The Hockey Stop

Washington Capitals and Wizards owner Ted Leonsis is perhaps the model for how to turn around the fortunes of a franchise through the draft and brilliant marketing. The jovial Greek American from Brooklyn went from humble origins to becoming a senior AOL executive and later a professional sports owner. He answers every email, blogs every day on Ted's Take, made the Verizon Center the rockingest and reddest place in Washington, D.C., and most recently moved the Wizards' training camp from Richmond, Virginia, to the George Mason University campus in Fairfax where last Tuesday at approximately 12:01 a.m. the team held the first ever NBA Midnight Madness event at the Patriot Center.

So with all his success both personally and professionally, a gaffe here and there is no big deal. When Leonsis told a reporter at the Patriot Center that the move to Fairfax and the Midnight Madness event were designed to lure more fans from Northern Virginia because that is the team's base, it might have riled residents of the District and Maryland. But no big deal. Fans in Maryland and D.C. will forget those comments the second after No. 1 draft pick John Wall steps onto the court for the first time.

But when on Wednesday Leonsis told a group of Northern Virginia business leaders at a breakfast event on the GMU campus that he expected the NBA will soon have a hard salary cap similar to the NHL's model, well that wasn't taken lightly by the league office and commissioner David Stern, who fined Leonsis $100,000 for the comments.

From the AP story:

"NBA commissioner David Stern said that's not necessarily true -- and the NBA fined Leonsis $100,000 for 'unauthorized public comments regarding the league's collective bargaining negotiations.'

"We're negotiating and that was one of our negotiating points," Stern told The Associated Press, "but collective bargaining is a negotiating process, and that was not something that Ted was authorized to say and he will be dealt with for that lapse in judgment."

But does Leonsis have a point about the salary cap?

In my view, he is absolutely correct that the NBA needs a hard cap similar to the NHL. Professional hockey has never been more competitive and the parity is stunning. Any team can beat any team on any night and that is great for the game and even better for the fans. It is why a smaller market such as Pittsburgh has just as much of a shot as New York.

The LeBron James fiasco is a great example of how smaller markets suffer with no hard cap. Cleveland simply did not have the money to build a championship-caliber team around James and the rest is history -- James went to cash-rich Miami to play with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh and probably get some rings.

Now let's say Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin and Henrik Sedin all signed with the New York Rangers when they entered into free agency because there was no hard cap and Gotham had all the dough.

That wouldn't be very fair now would it?

Kudos to Leonsis for speaking the hard truth about the NBA's need for a hard salary cap.