating this incredible flywheel that I think all of us look at you as kind of the north star and our mentor that we want to follow. What makes you go from one team to the integration of the whole flywheel that you've created.
Well, it's interesting you mentioned Wayne Heisinger. I started my first company in Florida. IBM was introducing the PC and they moved to boker Ratone, Florida, and I met Wayne, and Wayne started a sanitation company. That's where he made
his money. And then he bought the Miami Dolphins and the Marlins, right, and the Panthers, and then Blockbuster and then yeah, and so someone sets up a meeting It was probably twenty eight to twenty nine years old with them, and he said, what business do you think I'm in? And I said, you're in those sports business and the
movie rental business. And he said, nope, come here, and he walks me to the window, puts his armorund me, and he says, look down that alley and there was a dumpster in the alley, and he said, I sold the landlord in that apartment building, that dumpster thirty years ago we rented. I'm in the rental business. I've been billing him twenty eight dollars a month for thirty years for that piece of metal, Blockbuster. I'm in the rental business. I take a movie and I pay for it once
and then I rented out to viewers. And he said, in a way, that's the business I'm in. With sports, I'm about renting seats. I paid for the stadium and I rent seats. And he was a thematic investor, and I said, I think that's going to work everywhere. I don't know how that's going to work in sports because as a fan, you don't say I'm renting my seat today. It's like I'm those seats. They get passed down generation
this generation to me, ye need in sports. I think you can have a thesis in any business, but sports, that's only half the thesis. There's the business side, but the product. Do you have to have passion? And I didn't really sense Dwayne had passion about.
Sports, but you did clearly.
Yeah. Alex asked an interesting question about do you want to own a sports team or do you want to win championships and do you want to own a sports team or do you want to build a platque form that moves up the value chain in terms of business model. And when I first came into pro sports, I bought one hundred percent of a hockey team and then forty four percent of the building and an NBA team, And we didn't have a media property. We were not a principal.
We were licensing for resale our IP and at America Online, I was president of America Online. I learned about reoccurring revenues and software is service businesses and having a platform, and with the platform you can move eyeballs and fingertips around by doing cross promotion. And so I started to explain to people that we want to be aligned in a big market, super city and be the largest, most valuable sports enterprise. But no one buys a ticket for
monumental sports and entertainment. We hold almost three hundred events a year in our building, but they come to see Lady Gaga and you too, and Alex Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals.
And sometimes even the Georgetown Hoyas.
Sadly Georgetown plays in our building. And we can talk about the law of unintended consequences because the Supreme Court change the collegiate sporting world forever in a majority vote, and everyone celebrated but didn't consider the law of unintended consequences. Well, everything's changed. How do we look at now college and universities. They have agents, the players agents.
And are being paid for their name, image and likeness. Everything is Georgetown.
We won a Big East tournament, and four of the five starters transferred that offseason. They got better offers from other colleges. In fact, one of the young men transferred back. I mean it's I mean, having unlimited free agency in your college years probably wasn't what people were thinking. But a Supreme Court justice probably didn't know the ins and outs of basketball and NCAA. He was looking at it through you know, his lens, his or her lens.
I do want to ask you, Ted, before we get too far from it. This whole notion of you know, Washington is your home. It also is an incredible sports city. I mean, is that just you were lucky to be there? Like? Why is DC the place you just that? Because you had the means to go just about anywhere to do it? But why did Washington ultimately make sense?
For you.
So there's a theory about our country's important, or are economic regions important. So there's this theory that there's going to be ten super cities, and a supercity is defined by some unique ingredients. That you have a minimum of five research oriented universities. University is incredibly important Georgetown, You and I or a lums seventeen eighty nine. It represents longevity in the community. It graduates IP it's students. It attracts students, young people from all over the world, and
then they stay in your city. They become additive. We're blessed in DC. We've got Johns Hopkins. We've got University of Maryland. We've got University of Virginia. We have that ingredient that you have a minimum of three major international airports. We've got Baltimore, We've got National We've got dulles that you've got green space. We've got the National Mall in DC, we have the most iconic green space in the country. That you have iconic real estate, We've got the monuments,
We've got memorials. You also need a defining business community. We have the federal government. Were the largest customer, largest spender on the planet. So I've always been an evangelist, an advocate for Washington d C. But d C is in a state we don't exist. If we do it right, will be a supercity. And the final ingredient of supersitis is winning sports teams. You close your eyes and you think of New York. You go, oh, the Yankees, Oh, the Knicks.
