Mayor Muriel Bowser started her third term convinced she could become the next Tony Williams, luring a team back to the District with a grand new stadium development. Instead, she could become the next Sharon Pratt.

It would undoubtedly be an ignominious distinction should Bowser indeed become the first D.C. mayor to lose a professional sports team since Pratt saw the football team leave 30 years ago, and that means the blame game is starting in earnest among D.C. politicos about what, if anything, local leaders could have done to keep the Wizards and the Capitals in the District. A revolt in Richmond (or Alexandria itself) remains a possibility, as Virginia lawmakers must still approve the deal. But the sight of Ted Leonsis locking arms with Virginia leaders has been enough to send recriminations flying before the ink is even dry on any Potomac Yard stadium deal.

The chief villain in this saga is undoubtedly Leonsis, who seems willing to turn his back on a prime downtown D.C. location to grab some cash from the Virginia suburbs as he tries to spin his Monumental Sports & Entertainment into a public company, effects on Alexandria traffic be damned. But there is little doubt that Bowser will become a punching bag too, considering her outsize role in the negotiations to keep the teams in Chinatown.

“The city administration is at fault here: They were aware of all this,” says former Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans, one of the original architects of the effort to lure Abe Pollin’s teams downtown in the first place and one of Bowser’s biggest boosters since he was forced to resign in 2020. “If they’d acted back in August, and put the offer on the table they came out with yesterday [to renovate Capital One Arena], Ted probably would’ve taken it…The city didn’t believe he’d leave, and he called their bluff.”

Loose Lips finds it difficult to pin the blame solely on Bowser, however. As Herronor has argued forcefully in a somber press conference Wednesday, the city was never really in the game if Leonsis desired a blank slate to build a shiny new suburban arena. It might’ve taken a few extra months, but the city was ultimately able to come up with an offer for $500 million in improvements at Capital One (just a bit shy of the $600 million Leonsis has spent the past year demanding for the arena). Monumental even conceded privately that the city’s best and final offer, which also included a pitch to build a new music venue adjacent to the arena in Gallery Place, was a “generous” one. Evans and other conservative voices are eager to paint this as a decision based on crime around the arena, but the temptation of Virginia’s $2 billion offer was likely a major factor.

“In our view, there’s a difference in being committed to an urban arena and being interested in a suburban arena,” Bowser told reporters. “Clearly, they’re going to drop a lot of money on that project. And they have that vacant parcel.”

But Bowser wasn’t powerless here, either. Her very public yearning for a new football stadium at RFK, even as the Monumental matter hung unresolved, undeniably grabbed up quite a bit of her administration’s attention. And that probably didn’t make anything easier in the negotiations with Leonsis, particularly as her relationship frayed with the billionaire—several Wilson Building sources described a souring between the two over a variety of issues dating all the way back to the early days of the pandemic, as the mayor sparred with Monumental over capacity limits for sports venues. As with so many other issues, Bowser’s former chief of staff John Falcicchio was seen as a key point person on these discussions and his absence following his fall from grace did not go unnoticed. 

It may be a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking, of course, but there are also complaints that Bowser too zealously guarded her authority over these negotiations without including the Council. Chair Phil Mendelson played a role (and met repeatedly with Monumental officials over the past year, including a joint meeting with Bowser and Leonsis Tuesday), but the city didn’t present a united front until the eleventh hour.

“I find it unfortunate that a more collaborative effort never really materialized to negotiate a deal in earnest,” says At-Large Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, the chair of the Council’s economic development committee. He says he met with Monumental officials on his own as well, but he lamented that discussions with Leonsis only intensified as Virginia’s interest became abundantly clear.

“I don’t think it had to come to this,” McDuffie says. “It shouldn’t have to come to this.”

Evans predicts that Monumental’s move, set to come as soon as 2028, will be a “death knell” for downtown D.C., and the business class agrees, given their very public worries about the state of the downtown office market and its domino effects on D.C.’s tax revenue. Note that mayor turned Federal City Council boss Williams, D.C. Chamber of Commerce CEO Angela Franco, and Downtown Business Improvement District President Gerren Price all flanked Bowser Wednesday to show their concern over the loss of the teams.

But in D.C.’s more left-leaning circles, the news doesn’t seem quite so disastrous. Local lefties are no fans of Bowser, but they aren’t going to blast her for failing to outbid Virginia for a billionaire’s affections, especially when the evidence about how valuable sports arenas really are to cities is decidedly mixed. 

