The Graeme Roustan Show: Zach Leonsis

The Hockey News' Money and Power 2025 hockey business annual is available at THN.com/free, featuring the annual 100 people of power and influence list.

W. Graeme Roustan, owner and publisher of The Hockey News, sat down with special guests for peer-to-peer conversations also featured in the issue, including Monumental Sports and Entertainment’s president of media and new enterprises, Zach Leonsis.

Here's their full conversation in The Graeme Roustan Show:

Read along with an excerpt from their discussion:

W. GRAEME ROUSTAN: What was it like growing up in the house watching Ted Leonsis? I know for us, he’s the big Ted Leonsis. But for you, it’s dad.

ZACH LEONSIS: Well, I think I’m the luckiest guy in the world for a variety of reasons. I love my father, first and foremost. We’re incredibly close friends, and we talk to each other probably too often. I mean, I see him daily. We talk daily. We probably think 80 percent or 90 percent alike. And then, every now and then, we do disagree, and it’s healthy, and we make each other better. Most of the time, he’s right, and I’m wrong. But every now and then, I might be right. I’ve learned so much from my father as the years have gone on. His ability to connect the dots in a big-picture vision, to see around corners, to be partner-oriented truly as an operator. He’s not a transactional person. He thinks about the overall league itself. And he treats our membership as part of the NHL as one of the great privileges of our lives, which it truly is.

He’s relentless, but in a truly entrepreneurial way. So, I’ve learned a lot from him. But I think the thing that he’s taught me the most is certainly how to treat people, how to treat people with respect, gain buy-in, set a strategic vision, and be a great communicator. And I think he really embodies all of those things.

We understand that owning and operating these teams is unlike any other business on planet Earth. Your shareholders, your stakeholders, are very different. You have to think about this as operating a public trust and making sure that you’re a great steward of the franchise. Our fans and so many others out there, they intertwine their personalities, their personal identities, with the team brand. If you grew up and are a Caps fan, you’d rather be caught dead than in (the Penguins’) black-and-yellow, right? And so, we always want to think about legacy and operating in a double-bottom-line capacity, giving back.

We take our philanthropy, our volunteerism, very seriously. And we also understand that what’s best for the league is ultimately going to be best for us, too, even if in the short term, the immediate term, maybe it’s not totally advantageous. We want to be great model members of our league. And so, we’re very close with our league offices, not just the NHL but also the NBA. We’re very involved in a variety of different committees.

So, there’s definitely a certain vantage point and purview that we have. I think my father, in particular, is a creative executive. He sees the broader strategic vision and power of leveraging leagues as platforms to launch new businesses, take advantage of new opportunities, grow additional revenue streams and grow internationally. So, from that perspective, we are regular optimists because we still see so much more upside to come. From the time when my father purchased the Washington Capitals to now, valuations have grown tremendously. The business has grown dramatically. We’ve transitioned from being mom-and-pop-style businesses to highly sophisticated, diverse revenue-stream-producing businesses. And that’s only going to continue. And we have aspirations of growing our business even further and becoming even more relevant.

It starts with the product on the ice, of course. It continues in our offices with our business staff and how we approach our business as well. But it really all ties back to the league and the direction of the league. We’ve had the blessing of some of the best leadership in all sports and all business with Gary Bettman and Bill Daly. And we want that to continue. We want to bring energy and vigor and work ethic and time to the table to grow the pie for everyone – teams, players, ownership and fans included.

WGR: If you look at the other teams in the leagues, most of them don’t have what you have, which is this complete network of not only teams, organizations and concerts but controlling the facility. How important is it to have this ecosystem of all these different things connected to the organization?

ZL: It is unique, and it’s something that we take great pride in. It starts with the IP of the teams and our great fan bases. And you think about what are all the different avenues, channels, businesses that are required to support these businesses. And over the past five, 10, 15-plus years, I think sports properties have increasingly become media properties. Our live local and national television, and now streaming rights, are incredibly valuable. It’s been a key staple of keeping the cable bundle together. And forever, teams have out-sourced those services to blue-chip companies like Comcast or Fox. The world is changing, and we find a lot of strategic value in owning our rights and owning our distribution.

Local television, for example, is still the No. 1 way that we interact with our fans. We’ve got over three million cable subscribers in the Washington, D.C., Baltimore and the greater Washington region. We’re only going to be able to fit 20,000 people in our building on any given night, but we might have hundreds of thousands of people watching on television. So, we’ve really wanted to focus on making the television product great and making our games accessible.

We went direct-to-consumer. We built these brand-new studios. This is the most up-to-date, future-forward production plant and studio in all of local sports. We’ve upgraded our video quality from 1080i to 1080p. We’re rapidly evaluating what it looks like to go to 4K in the future. This facility is built for that kind of future. We’re also a major-league market. Washington is a top market in the U.S. And so, we wanted our programming to have a major-league look and feel, a national presence, if you will.

WGR: How has it changed from a sport that’s on TV to a media company?

ZL: For the longest time, all distribution was tied exclusively to traditional cable and satellite television. And we’ve seen some of the writing on the wall for a long time now. Maybe some people were trying to ignore it. We, in the 2010s, knew that cord-cutting and cord-shaving was going to impact the way people digested content. In Washington, D.C., we think one of our great positive attributes is that we’re a particularly young community. We really score high with millennials and Gen Z. We have great universities, and people who are graduating from those schools are staying here and getting jobs. That’s great for us. But a lot of those younger people aren’t subscribing to cable. It’s the youngest generation that’s saying, “I’m going to cobble together my own bundle of Netflix and Hulu,” and whatever they want to do. So, it’s really important for us to get ahead of that and deliver our product direct-to-consumer.

We see at the national level, there is increasing interest from some of the biggest digital players in the world. You look at some of the companies that we affiliate and partner with now, Disney, ESPN, Warner Brothers Discovery and Turner. These are fantastic, very reputable, high-blue-chip media companies.

Then, you look at some of the market caps and some of the digital players, like Amazon, and it’s a different ball game. All of those players are really looking at live sports as invaluable programming. Think about the programming budget that Netflix has. They spend quite literally billions of dollars, $10 billion or something, on producing shows, and you binge-watch it all in two or three days’ time, and that series costs $5 million an episode to produce, and you’re done with it. In hockey, the NBA and other sports, the leagues provide thousands of live games. It’s appointment television.

For this conversation, more interviews and a deep look into the world of the hockey business, check out The Hockey News' Money and Power 2025 issue, available at THN.com/free.