Doing it Ted's way

  By Adam Proteau, The Hockey News, Oct. 6, 2008 "Doing it Ted's way":

Photo by Greg Fiume/NHLI via Getty Images)

Asked what he had learned after just about 10 years as an NHL owner, Leonsis said:

“You know, I’ve always worked in public companies, but here’s a private company (in the Capitals).

“So I said, ‘OK, we don’t have shareholders like Wall Street. We have stakeholders – our fans.’ And you always hear businessmen being criticized for not taking the long-term view; that they have to meet the next 90 day’s quarterly results. So they view things for the short term, at the detriment of the long term of the company.

“I said, ‘OK, if I wanted to be critical of ourselves and myself, and look at what is it that my deliverable is as the owner and the CEO of this team, it’s that we need to deliver a Stanley Cup.’ That’s the ultimate definition of success in our sport. You have to close your eyes and ask yourself, ‘Can this team win a Stanley Cup today or in its immediate future?’

“And it was very troubling to have to honestly say, ‘No, it can’t,’ even though it was successful as defined by making the playoffs or having star players.

“So we did something dramatic and radical and said, ‘Let’s benchmark and look at the teams that have won Cups in the NHL and the teams that have won in the NBA and NFL. Let’s also look at what happens when a (salary) cap system went into place.’ We were the first team that hired a capologist and spent the lockout doing research and best practices on what works and what doesn’t in a cap-based system. We were very analytic and research-based.

“We learned a lot of things: first, for the most part, teams that are in the playoffs and out in the first or second round, and do that consistently, stay right where they are. Because they replenish themselves, as the Caps were doing, with the 15th pick in the draft and 18th pick in the draft. While the teams that are really good, that eventually become really bad, tend to get high picks.

“We also learned that the system is created so that, if you draft and develop well – and those younger players tend to be less expensive at the start of their careers – that’s how you’ll build a good team. So we went and we traded every brand name, high-paid player who was in his 30s and went into it with the strategy of, ‘Let’s get a (draft) pick and a prospect.’

“Pick-and-prospect, pick-and-prospect, was what we tried to do. And it was dramatic and I was very transparent about what we were doing. I was criticized like you can’t believe. The Washington Post columnist Tom Boswell said, ‘Go to Ted’s house, take your season tickets, burn them and throw them on his lawn.’

“But I was committed and I believed. Pick-and-prospect, pick-and-prospect. Give them time to play. And we were really bad one year and we were really bad the next year. But we had high picks. And last year we started out the game bad then we played pretty good.

“This year, we’re kind of looked at as a model franchise. We haven’t achieved anything yet, but we’re still one of the youngest teams in the league, and we’re loaded. Now I watch as other teams face the music and you can almost see them try to emulate what (Capitals GM) George McPhee and his staff did.

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