“This is a reminder that a stadium is just a political fight between jurisdictions, not about serving residents and providing what the community needs,” says Ed Lazere, the former Council contender and progressive advocate who spent the past few months organizing to oppose Bowser’s RFK plans. “Ted Leonsis said in his statement that this project will ‘lift all of our neighbors towards a shared sense of prosperity.’ But this isn’t about our prosperity, it’s all about his prosperity…It may be an awful transition to go through, but maybe it’s part of a solution for more vibrant living downtown.”

That’s why Lazere finds it so objectionable that Bowser and Mendelson were able to come up with $500 million to offer Leonsis seemingly at the drop of a hat, even as the mayor cries poverty and says she simply doesn’t have the money to follow the law and expand food assistance benefits for hungry people. 

“What does that say about what they really care about?” Lazere says. “They care more about subsidizing a billionaire and having a flashy development than real economic development to invest in D.C. residents.”

Bowser claims the windfall came because Chief Financial Officer Glen Lee was able to refinance some of the District’s debts and secure more favorable terms as interest rates and inflation fell. Mendelson had claimed for months that the city was right up against its borrowing limits (a key reason he raised doubts about her pursuit of the RFK stadium), but Bowser says this “gave us room to put that kind of cash on the table.” She claims that these terms became “even more favorable” only recently, which prevented her from making such an offer earlier, though LL would note that these economic conditions have been improving steadily for months now.

Whatever the reason, the last-minute nature of the offer managed to piss off just about everyone involved. If you support a deal to keep the teams, it looks more like a desperate bid to save face than a serious offer. If you oppose it, you might wonder why deals for other huge priorities (from funding Metro to making housing more affordable) are so much harder to come by. In fact, LL hears that the Council was not nearly so unanimous in supporting the offer as Bowser and Mendelson sought to make them appear, but lawmakers barely had any time to review it before it was announced publicly to counter Virginia’s pitch. 

Mendelson, for his part, declined to discuss the behind-the-scenes machinations of how the deal came together, but would say he believes it was a “strong move” to provide an alternative for Leonsis.”

Bowser says she intends to push the $500 million offer through the Council on the off chance that the Potomac Yard deal falls through. Virginia’s General Assembly still needs to sign off on it, and newly empowered Democratic leaders might not be so keen to hand a big win to Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin (especially because Northern Virginia politicians no longer control key leadership roles in both chambers). It’ll also need to satisfy Alexandria denizens, who have repelled stadium projects in the past. 

And a move to the suburbs may prove more trouble than it’s worth if Leonsis cares at all about public opinion—a good portion of the fan base lives in Northern Virginia, but the reaction to the move has been generally negative thus far. As Ward 8 Council candidate Markus Batchelor noted, Leonsis’ plans to move the Washington Mystics from the newly built Entertainment and Sports Arena into Capital One once the Wiz and Caps move out has the knock-on effect of pulling a team out of a disinvested area in Southeast, not exactly a good look for the rich White team owner.

“Monumental is too far down the road with Virginia to simply pivot, but there are a lot of things that have to happen and we’ve seen deals fall apart before,” Mendelson says. “There are serious questions about highway access, Metro access…It’s much more complicated to pull off this deal in Virginia than it is here.”

The District could have its offer approved as soon as February, Bowser said, proving to be an appealing antidote if things get ugly.

“If they come back to us, we may be able to talk about something different, too,” Bowser said, trying to leave the door open to another deal. “If they want a campus-style [development], it may take a couple of years, but we would have RFK, and we would have the FBI [headquarters]. So there are multi-acre sites in the District.”

Indeed, this episode has not deterred Bowser from her pursuit of RFK. If anything, it might spur her to double down and work even harder to secure some sort of win there (even though Lazere argues, persuasively, that this sudden reversal from Leonsis demonstrates the dangers of relying on sports team owners to do anything but pursue their own self-interest).

“Instead of prioritizing the cultural and economic engines already in our backyard, ones that are central to our continued recovery, we’ve only seen greater focus on the shiny object—and the less fruitful deal—for D.C.’s economy,” Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen wrote in a statement, noting that he argued months ago for more of a focus on Capital One than RFK. “Today’s move wasn’t inevitable, but avoiding it required far more focus in the past year than it ever received from the administration.”

Allen added that he was hopeful that this drama forces a greater focus on how to “move aggressively to transform downtown,” and that is a rare point where he happens to agree with Evans. Bowser has called in a pair of heavyweight developers, Jodie McLean and Deborah Ratner Salzberg, to develop a future plan for Gallery Place, with or without Monumental. That’s probably a better move than hoping a billionaire’s change of heart solves the city’s problems.

“This Monumental move should not ultimately render us as a hole in the donut,” McDuffie says. “The city needs to rise to the occasion here.”