FanHouse Abe Pollin

As Washington, D.C., and the NBA community mourn the loss of Wizards owner Abe Pollin, the future of the franchise sits in question. Unlike the situations in Salt Lake City, Detroit and Indiana, where NBA team owners have also passed away in last nine months, the Wizards will apparently not stay in the family.

In 1999, when Pollin sold controlling interest of the NHL's Washington Capitals to AOL executive Ted Leonsis, he also handed over a minority interest in the Wizards, which included a clause giving Leonsis the first option to buy the team if Pollin chose to sell.

WASHINGTON -- If you aren't from the nation's capital, my hometown, and you know the name Abe Pollin at all, it is probably because of his audacity. At the end of the 2002-2003 NBA season, he fired from the team he owned, the Washington Wizards, Michael Jordan.

Such a remembrance would be as understandable as it would be unfortunate.

Indeed, Pollin, who died Tuesday afternoon at 85 as the longest tenured owner in the NBA, was much more than the protagonist in the ending of MJ's basketball-playing career as he was cast -- and wrongly, by the way. He was the kind of owner every fan, and certainly every city leader, would love to have had. The nation's capital was lucky for the last 46 years Pollin owned the Wizards, which was why Wes Unseld -- truly the greatest pro basketball player in this city's history -- dragged himself into downtown Washington on Tuesday night for what was a unglamorous meeting of a losing team from Philadelphia and Pollin's losing Wizards.

Abe Pollin, who has owned the Washington Wizards since 1964 when they were the Baltimore Bullets, has died. He was 85 years old.

Pollin had suffered from an undisclosed chronic illness for the past several years, one which confined him to a wheelchair but didn't keep him away from the Wiz. Pollin had previously owned the NHL's Washington Capitals, but sold the team to a group led by Ted Leonsis in 1999.

Pollin was the NBA's longest tenured team owner. Upon selling the Caps, Pollin told reporters his sons had "no interest" in running a sports team, and it's not known whether Pollin's wife Irene will maintain control of the franchise.

Ever since Bruce Boudreau took over as head coach of the Washington Capitals on the day after Thanksgiving 2007, the hockey news out of Washington, D.C. has been uniformly positive. There was the last year's late-season drive to make the playoffs, followed by an offseason filled with awards, a key to the city for Alex Ovechkin and elevated expectations going into the 2008-09 NHL season -- expectations that, thus far, have been fulfilled as the team surged to second place in the Eastern Conference.

But through it all there's been one minor, yet discordant note: the speedy attacking team was skating on one of the worst home ice surfaces in the NHL.