Well, he does, but.
It's in the fabric. It's why it's a great city. Oh it has great sports teams. Oh, and it has great iconic real estate. Oh it has Columbia University. It's got right.
But Ted I mean on that note, I mean it's it's interesting to think about the sports component of it, though, because when you start sort of building this platform of monumental to Alex's point, that's not obvious. It's not obvious that sports is going to be anything beyond you know, you wake up thinking of the Yankee. People weren't thinking about it as a big business.
You were people who weren't thinking of the Internet as a good business.
And so what did you see in sports that convinced you that this was a good investment.
Great and deep and passionate and durable fan interest families pass on fandom generation, the generation. You don't see that in any other consumer product. It's not like, oh, my father drove an osmobile, I'm going to drive an osmobile right right. In fact, they ran a campaign this is not your father's Osmobile. I said, Oh, the end is near for that company. I saw in the tech business, the subscription business. What was AOL? Why were we so
highly valued? We got people to pay us nineteen ninety nine a month, and we became aim a must have product. People wanted their mail, people wanted their instant messaging, and we spent billions of dollars to renew customers. We renew in the NHL and the NBA a bad year, eighty to eighty five percent of our season ticket hold. Well, when you have a great team, you have a waiting list. You sell out and then you develop a waiting list of people who want to come and fill the stands.
And because you have that kind of demand, then you can raise your prices. Once you have a big, big audience, then you can start to monetize the secondary revenue streams. You can sell advertising, you can do sponsorships, you can sell suites to corporations who really are saying they're an owner of the team. They're buying the suite for ten years, and now they're giving seats as gifts right to their customers and their partners. And you want the best software
companies in the world, Oracle Salesforce dot Com. They say, this is how many big customers we have. They have the best balance sheets, and we're able to build into the contract annual increases three percent, four percent, five percent per year. So I looked when I bought into the leagues, I said, holy macl we are the world's biggest best SaaS companies software as a service. And who are partners? Disney, ESPN, Comcasts, Capital One Arena has the naming rights, They're one of
the biggest banks in the world. You just you go down and you see there's not a lot of variability in the business. It's repeatable and you know who the customers are and how the growth gets built in. So I've just become a spokes person, if you will, for the category. And I thought, one day, private equity, one day, smart money is going to come into this business because to date it's mostly been family run businesses. You bought a sports team for five million dollars, you know, fifty years ago.
Alex Is like, did you say five million?
The Washington Capitals weren't expansion team. I think it was five million dollars fo.
So, speaking of that, Ted, I was reading that you might be interested in the Nationals. So I was hoping, like, if there's an opening as a bopend coach or first base coach'll be available for you. But why the Nationals?
So first, I'm a season ticket holder for the Nationals, and I played baseball growing up. I played third base, Alexy, Okay, I couldn't do shortstop, but third base I could hand on coordination. And the owners of the Nationals, the Learner family, they're spectacular family, real estate people. Their bedrock in the community, and they're small investors in monumental sports. And we're friends. And the stakes have gotten higher and higher in sports,
and in baseball. They have to compete with the Yankees, you have to compete with the Mets, you have to compete with the Dodgers, and these big, big markets, bigger markets right now, they have the resources to go get players. That's why the cbas for leagues dry value right The NHL has a hard cap. We had a lockout. We came back with a hard cap system. It means every team in the NHL thinks it can win the Stanley Cup when the new season starts.
Because they're all spending the same amount of money.
Play and the playoffs. Everyone thinks the playoffs are attainable. And once again the playoffs, anything can happen. And that's why attendance is fantastic in the NHL. The game's never been in better shape. CBA was very instrumental in that. Basketball has a great CBA as well. Teams can make the decision to spend more than the cap, but they get penalized for that, and those dollars go into a pot and they go to the smaller market teams, which make the smaller market teams feel when it's time we
will compete. We'll go into the tax if we think that's the right thing. But it gives you rules of the road. In baseball it has CBA, but you've got teams that spend three hundred million dollars in teams that spend thirty million dollars. Well, if you're a fan in one of those markets, it's tough to go with enthusiasm because you go it's very unlikely, right, and you know the Marlins. We're talking about Wayne Heiinger. They won the championship one year and then he dismantled the team. He
was losing money. Ye most teams that win a championship and pay attacks, they lose money in their championship winning year. Right. So with the Nationals, I look and I go, well, we have a platform. We just bought our network. Everyone's going to streaming. Streaming is about subscriptions. If you want to have a subscription, like at AOL back in the heyday, you didn't have mail available for nine months out of the year, you have to have a year round subscription.
