But this isn’t the high school debate team, it’s basketball. And firing Saunders is like applying cream to a single zit on a face full of acne, or whatever salve you want to put on a minuscule, perhaps irrelevant, part of a larger problem. Make no mistake, coaching is huge in basketball, but Washington’s issues derive from Grunfeld’s foundation of players. And as far as that different voice? The entire coaching staff remains intact; only Flip is being paid to leave (his four-year, $18 million contract runs through the 2012-13 season). Lucky him.

“We are kind of polar opposites,” said new coach Wittman of his style in comparison to Saunders, when asked what would really change. With that, Wittman cemented the impression that Saunders is not a fiery type of leader, that he was one better suited to a unit of ready veterans, not youthful knuckleheads like the bunch that occupies the home locker room at Verizon Center nowadays. Wittman has been the enforcer, often seen yelling at said knuckleheads. i.e., JaVale McGee, during practice and games. It’s not often players tune out a coaching staff only to have team management remove the subdued head while promoting the yeller. If the players weren’t listening already, what now?

"I would’ve walked with [Flip] if I didn’t believe this team could be better than we are,” said Wittman, conveying ignorance of the need for more drastic adjustment.

But the team's real issue is with personnel, the cover model for Inept Employment Magazine being Andray Blatche. Firing the head coach was simply the easiest change to make; if that’s all owner Ted Leonsis does, though, he continues to do his team a great disservice. Blatche is the antithesis of Leonsis' announced plan of rebuilding with toughness. Nick Young is a one-dimensional offensive player with a mean selfish streak. Player development under Grunfeld has been subpar, in general, but getting rid of those two specifically would go a long way toward improving things.

Grunfeld, growing ornery toward the end of the press conference as the media peppered him with questions about his own job security, admitted that everyone is responsible, while also trying to absolve himself from blame, alluding to problems caused by Gilbert Arenas and guns. He also talked up his young players, beaming with false confidence in the future—see how much better these other zits look now that I’ve cleared this one?!

“Just because you're losing, you're not a loser,” was Grunfeld’s final sentence before the show came to an abrupt end. Washington’s resume with Grunfeld at the helm: 266 wins, 407 losses, four playoff appearances, just eight playoff wins.

Time for a different voice? Time for new management.

Which isn't to say that Leonsis, a tech mogul turned sports tycoon, doesn't have the skills to make it in his city's main game. Last night, I watched the owner of the 1-12 Wizards (at least, before last night's game) field questions for an hour or so from what might have been a hostile audience: Season ticket holders, folks who'd forked over hundreds of dollars to watch Leonsis' squad stink it up.

In lesser hands, it might have been ugly. But Leonsis had a three-point strategy that a communications consultant couldn't have improved.

1. Feel their pain. Leonsis began his remarks—and many of his responses to questions—with empathy. "It's not easy for me, either," he announces, unprompted, about of the spectacle of watching his hapless squad.

2. Remind people that you've been there before. Leonsis repeatedly segued into recollections of the "unwatchable" Capitals in his early years as owner. Like when one questioner wondered why a free agent would ever come work for the hapless franchise: "This is what I heard in the NHL: D.C. is not a hockey market. You have the best young player in hockey and as soon as he can, he's going to go to Detroit or Montreal, a city that can win championships. The opposite happened. [Alex Ovechkin] signed a 13-year extension with us because he believed in us."

3. Declare that you have a plan. One way or another, Leonsis worked his way back to a reminder of how he's loaded up on young players, something he says is intentional and will pay off. "I'm convinced that we have to work hard and keep at it and stay with the strategy. I don't see a herky-jerky, emotional response to losing."

The owner's low-key, cerebral answers had the bizarre effect of lowering the emotional temperature almost immediately—quite a task, particularly when you consider that players from the Oklahoma City Thunder were busily working out on the court behind him, and appeared to be taking their exercise routines far more seriously than the Wizards personnel who ambled out about halfway through Leonsis' spiel.

And then—what do you know?—the worst team in the league went out and beat the best.

