FanHouse TedLeonsis

WASHINGTON -- When Capitals owner Ted Leonsis learned that Game 5 of his team's second-round Stanley Cup playoff series against Pittsburgh would have to be played 24 hours after Game 4 in Pittsburgh because of a Yanni concert scheduled at the Penguins' arena, he complained that the back-to-back games were bad for the league, bad for the teams and bad for the fans.

Personally, I was more concerned to learn that there were enough fans of the Greek crooner to fill a major sports arena. But I digress. Leonsis was right. Yanni shouldn't have been allowed to have any influence on one of our major sport's postseasons, any more than he does on music in this country.

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Late last week we gave you the heads up on E:60's upcoming profile of Washington Capitals winger Alex Ovechkin. Earlier this evening, ESPN aired the piece, which you can watch in its entirety right here. I don't want to give any spoilers, but I will say that Ovechkin is in rare form.

Fans of Don Cherry, Sidney Crosby and local speed limits will not be pleased.

Hockey fans in the U.S. love to complain about how ESPN gives the sport short shrift on SportsCenter, so I guess it's only fair to note that the network's E:60 program will be doing a profile on Washington Capitals winger Alex Ovechkin next Tuesday night, April 21, at 7:00 p.m. ESPN's Rachel Nichols not only talks to Ovechkin and a few of his teammates, she also made time to talk to Caps owner Ted Leonsis, Don Cherry and Wayne Gretzky. Enjoy the preview clip.

The war of words that started last Saturday night on Hockey Night in Canada when Don Cherry chastised Washington Capitals winger Alex Ovechkin for his post-goal celebrations continued earlier this evening, when the CBC talking head decided that it was time to fire back at Ted Leonsis after the Washington Capitals owner compared Cherry to Rush Limbaugh earlier this week.

Though video of the appearance isn't yet available, he's roughly what went down. Cherry's comments came toward the end of his regular weekly appearance on Coach's Corner between the first and second period on Hockey Night in Canada. Cherry had already warmed up the viewing audience earlier in the segment when he jokingly referred to Calgary Flames center Oli Jokinen, a Finn, as a Russian -- because after all, it's impossible to tell those European players apart these days!

UPDATE: Video available after the jump.

U.S. President Barack Obama hopped on Air Force One earlier today for a quick trip to Ottawa to meet with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The trip is the first official overseas international state visit of his presidency, and he was welcomed warmly by crowds at the airport in the Canadian capital.

Ahead of the trip, the President sat for an interview with the CBC's Peter Mansbridge, a media personality who's roughly on par with being the Walter Cronkite of Canada. At the close of the interview, one that covered some weighty topics of concern like the current administration's position on NAFTA and some of the "Buy American" clauses in the recently signed stimulus package, Mansbridge couldn't help but mention that the President has yet to see his first hockey game.

Last week, ESPN.com published a survey of 193 current NHL players. One of the questions: Should the NHL participate in the Winter Olympics beyond the 2010 Games in Vancouver? The answer was a resounding yes, with 82% of those surveyed answering in the affirmative.

But while that poll was anonymous, you can put a face on at least one player who has his mind on hitting the ice in Sochi, Russia in time for the 2014 Winter Games: Washington Capitals winger Alex Ovechkin.

In an interview that will be published tomorrow in Sovetsky Sport, Ovechkin told the newspaper's Pavel Lysenkov that participating in the games is a "matter of prestige" for him and his fellow Russian NHL players. The translation of the piece comes after the jump. Thanks once again to our friend Dmitry Chesnokov, Sovetsky's Washington correspondent, for supplying the translation.

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.

Back in the early days of NHL FanHouse, we had some fun when Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis engaged in a very brief but public feud with local sports radio personality Steve Czaban. While others might have thought it silly, I thought it was a lot of fun to watch in an "everybody wins, nobody gets hurt," sort of way.

My only regret is that nobody unleashed any insults along the lines of Mark Crawford's crack about Scotty Bowman and the steel plate in his head. Now I would have paid to hear something like that.

Well, Leonsis has gotten his Irish up again -- I know he's of Greek descent, but stick with me here -- and this time the object of his ire is ESPN's own Bill Simmons. The trouble started when Simmons fielded a question in his Sports Guy column from a reader who was astonished that the Washington Mystics had raised not one, not two, but three banners to the rafters of Verizon Center touting their league-leading attendance (1998, 1999 and 2002).

It was the following answer that drove Leonsis to the keyboard:

I don't consider those three WNBA attendance titles valid because half of those crowds were made up of Pittsburgh Steelers fans. But I mentioned your e-mail to my buddy House (a D.C. fan and resident) and he shamefully passed this tidbit along: Apparently last month during a Capitals game, the Caps raised a banner to commemorate their 2007-08 Southeast Division title.

There were a number of big stories to emerge during Monday's night's Pittsburgh Steelers win over the Washington Redskins. One of them appears to be the overwhelming contingent of Steelers fans that took over FedEx Field, forcing the host Redskins to actually use a silent count in their house.

The opening discussion on the post-game Sportscenter wasn't the play of the Steelers defense, or even the job Byron Leftwich did coming off the bench in relief of of Ben Roethlisberger. Instead, it was the two hosts looking at each other, jaws agape, discussing the thousands of Pittsburgh fans that made FedEx Field seem like Heinz Field East.

Ryan Wilson wrote about it this morning, and points out a piece by Dan Steinberg at the D.C. Sports bog on this very topic.

My original guess was 15 percent, but I was mocked for going too low. Was it 20 percent? Was it 25 percent? Some writers guessed as high as 30, and the Washington Times went with 33 percent, although I still say that's way too high. Your guess on the percentage? And as long as I'm asking questions, why does this happen? Why does it happen with Penguins games? Do Pittsburgh fans have more money? More passion? Fewer outside interests? Fewer job responsibilities?

Every Monday morning The Ice Sheet will take a close look at everything that's happened in the NHL since Friday night at 5:00 p.m. To read them all, click here.

Over the past two weeks, the hockey blogosphere has been ablaze with talk about how the Edmonton Oilers booted blogger Dave Berry from the press box at Rexall Place when his observations about the team veered into territory that was decidedly off-color. For me, it was impossible not to watch the story in a combination of anger, sorrow and bemusement. The reason: Like it or not, my blog, Off Wing Opinion, first broached the issue of bloggers finding a place in the press box when I asked the Washington Capitals -- specifically majority owner Ted Leonsis -- for a single game press pass during the 2005-06 season after I had watched a game as a guest in his box.

What's happened since then is pretty well known here in Washington and elsewhere in the hockey blogosphere. After getting that single game credential, I suggested to Leonsis that he afford that same privilege to other local bloggers who covered the Caps. He agreed, but asked me to put together a "blogger's bill of rights," to help smooth the process. As a result, I created a set of guidelines to help bloggers and sports PR professionals to help understand one another better.