So I have felt that from a business standpoint, having a platform and having winter and summer programming is going to be critical to build value for the network because you won't get the churn. Right, Oh, you lost in the first round of the playoffs in April, I'm going to cancel my subscription and I'll sign back up when the new season starts. If you're in the playoffs and baseball is started, you're going to have a real good,
strong subscription base. So from a business standpoint, it's very compelling. And then to be able to sell advertising indoors outdoors on television cross promote. But the real reason you want to do it is you want to win championships. And I think in this new world where there's all this money coming in, the sports teams and sports teams are
being valued incredibly high. A football team in Washington, DC just sold for six billion dollars to the smartest, wealthiest people who had to syndicate they couldn't afford it themselves.
Were you shocked by that price, No, I.
Think it's undervalued. Steve Bomber, who I respect very much and I consider a friend and with like the same age, and we competed, you know for decades.
Bears rivals back in the day, Yeah, and now rivals in a different way.
Miss He certainly kicked my ass twenty places. But he paid two billion dollars for the Clippers, and everyone was shocked and laughed at him. Yeah, And he's a smart guy. And he bought hundreds, if not thousands of companies for Microsoft that were SaaS businesses that you pay ten times
revenues for a software company when you acquire it. So's say a basketball team was doing two hundred million dollars and you had a new media deal on the horizon, and you had naming rights partners, and so Steve knew he wasn't overpaying for it. Thank God for Steve Bomber. It was very helpful because Mark Cuban entered the league the same time that I did, and we were tech people and we would be advocating it, but Steve actually did it. And now, yes, someone well, what's an NBA
team worth? Oh, it's ten times revenue? Right, what's a hockey team worth? Oh? Seven, eight, nine times revenues? I think the Brooklyn Nets, it was reported they traded it fourteen times revenue. They brought in partners, and it's not overvalued. But this belief that the tree these automatically will continue
to grow to heaven is dangerous. Right, We're in the red line right now of danger because if Josh Harris and Mitrails and Eric Schmidt, all these people have to come together to reach to buy a football team, does that mean in five years, ten years the investors are going to get five times their money on six billion? How you're going to get thirty billion? That's why private equity. I brought the first sovereign wealth fund into sports, the Guitaris, right, yeah,
And it was simple. Their belief was my belief. We want to put our money into a safe, durable, almost family like business in a big, important market. So where do they invest in New York and London, in Washington, DC, safe harbor for their money.
How did that deal come together? Tell us about that.
I was introduced to them through my investment Revolution and then your venture firm, my venture firm with Steve case so I knew of them, and then they were doing the World Cup and private equity companies were reaching out to us. Was where an attractive company. We do a lot of revenues and a big market reaching monumental, but private equity isn't investing their money. They get LPs limited partners, limited partners and they've got five to seven year horizons.
Usually my horizon is the rest of my life and then my beyond and a sovereign wealth fund. That's what they're attracted to. Oh, we want to be in a safe city with a lead investor who has a lot of skin in the game and isn't going to do crazy things and is strategic and smart and will support you. And oh, you want to buy the baseball team. If I think if we had said, oh, I want to buy any baseball team. I want to buy a soccer
team in South America. Well, that's that's off. Strategy of strategy is build the world's most valuable regional sports and entertainment company on the planet. Get it to a ten billion dollar market cap maybe one day. This is a asset class, and companies are going to have to start going public once private equity came in. They want out at some point.
It's inevitable.
It's inevitable. So you know, my I don't have very many gifts, but I have been good at peering around the corner a little bit and seeing what's out there. And so yeah, we were maybe the first to really advocate this is software a service. Like business analysts, media people who covered the business of sport will get it. Bloomberg will, We'll get it. You're in the subscription Bloomberg's
in the subscription business business model and they subscribe. And I bet you Mike Bloomberg has subscribers from day one. Who took his first terminal and you know, cant like Wayne izinga.
So it said obviously in the news has been private equity entering the world of the NFL, but only at a ten percent clip which they're doing their last, but they're also being very conservative. What are your thoughts about the NFL and private equity and that kind of merger.