Photo by Keith Allison via Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0

This post originally misspelled the name of Alex Ovechkin

That's No Oil Spill, That's Our River: D.C. officials and the Coast Guard responded last night to reports of an oil spill on the Anacostia River. The good news: There was no oil spill. The bad news: The river is sufficiently polluted that they thought there was. Keep toting those reusable bags. -3

The Rich Are Different From You And Me: The housing market is doing better here than in the rest of the country, but the days when a home doubled as an ATM machine are over. Except, apparently, for the very wealthy, who are swapping property like they're playing Monopoly. Washington Capitals and Wizards owner Ted Leonsis literally traded houses with Nextel founder Chris Rogers, accounting for two of the five most expensive residential real estate transactions in the area this year. Meanwhile, in Great Falls, kids are driving Jaguars to high school. -2

Livable, Walkable, Huntable: D.C. Councilmember Tommy Wells is a frequent advocate of policies aimed at getting people out of their cars, and now we know why—his own car is quite dangerous. Wells hit a deer while in Minnesota, totaling his wife's car. No word on whether he'll be setting up a venison stand at a Ward 6 farmers market now. -1

Memorial Day: The original plan for the new memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. set to open later this month would have required tickets for D.C. residents who wanted to take advantage of a special open house just for us. Organizers have since realized that a celebration of King's life should be open to all; now they say they won't turn anyone away on Aug. 23, between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m. The main event for the memorial will be Aug. 28, 48 years after the March on Washington; Metro will open early and provide free parking. +2

Yesterday's Needle rating: 67 Today's score: -4 Today's Needle rating: 63

The Washington Wizard isn’t gone—he’s just officially buried in a sea of red, white, and blue, likely never to be heard from again.

Ted Leonsis’ ownership group finally unveiled the much-anticipated new look for the city’s basketball team today, with dim lighting, pop music, balloons, and customized cupcakes giving the Verizon Center's practice court a feel of "high school mixer" meets "evening gala."

Welcoming fans to the future while connecting them to the color scheme of the past was the theme of the day. But Leonsis insisted that the change had more to do with the memory of former winning ways—rather than just how bad the old Wizards colors were. He focused on the word “motif” instead of the discarded option that has seemingly come to grind the owner’s gears the most: a name change. (Why wasn't that on the itinterary today? Because, Leonsis declared, modifying the intellectual property of a team takes at least 25 months and requires multiple changes in other NBA cities.) Fan satisfaction might not be at 100 percent as long as the name “Wizards” is still around, but they can be happy that an effort which took a year and, per Leonsis, "millions and millions of dollars" finally brings a much-needed upgrade.

The main changes: A sleeker font similar to Leonsis' Washington Capitals; a secondary logo featuring a lowercase “dc,” with the stem of the “d” morphing into an open hand reaching for a ball (like the old “double-L” in Bullets); and—of course—bars and stars reflecting the colors of the American flag (well, as close as Pantone 289 and Pantone 186 can get). The design team that worked with the Wizards, including a three-member crew from adidas (Leon Imas, Sumiko Kalish and Mike Bui) and Christopher Arena, the NBA’s vice president for apparel, sporting goods and basketball partnerships, even managed to incorporate the silhouette of the Washington Monument three times without it looking overly phallic.

The tallest and most recognizable part of the city’s skyline can be found in the “d” in “Wizards” on the home jerseys, in the “h” in “Washington” on the away jerseys, and in a third alternate logo that features the monument pointing surreptitiously toward a single star above, over the backdrop of a basketball. Team president Ernie Grunfeld indicated that the concept of a basketball in front of the Capitol was considered—but since Leonsis’ ownership group is called Monumental Sports, the west end of the Mall won out.

The curtain-raising was led by Leonsis, Grunfeld, executive vice president of business operations Greg Bibb, Wizards coach Flip Saunders and greats of the past Bob Dandidge and Elvin Hayes. Players John Wall and Jordan Crawford modeled, mostly giving mean mugs in uniforms—until the ice was broken when they were asked to further show off the wares, which includes a star forming a “W” underneath on the lower outer seam of their basketball shorts.

“The only thing I was upset with was the leak and then all of the articles and all of the write-ups,” Leonsis said of the roll-out, referring to an incident in early March when the current logo featuring a wizard and crescent moon made its way onto an online photo of a NBA team logo jacket, just with the colors replaced. “I would tell people, 'That’s not what we’re doing,' but no one seemed to care about that. They only wanted to generate pixels and feed their own monsters.” (Washington City Paper generated its own monster-feeding pixels, enlisting designers to imagine alternative logos.)

A “find-and-replace” version of the old Wizards logo did end up making it onto the team’s official new reproduction guideline sheet, but all indications point to it never being used again. Leonsis denied the leak and the resulting pixel monsters played any part in shaping internal opinion.

Dying the Wizard, but not killing him, means the name that has little to do with the District except some alliteration will still inundate box scores and sports ticker bottom lines. Pretty new colors and dashing logos are intended to serve as an opiate to the masses, and of course, to add to team sales receipts. But ultimately, winning is what counts—the rest is haberdashery.

