Ted Leonsis is eager to host more women’s hockey games at Capital One Arena in the coming years. He’s also interested in bringing a team to Washington, DC, permanently, but he has some conditions before attempting to do so.
Leonsis shared his thoughts on the future of women’s hockey in DC while speaking to WTOP’s Ben Raby, the former host of Capitals Radio.
“We should be the women’s professional sports capital of the world,” Leonsis said. “We want to play that part and be in that role as a leader and innovator.”
The news comes on the heels of the PWHL’s apparent addition of up to four new franchises this summer. The league announced that it was expanding Detroit on Wednesday while Ice Warriors magazine reported two days later that the PWHL is in the process of finalizing Hamilton and San Jose as the next two expansion cities. The magazine added that Las Vegas is a frontrunner to be the fourth team.
The DC area seems eager to host a franchise — if the PWHL Takeover Tour game between the Montreal Victoire and the New York Sirens this past January is any indication. 17,228 fans attended the game — which broke the United States record for the most people to attend a professional women’s hockey game at the time.
“We’re incredibly proud to see Capital One Arena serve as the stage for another historic moment with today’s record-setting PWHL game,” Leonsis said then in a statement. “…[T]he momentum we’re seeing today reflects both the excellence of the athletes and the growing demand from fans to experience women’s sports at the highest level.”
In the waning minutes of regulation, the crowd even made its feelings known about the need for a more permanent solution, chanting “We want a team!”
“We have a couple more years of renovations, so it’s very difficult right now to speak with certainty about expansion and what they’re doing along our timetable,” Leonsis told Raby.
Leonsis added that he spoke to PWHL executive Stan Kasten shortly after the event about getting into “a rhythm” about DC hosting games, possibly doing two next year and three more the season after that. But the league would need to change its ownership structure before enlisting Leonsis to bring a team to the District. Currently, all the teams are owned and operated by the Mark Walter Group, and there’s no timetable for the league to move away from that structure, at least in the short term.
A Monumental spokesperson added in Raby’s story that they are open to bringing a team to DC “if there were flexibility in the ownership structure.”
The DC area has long been considered as a potential landing spot for a women’s hockey team. The Athletic reported in October 2024 that the PWHL evaluated the District; Pittsburgh; London, Ontario; and several other locations as potential host cities for inaugural clubs.
Prior to January’s game, the Capitals hosted multiple PWHPA (Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association) events, which were a hit with local fans. In 2022, MedStar Capitals Iceplex, the team’s practice facility, housed a stop on the PWHPA’s Dream Gap tour. A year later, it welcomed the PWHPA Showcase, bringing big names like Amanda Kessel, Hilary Knight, Sarah Nurse, and Marie-Philip Poulin to the area.
Leonsis, whose Monumental Sports & Entertainment is already the owner of the WNBA’s Washington Mystics, has long been a vocal supporter of women’s sports at large.
“What I’d like to do is make Washington, DC the capital of women’s professional sports,” Leonsis told CNBC’s Squawk Box in April 2024. “I could see one day us replicating what we’ve done at Monumental and we could have a women’s hockey team, we could have women’s baseball teams, we could have women’s volleyball teams. I think the whole platform [of women’s sports] is getting ready to explode.”