I can't speak of the NFL. I don't own a team, but it's pretty clear that there's not a lot of people left that can buy six eight. I saw the Cowboys are valued at ten billion.
Dollars, right, yeah, and then that's probably on the low end.
So it unlocks another pool. But the NFL is conservative and they're very wise. They've built, you know, the the city on the hill if you will, for all sports. And my bed is over time they'll change. You have to be able to adapt to whatever the new reality is. And just because they did ten percent, I don't think that'll be a forever number. Maybe well, but it probably has some leeway. The NBA, we were pioneers. We're like a venture backed in the company.
The NBA is a league.
Yeah, I'd say we've been in the growth stock the tree, growth to heaven. Everyone says, oh, it's going right at the NBA. The media deals are great, well, the local media deals are great. Right. We're really struggling, right, and it's hard work. It's no different serving on a committee of the leagues as it is a serving on a committee of a big public company. I'm on the board of American Express right down the street from here, so
regulated business and the governance of the company. In the board's role and what we do in the committees is it plays a vital role. So we're all concerned and working really really hard to figure out it's not our product that isn't of interests. Locally, our ratings are up while viewership of television is way down, so that means we are taking the interest from other networks, other shows, other pieces of content. But it's a very tough pivot.
As young people remember, cable was the last big exponential boost for sports teams, right, So the media industry is changing radically. I'm chairman of the Media committee at the NBA and the NHL, and you have to stay on trend. You have to understand what's going on. You can't blame people, you can't blame consumers. A kid goes to college, kid grows up at home and he's watching over the air television or cable, and then he goes to college and
there's no cable. Everything is wireless. So when he or she graduates from college. I'm not going you're not calling the cable company, right, You're getting your iPhone and you're rolling your own now all of a sudden, and so so you've gotta you've gotta watch all those trends, and then you have to figure out who do I partner with,
who can mutually value what we have. And you know the thing about pro sports, I mean, here's a superstar player with charisma who's now in chapter two of his career and people will watch him on air, but his star was so bright he brought people to watch the games in the stadium and on television. You know, Michael Jordan was my partner form and you could just see
in the interactions. You know. I was once in a hotel lobby with Michael Jordan and we had to walk through the whole and people said Michael Jordan's and I said, I could have been naked on fire with an axe in my head to see that naked guy with the I don't see right. So sports brings that together and a winning team with stars, the engagement level is like no other business. And that's what advertisers want, That's what sponsors want, that's what mayors want. That's what governors want.
They they want that that shine. So it's such a unique business and we still have a lot of upside, if you will, because I think streaming is in killing sports. I think streaming is going to be ultimately a big positive right for teams. It's amazing to me, again being a tech executive. I guess in my background, the data is all we lived on at AOL. Google one is built the second or third most valuable company on the planet because they have the data, they know where you're going.
When we just bought our RSN, I asked the people that Comcast NBC, a very important media company, who are the customers? Men, go, really, that's how we can do better? How old? Well eighteen fifty? You don't know who your customers are? Why? Because the cable company gets the customer and then they buy the programming from the RSN and the RSNS and people don't realize in all the changes, they were enjoined by Congress that the cable company couldn't
share the names because of privacy. So when I bought our Regional Sports network, I didn't know who one customer, one viewer was. No RSN does Wow, isn't that crazy. Wow, that's incredible. If you go direct to consumer, you're streaming on OTT, you're like the cable company. You get the relationship with those people. And then the other thing that blows my mind and being counterintuitive, I think that's where fortunes get made. I'd hear from cable companies. I just
saw on analysis. Can you believe it's seven hundred dollars if you wanted to watch every NFL game and you had to subscribe, and you and I go, we charge twenty five hundred dollars a game for one ticket in the dream seats at the Wizards, and fans will arrive late and leave early, right and go get something needed halftime and you see the empty seats. I go, it's twenty five hundred dollars a seat. What could be more important?