Photos by Kyle Weidie

Ted Leonsis, a fabulous sports owner turned blogger, went after sportstalk station WTEM-AM in a recent blog post after Thom Loverro, a fabulous newspaper columnist turned blogger (and WTEM host), called the Leonsis-owned Washington Wizards an "invisible franchise."

Leonsis flamed Loverro's medium as much as he did his message.

"I find it ironic that an AM radio station – which I can’t hear at night because of static – calls a fast growing NBA team 'invisible,'" Leonsis wrote. "That is funny."

Well, I listened to the playoff game between the New York Rangers and the Washington Capitals on the flagship station of Leonsis hockey team: WFED, 1500-AM.

That's when the humor of Leonsis' crack hit me: The flagship station of the Caps, a team the whole region and my household has pinned their sports hopes and dreams to, is an AM signal, too.

I couldn't find the biggest game in town anywhere on the FM dial.

Invisible? Nah. But you could say Caps are inaudible.

That is funny.

(Turns out Ted's having some blog problems today, too.)

courtesy PuckBuddys

I'm more awed by the minute at how swimmingly things have gone for PuckBuddys pretty much ever since the first blog dedicated to gay Washington Capitals fans  dove into the mainstream around New Year's Day.

Ted Leonsis was among the first to embrace the place. From the get-go and with no fanfare, the Caps owner directed readers of his own blog to the new site, whose slogan is "For boys who like boys who like hockey."

Then the idolmaking Deadspin and Puck Daddy started teasing posts from Puckbuddys, too.

And all of a sudden gay and hockey are being paired like Tai Babalonia and Randy Gardner.

The Hockey Luvin' Homo showed up behind the glass at a pivotal Vancouver/Los Angeles game last week.

And, as reported by PuckBuddys, NHL heavyweight and Toronto Maple Leafs GM Brian Burke is out speaking about the need for his beloved sport to get over the anti-gay bias that's ruled the roost in hockey since the first puck was dropped, and pretty much all other sports ever since sweaty and awesomely fit young men wrestled and gymnasticked nakedly (ok ok ok... probably nakedly) in the ancient Olympics.

“My goal is to throw the weight of an NHL front office at the issue,” Burke told the newspaper at Bowdoin College, where he was appearing as part of a series called "Anything But Straight in Athletics." “This bias needs to disappear, and I think pro leagues and teams can add useful muscle to this issue.” (Burke's gay and openly hockey-luvin' son, Brendan Burke, was killed last year in an auto accident.)

Anybody wanting to jump on the gay hockey bandwagon while there's still room can show up  tonight and Saturday, as PuckBuddys hosts its last two Caps viewing parties of the regular season.

Coming soon from a distinguished legislator from (I'm guessing) Virginia: The Defense of Hockey Act.

And I might have to support it! If PuckBuddys and the like keep at it, gay sports might become (gasp!) mundane! Then what the hell am I gonna type about?

(Full disclosure: PuckBuddys founders Craig Brownstein and Doug Johnson are geniuses. Oh, and they're also friends of mine.)

Illustration by Brooke Hatfield

Today, alongside halfsies offers for "three LipoLaser treatments" at Help for Health in Springfield and a "scrub" at Alexandria's Frizzles Salon and Spa, Groupon is offering fire-sale prices on Washington Wizards tickets.

From the Groupon pitch:

Choose from the following seating options:

* $150 for One Box VIP Ticket (a $225 value, including all you can eat and drink of beer, wine, and soda at the Courtside Club)

* $37 for One Club level Ticket (an $80 value)

* $18 for One Upper Level Ticket (a $35 value)

These options are available for the following games:

* Saturday, February 5 vs. the Atlanta Hawks at 7:00 p.m.

* Tuesday, February 22 vs. the Indiana Pacers at 7:00 p.m.

* Monday, February 28 vs. the Chicago Bulls at 7:00 p.m.

* Wednesday, March 2 vs. the Golden State Warriors at 7:00 p.m.

* Saturday, March 5 vs. the Minnesota Timberwolves at 7:00 p.m.

* Saturday, March 12 vs. the Los Angeles Clippers at 7:00 p.m

This is at least the second time this season that Leonsis has cast his basketball team's tickets into the bargain bin.

Meanwhile, I'm not aware of the Washington Capitals' tickets keeping company with scrubs and "LipoLaser treatments" on Groupon's daily deals even once this year.

Groupon does seem a fine fit for this year's Wizards, who've proven to be competitive in only half their games.

But, Blake Griffin at a deep discount?

Now THAT's a bargain!

The gathering, titled “Scoring Big: The Business of Sports,” is headlined by Dan Snyder and Ted Leonsis, but the supporting cast will include Robert Tanenbaum and Marla Lerner Tanenbaum of the Nationals and D.C. United's Will Chang.

For now, this crowd should talk more about business than sports. Every panelist owns a team that finished in last place within the last year. (Though, to be fair, Leonsis has had regular season successes with the Mystics and Caps, and he bought the woeful Wizards after their horrid 2009-2010 season. But after last night's rout in Philly, they're 0-17 on the road under new ownership and show no inclination to not again finish at the bottom.)

Perhaps that's why, despite the local-centric flavor of the event, Chang is identified in the gathering's press release as being "owner of D.C. United and the San Francisco Giants."

Nothing's gone right for Chang on or off the field since he took over United, which used to be the MLS's flagship franchise but spent the entire 2010 season in the cellar and finished a whopping 29 points out of first place in the Eastern Conference and has used up all its chits in getting the city to build a soccer stadium. But his United bio confirms he "is also on the Executive Committee of the ownership group that owns the San Francisco Giants Baseball Club and ATT Park."

The Giants, eh? Good on him.

Wonder if Chang's got his World Series ring yet. And if so, will he flaunt it in front of Snyder, Leonsis and the Tanenbaums, like Troy Aikman does to Joe Buck in FOX's fabulous "It's good to have a ring!" ads?

Hope so!

The forum will kick off Tuesday at 8:45 a.m. before a live audience, and will also be streamed live at www.washingtonpostlive.com. Those not in the house can ask questions of Chang or his ring-less co-panelists via the paper's website.

There'll be a lot more words about this development in the next Cheap Seats weekly. But what fascinated me most looking into the deal were my discussions with sports marketer Rob Tuchman, who took the Wizards/Groupon alliance and its accompanying exemptions as another sign that the Death of the Season Ticket is upon us.

"I really do see the season ticket as going away," says Tuchman, who is executive vice president of Premiere Global Sports, a New York firm that markets ticket packages to sporting events.

Tuchman handed down his death sentence for season tickets—not just for the Wizards, for all of pro sports—after years of observing that all the growth in the ticketing realm was coming in so-called secondary market firms. These new-age scalping firms all depended on selling single-game tickets, with different prices for every game, and by now about all the pro sports franchises are themselves jumping into the mix. Big-dollar customers who buy up tickets to every game have been the target market and lifeblood of franchises here and everywhere for decades. But with the advent of every eBay and Craigslist and StubHub and, yes, Groupon, more and more one-off tickets are being sold very publicly. And, as with this latest Wiz/Groupon pairing, often the sales are arranged directly through the team.

"This all got started back in 2005 and 2006," Tuchman says, "when a lot of teams would see these huge prices on Stubhub, and they said, 'Hey, the Yankees/Red Sox tickets are going for $1000! We need to be capitalizing on this!' And so teams got into the ticket broker marketplace, and it's backfired horribly on them now. You see all these tickets going for below face value."

As Tuchman sees things, one major impact of these team-sanctioned secondary market sales and the resulting bumper crop of below-face-value tickets now available for non-marquee games—deals that any Internet user can find—is that season ticketholders feel snubbed. If the team makes it seem like only tickets to, for example, the Heat, Celtics, Lakers and Magic games are valuable, Tuchman says, the season ticketholder will wonder, "Why should I buy a whole season?"

More to come, including the Wizards rationale for the Groupon deal and defense of the season ticket...

Mike Wise

I figured it was just a bit. But then Ted Leonsis, at yesterday's press conference to officially announce his takeover of the Washington Wizards, recognized Wise in front of all gathered as a guy about to be married.

Wise has gone public with the personal stuff before. His column about his own serial sexual improprieties after Tiger Woods' bangage spree came out ("I am Tiger Woods!" Wise declared again and again in print) could be filed under Too Much TMI™.

Some heartless souls mocked the columnist for his confessional.

Yet now, just a few months after telling the world he's medically incapable of fidelity, he's pledging to stay the course, through sickness and health and business trips to Vegas? Because he lost a bet with others at the station about who would lose the most weight?

Yup.

"It's real. He's getting married this weekend," says Chris Kinard, WJFK's program director.

Geez Louise.

Wise didn't return an email for comment. Guess he's busy. Kinard says he'll be back at work on Monday.

I'm not ready to say he wouldn't've, either.

Jagr was once to Leonsis and the Washington Capitals as Albert Haynesworth was last season to Dan Snyder and the Washington Redskins — the highest paid and surliest player on a team headed nowhere good.

Back to me: In March, I was summoned to Leonsis' Arlington offices. He wanted to discuss something I'd written a few weeks earlier in this space. I'd called his 2004 trade of Jagr "on paper...the worst trade in NHL history."