And they're having a beer and you know, being with some friends, and so I go, we have to change that as a mindset. Now that cable was offering you all the video, all the audio, all the data for one thousand dollars a year, and people didn't think it was worth it. But they'd pay a thousand dollars for one ticket for Minnesota Timberwolves camping so I think a part of our next upside is going to be will
be the bundler. The sports teams will be the buntings themselves. Yeah, and we're selling a seat and you'll get a jersey, you'll play golf with the team, and you'll get Uber Eats credits, and you'll get discounts for publication. And we have to be the bundler and a part of the bundle, just like Prime. Think about what Amazon did. I'm sending you stuff that you bought, and I'm going to give you free delivery, but you're going to pay me a monthly subscription. And now I'm going to start to put
things into the bundle. And now Prime Video is the biggest. I think they have ninety million subscribe unbelievable. So subscriptions, building passionate audiences and having those reoccurring revenues, I think is what our business about.
All Right, we're gonna do a quick, rapid fire. I'm with you, and so the like one to two word answers for all of this. All right, what's one word to describe your deal making style?
I use niceness as a competitive weapon.
What's more important gut or data?
I don't think either works alone. But if I had to pick one at where I am in my life and career, I'd say, gut, I've seen it all.
Who's your dream deal making partner?
Peter Goober? Peter Goober, we were competing for a deal. We didn't know about it, and at the last second we told each other and he said, oh, we're friends. Let's do the deal together. And I'll never forget this. He said. We'll laugh together, we'll cry together, but we'll have a great journey as friends. And he's the greatest.
This is this is a second try at this question. But what is the greatest deal you've ever made.
In terms of money?
Sure?
Well, I sold my company, my little startup, to America Online, and I got ten percent of AOL and what was called the polling of interest, if you can believe it, AOL was four hundred million dollars. I got forty million dollars of stock, and nine years later the company when we bought Time War, it was worth one hundred and seventy billion dollars, which back then that was real money. Wow, if there were no trillion dollar market capital, it.
Feels like real money.
Away.
What's the best piece of advice? You've ever received on deal making or business.
Don't get too high with the highs and too low with the lows.
What's your hype song when you go into a big negotiation or a meeting?
My hype song. People laugh at this, but I used to. I used to be a punk and I go to CBGB's and Talking Heads were my favorite band, and so probably once in a lifetime by the talking Heads.
I love it. You can only watch one sport for the rest of your life, which one is it? This is a good one for you.
I'm going to surprise people, but hockey is the most honest game. You can't you can't hide in hockey. You don't skates, and you have to go one hundred percent full out. You can't run out of bounds, you can't hold your knees doing a file shot. It's It's an honest, honest sport. And I've really come to enjoy the live experience, you know.
Congrats to our mutual friend and champion Vinie Viola.
Jenny's the best, the greatest, and he deserves his Stanley Cup, his immortality.
What team do you want to win a championship more than any other?
I have real c I already have thought of what I have to accomplish in the next twenty five years, or you'll be scarred. I've won championships everywhere, taking companies public, but I haven't broken the code in the NBA, and so I have to make the Wizards. And you know from last year how hard it is to get from round to round to round, and the furthest I've gotten in the playoffs is Game seven lost to Celtics and semi finals of the East, and you think, oh, I
got a young team. It's just got to keep going from there. And then injuries and bad trades and all of a sudden you're rebuilding and careers are short, and you know, you learn, and I want to build it the right way. But we have to win a championship for the fans, for the Wizards.
All right, Well, this has been really fun. Ted leonsis thank you so much.
Thank you, Thanks guys.
The Deal is a production from Bloomberg Podcasts and Bloomberg Originals. The Deal is hosted by Alex Rodriguez and Jason Kelly. Our producers are Ana Maazarakis, Stacey Wong, Lizzie Phillip and Victory Veyees. Original music and engineering by Blake Maples. Our managing editor is David E.
Ravella.
Our executive producers are Jason Kelly, Brendan Francis, Neonham, Jordan Opplinger, Trey Shallowhorn, Kyle Kramer, Andrew Barden, Kelly Laferrier and Ashley Hoenig. Sage Bauman is our head of podcasts. Additional support from Rachel Scaramazino and Elena Los Angeles. Joshua Devaux is our director of photography. Rubob Shakir is our creative director. Art direction is from Jacqueline Kessler. Casting by Julia Manns. Our associate producer is Natasha Abelard, Camera operation by Ryan Cavtero,
Jesse Ridner and Sumahussin. Our gaffer is Alex Brown, and our grip is Max Garstak. Our production assistant is Gabriella Dematase. Alex Diaconus is our video editor. Listen to the Deal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also tune into The Video Companion on Bloomberg Originals and on Bloomberg TV. Thanks for listening.