I was early into paternity leave at the time of the summoning, but I took a break from my break for a private audience with Everybody's Favorite Owner. He gave me a bottle of water, sat me down, and spent about 90 minutes letting me know, with equal parts charm and righteousness, that I was a tool.

I believed what I typed about the Jagr deal. The way I saw things: The Caps gave the New York Rangers a past and future Lester B. Pearson Trophy awardee (given annually to the NHL's best player, and to Jagr in 1999, 2000 and 2006 ) plus millions of dollars in cash in exchange for...Anson Carter.

The way Leonsis saw things: "I traded Jagr for Alex Ovechkin."

OK, so Jagr was killing the morale of coaches, teammates, fans and the owner from the time the Caps brought him here in 2001, along with the biggest contract in NHL history — seven years, $77 million.

Leonsis even gave me a hockey-for-dummies demonstration, using magic markers on a dry erase board in his office and dropping all sorts of puckhead nuance (including: left-hand-passer + left-hand-shooter = tough one-timer), to show how Jagr's unwillingness to adjust his game had unplugged the Caps' power play, which was tops in the NHL before his arrival.

It was an awesome display.

And, as we all know, getting rid of Jagr (as well as Peter Bondra, Sergei Gonchar, Robert Lang, and Steve Konowalchuk) sped up the Caps' race to the bottom of the standings. The team's 59 points in 2003-2004 was second worst in the league, above only Pittsburgh. Then Leonsis, as has become his habit, won the NHL lottery for the 2004 draft, and used the top pick on Ovechkin.

On the whole, things worked out darn good for Leonsis and his squad in the years since Jagr went away. When he speaks of Ovechkin, he gets a look in his eye similar to that, say, a father on paternity leave has when talking about his baby. But while he's, at least outwardly, Mr. Positive about everything from A to Z, I'm not sure he's over his breakup with J.J.

I wouldn't have gotten the one-on-one tutoring session if he was.

But I did get that session. And I found that I was sadder than I should have been when Ovechkin and the top-seeded Capitals went out in the first round of this year's playoffs a few weeks after our summit. And sadder still when Jagr's squad took the world title from Ovechkin.

I've forgotten all about Anson Carter. And no matter what happened in Germany, Leonsis' Jagr-for-Ovechkin trade looks like a steal to me.

I'm beginning to wonder what was in that water bottle.

Maybe it's too early to write off seeing LeBron James in a Wizards uniform. But the salutatorian of this year's NBA free-agent class, Chris Bosh, surely ain't coming to D.C.

Bosh just named the five squads he'll play for, and ours wasn't among 'em. AP reports the all-star forward will only go to "the Chicago Bulls, Los Angeles Lakers, Miami Heat or New York Knicks should he decide not to re-sign with Toronto."

So why would Bosh so quickly dismiss DC? Who wouldn't want to be a part of the rebuilding process taking place under a lovable and vibrant new owner with all that freed-up Jamison/Butler/Haywood cash and the halfway freed-up Gilbert Arenas, and with John Wall being delivered via the lottery?

Maybe this is why: Bosh's ex-girlfriend lives here.

Back when it was all peachy between her and Bosh, Allison Mathis used to shout mean things at LeBron from a courtside seat to support her man during Cleveland/Toronto games. Then their love went away but their love child didn't, and she went after Bosh litigationally for abandoning both her and their baby.

The ugliness got aired in courts in Maryland, where Mathis lives, and in Bosh's native Texas.

According to Mathis' filing in Montgomery County, Md.: "By late September 2008, several utility companies were threatening to disconnect essential services – electricity, gas and water, to the home in which she was living. With her first baby on the way in just a few months, the father of her child, who was earning, upon information and belief, over One Million Dollars per month at that time, left her with no money, no housing security, no transportation, and no way to pay for pre-natal care."

At last check, a Dallas court was deciding how much child support Bosh was going to pay.

(Mathis, the daughter of political columnist/TV pundit Deborah Mathis, first appeared on our basketball radar in 1998, when her teenage dalliances with classmate and future NBA'er Damien Wilkins resulted in the dissolution of the nationally ranked prep hoops program at St. John's Prospect Hall.)

Can't blame Bosh for not wanting to be hit with heckles like "No way to pay for pre-natal care!" while he's on the free throw line.

Come to think of it: The way Mathis goes after James in that video clip, knowing she's in town might be enough to keep LeBron away, too.

"Ouch," says Mike Rucki from onfrozenblog.com.

Rucki writes that the tab for his seats went up "approximately 32%." The Great Dan Steinberg, in summarizing the inflation, says season ticketholders will notice their fees rising anywhere from 13 percent to 50 percent, depending on where the seats are and how late they decide to pony up to Leonsis.

Unless Leonsis needs some extra quick cash to finalize his purchase of the Wizards, the timing of the increase announcement seems odd. By issuing the raise decree now, Leonsis is, in effect, gambling that the Caps won't do as well in the postseason as every newbie fan around these parts is sure they will. Because if the organization held out until late spring before setting the price scale, and then Ovechkin actually leads the Caps to a Stanley Cup, the sky's the limit on how high Leonsis could shoot up the costs. The flip side: If the Caps bow in the first round after a season of unparalleled excellence and unbounded hype, of course, any price increase would be sketchy.

(AFTER THE JUMP: How much do options cost? Does Leonsis' involvement with OptionIt make him a man of the people or just another scalper? The end is near for UDC's Final Five? How come Five Guys burgers never stepped in? McKinley Tech once had four guys on the same All-Met team?)

In any case, the price increase comes at a time when the first fissures in what has been an iceberg-solid fan base have appeared. The dark side of owning a hot team has come through loud and clear lately. One commenter to Steinberg's post directed readers to a tale that appeared in the Daily Times, a Delmarva publication, claiming that Leonsis not only refused to give refunds to a fan who was snowed out of the Feb. 7 Pittsburgh/Washington game and unable to use her tickets, but mocked that fan via email.

"Blah blah blah — all was well — 16k people showed up and saw a great game — off your soapbox please," is how Leonsis is alleged to have responded to a refund request from snowbound fan identified as "Erin McKenzie Dean" of Salisbury, Md.

For the first time since he brawled with a young fan in the concourse of his home arena, Teddy Baby is getting some heat. In fact, he's having fans describe him with some variation of "Snyderesque," which in this market counts as the biggest insult any sports owner or administrator or family pet could ever be hit with.

But while the price increase and one sorry anecdote is hardly enough evidence to compare Leonsis to the Redskins boss, what with his decade of decadence, another recent addition to the Caps ticket inventory seems right out of Dan Snyder's How to Gouge playbook. This season, Leonsis teamed up with OptionIt, a fascinating and young company described on the team's web site as "a leader in the next generation of ticket buying for sports events."

The Caps say the partnership was forged to offer fans "a new way to secure access to a limited number of face-value tickets for the regular season as well as ALL potential playoff games." But the service itself actually guarantees that anybody who uses it will be paying more than face value for a ticket. In lay terms, OptionIt is a sort of state-of-the-art scalping service that hits up ticketbuyers earlier and, theoretically, with less oomph than a street scalper or professional ticket broker would.

Technically, OptionIt, which was founded by ex-traders on the Chicago commodities market, sells options on tickets to future Caps games, or, in the case of the playoffs, potential future Caps games, the way a trader on the floor of a commodities market might sell pork futures.

So, for example, for the regular season game against Dallas at Verizon Center on March 8, you can buy options from OptionIt for two $45 tickets for a total of $10, or four $90 seats for $35. Purchasers can then decide whether to exercise their option until the day of the game. If they decide to buy the tickets, they will pay face value. If they opt to not purchase the tickets, they lose their $10 or $35.

The playoffs are a trickier and a bigger gamble for purchasers. Options on Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals run from $42 to $123. Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Finals options are now going for $67 to $188. Game 7 options are sold out.

Unlike the Dallas regular season game, which barring a natural disaster or a plane crash will come off on schedule, there's hardly a guarantee that those particular playoff games will even be held. The Caps could sweep a series or, heaven forbid, choke in an earlier round of the postseason tournament. The Caps, in their nearly four decades of existence, have never played a Game 5, Game 6, or Game 7 in the Finals, and, having been swept in 1998, the team's only appearance in the championship round, only once each for Games 1-4.

And if a game doesn't happen, for whatever reason, the options purchaser loses every penny.

Options services have been tried before, but failed because the options sellers couldn't deliver coveted tickets come crunch time. But unlike its predecessors, OptionIt has negotiated deals directly with the management of the teams it's selling ticket options for. So, Leonsis has made a certain number of tickets in all price ranges unavailable for sale in the general ticket pool, and earmarked those tickets to OptionIt customers.

In exchange, Leonsis and OptionIt split the profits derived from the options sales.

OptionIt vice president Michael Proman, one of the company's two full-time employees, argues with passion and effectiveness that his services are friendly to the common fan. Professional scalpers are the ones who are priced out by the options offering, Proman says.

"Yes, we do have some scalpers [buying options]," Proman told me by phone from the NBA All-Star game, where he said OptionIt's product was very well received. "But the way we price our options actually deters scalpers. They want 50 to 100 percent profit on their inventory, but our pricing [the cost of the options plus face value tickets] is 25 to 30 percent below what the scalper market is. We think it's enough to give the fan a great deal, but it's not cost effective for the scalper [to buy options]. The whole notion of this is that people are priced out of the market when these high-profile games happen. And if people want to assure themselves affordable access, anybody can go buy an option, if the team makes it to the Stanley Cup finals, that's going to price itself out of 90 pecent of the people's budgets."

Proman's role is above-board, smart and maybe even visionary. But why would a team owner get involved in adding costs to fans? Does Leonsis' partnership with OptionIt make him a gouger or a guy looking out for the common fan? Or both? Does it make him, um, Snyderesque?

In any case, you can't deny it's novel.

More to come.

***

Jeff Ruland and UDC's Final Five lost last night at home to the University of the Sciences Devils, 72-57.

But here's some great news: Just one game left on the Firebirds schedule!

A recap of the awesomeness of this year's UDC team for those who A)have been trapped in a wi-fi-less snow drift for eons, or B)aren't either of Cheap Seats Daily's regular readers, and somehow missed the bombshell delivered in this space last month: Because of injuries and quitters, Ruland's team has been playing the second half of the season with a roster of only five players.

Opposing coaches haven't had problems figuring the unique Box-and-None defense Ruland's had to employ when one of his Final Five needs a breather. The Firebirds haven't won since the roster was pared. The team's record now stands at 1-17). But all the misery will end for now as UDC hosts Central State at 3 p.m. on Saturday. Admission is free, and worth every penny.

Biggest tragedy of UDCs 2009-2010 season: For all its shorthandedness, the school never landed a sponsorship deal with Five Guys hamburgers...

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Funeral services are scheduled for Saturday at St. Anthony's on 12th Street NE for McKinley Armstrong, the longtime basketball coach at McKinley Tech high school in the District. In 1969, Armstrong fielded one of the strongest teams the city ever saw: Legend holds that four players from the same squad were named First Team All-Met.

Chew on that.

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Oh, for somebody to do the same for Georgetown basketball!

(Full disclosure: Repeatedly bringing up the role of race in the Hoyas basketball history will only do wonders for the value of my Tom Lang trading card collection. I love that photo of my Lang stack. I might run it every day, or at least until I found out whatever happened to Tom Lang.)

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So much for the smooth transition from Abe Pollin to Ted Leonsis. The Washington Post's Thomas Heath reports that Washington Sports now plans to put the whole Pollin Estate shebang — controlling interests in the Washington Wizards and the Verizon Center, plus the local franchisee rights to Ticketmaster — up for bid on the open market.

The Ticketmaster portion of Pollin's holdings always intrigued me. He was the first arena owner to have his own computerized ticketing system. His stake in Ticketmaster was something neither he nor the parent company ever discussed. But there's got to be a story on how he was able to hold onto that through all the company's mergers and acquisitions as the ticketing realm consolidated over the last two decades. Last time I checked, Pollin was the last franchisee, with every other territory in the U.S. owned by the parent company.

Here's one example of why Leonsis would want to get in on the ticket-fee scam: A friend of mine recently bought one ticket to the Vampire Weekend show at Constitution Hall.

(AFTER THE JUMP: How much does a $28.50 ticket to Vampire Weekend cost? Really? Who remembers Parkington? How about a retrospective of all WUSA sportscasters between Glenn Brenner and Brett Haber? Who still remembers Ken Broo? Nostalgic for a Fridgen/Weis matchup that never happened? Would that have been a heavyweight bout or what? London Fletcher's the only guy happy about this year's Pro Bowl?)

The cost breakdown:

Ticket face-value – $28.50
Facility Charge – $1.50
Convenience Charge – $8.55
Order Processing Fee – $4.00
TicketFast Delivery (to print ticket at home) – $4.75

So, the total cost of a $28.50 ticket is....$47.30!

What a racket! When I was a little dirtball waiting all night in line at the Hecht Company at Parkington to buy tickets for Jethro Tull at the Capital Centre, the service charge was 35 cents! (I saw Tull there five summer tours in a row. What the hell was I drinking?)

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Ever since Brett Haber, the current sports director at Glenn Brenner's old stomping grounds, WUSA-9, gave a sweet homage to his predecessor, I've been on a bit of a Brenner bender, looking up old clips on youtube and reading about a guy who everybody loved. Haber, speaking off the cuff after his station ran a package on the George Michael memorial service, told a viewing audience, "As a guy who sits in Glenn's chair every day, I aspire to live up to his legacy."

And from my Brenner readings, it became clear how much trouble the folks who've sat in that chair since his death at the peak of his popularity in 1992 have had.

A compendium of how we got from Brenner to Haber:

Warner Wolf, a local product and legend when he left DC for New York in the mid-1970s, was the first Brenner replacement to get crushed by his ghost. He came back to his hometown in June 1992, but his once robust "Boo of the Week" seemed stale and frail in Brenner's wake. Wolf's return engagement at WUSA ended in August 1995 with a spat over whether horse racing results should be given out as a part of his nightly sportscast — Wolf said yes, management said no. Wolf gave out the feature winner from Laurel anyway, and he lost his job.

Ken Broo was next to be done in by the dead guy. Broo, who came here from Cincinnati, got off on bad footing right away. His start at Channel 9 in the spring of 1996 came the same week that the station was sponsoring the Glenn Brenner 5K, a memorial race that that year attracted more than 4,000 runners. The station had commercials for the Brenner tribute running in heavy rotation, but nothing promoting the new sportscaster. I spoke at that time with Broo about how hard it was to fight the past. Broo, who hadn't yet found a place to live in DC, asked me "You think I should rent?"

“I guess anybody who does sports at Channel 9 is going to feel Glenn Brenner’s ghost,” Broo said. “But it’s like Glenn Brenner isn’t even Glenn Brenner anymore.”

Broo, despite trying out Brenneresque vehicles like his lighthearted weekly "Broo View" segments, never caught on here, and lasted four years before going back to Ohio.

Then came Jess Atkinson, a real nice guy and local hero for being a star kicker for the University of Maryland and the Redskins (Atkinson was a perfect 7-7 on FGs with the Skins — the best kicking percentage in team history — before his career was ended on a cheap shot by Andre Dirty Waters.)

But by the time Atkinson got Brenner's old job in 2000, WUSA's news operation had all but abandoned sports, thinking any viewer looking for scores or highlights would be turning to George Michael. Some nights, Atkinson's sports slot on the nightly news was just a minute long. He quit WUSA in 2002 to form his own production company. Atkinson now produces shows around University of Maryland athletics, something Glenn Brenner never tried.

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The Baltimore Sun reports that Maryland and Notre Dame are talking about holding a football game at Dan Snyder's FedExField next year. Too bad they couldn't get this done during the Charlie Weis Era in South Bend. Firstly, that would have given the Terps a wonderful chance of whupping up on the Fighting Irish, since Weis' teams went 15-24 in his last three years of "outscheming" the opposition.

But more importantly, a Weis/Friedgen matchup would surely smash the record for combined weight of the head coaches.

With Weis and Mark Mangino gone, is The Fridge now the King of the Hill in the NCAA?

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We read earlier this week about London Fletcher's ecstasy over getting to play in his first Pro Bowl, despite backing into the lineup like a Green Line Metro train that overshot the Petworth station. Fletcher by now appears to be the only one celebrating anything about the event.

The Pro Bowl moved this year from Honolulu to Miami and from a week after the Super Bowl to a week before, both moves in hopes of defibrillating a game that had lost its pulse. And that latter change means Pro Bowl selections from Super Bowl teams won't be in the lineup.

Fletcher, who has been dubbed "The Susan Lucci of the Pro Bowl" for being on the cusp of an invitation so many times in his 12-year career, benefited from the alterations. He gets to go to the game only because Saints linebacker Jonathan Vilma, who was voted in as a reserve, found out Sunday evening that he and his teammates will be preparing for a game that counts.

There's so many defections for so many reasons now that even folks in the host city are blasting the game as a joke. This from the Miami Herald, in a piece headlined "Pro Bowl is an embarrassing waste of time":

The Pro Bowl has gone from being something benign and easily ignored to something begging scorn.

Kicking off Super Bowl Week with the Pro Bowl is like kicking off your vacation with rain...

[T]he main problem isn't where you put the game.

The main problem is that players continue to want to be selected to the Pro Bowl (think bonus check) but not actually play in it.

The co-main problem, the new, colossally dumb one, is that having the game before the Super Bowl automatically eliminates Pro Bowl players from the two Super Bowl teams — meaning, the best players from the best teams.

Raise your hand if you think that makes any sense.

Already built in are the many players bowing out every year with lame excuses and made-up injuries. Now you also eliminate the players that fans most want to see. In this case, Peyton Manning and Drew Brees.

The result is that only 63 percent of players originally selected by fans, players and coaches actually are competing Sunday at It's-Still-Dolphin Stadium-to-Me.

I mean, so many actual stars have dropped out that two of the AFC quarterbacks are Vince Young and David Garrard. Seriously. C'mon!

But, good for you London. Hell, I'll probably watch anyway.

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