Thank you for the support.

And for the nice comments in this article; and for allowing us to grow our season ticket holder base to almost 8000 season ticket holders – up from 3900 when we bought the team. That places us in the top 20 teams in the NBA now in terms of season ticket holders. Thank you for renewing your season tickets at a better than average NBA rate – in excess of 80 percent last off season. And thank you for using your tickets – we monitor this usage digitally – fully 80 plus percent of the tickets are used game by game by season tickets holders; we count the turn style clicks. The Caps are at 88 percent as a comparison.

Thank you for your positive emails to me and for your support of our young players. And thank you for meeting with me personally – every single week of the season – in round tables – in one on one sessions; in meetings in the owner’s box; in chalk talks and formal Q and A sessions. I love being with you and learning and listening to you. We have fantastic fans and this is a great basketball market.

And I thank you for enjoying the game day experience – and for your belief in what we are doing here in Washington DC. Rebuilding a team is hard enough without the local pixel maker piling on; but this is an annual rite of passage – all teams go through it here via the Washington Post. Its genesis is from a blog post – that then goes to the newspaper itself. I have to laugh in that the blog post column mentioned within is usually sponsored by a ticket reseller that allows you to go find out what the actual average ticket price of a ticket is on the resale market; but why let facts get in the way of a sensational story, right? And the negative comments within are mostly from scalpers? Scalping is illegal in our city; so they are now quoting about to be criminals to prove a point in a story . That is ironic, no? The scalpers don’t want their names to be used – that usually isn’t a good sign. I guess they didn’t want to be arrested! The Washington Post is harboring criminals now. Scalpers; think of the genesis of the name itself – it isn’t positive, is it? Click here.

And Luke Russert – want to hear something funny? He was my guest in the owner’s box dining room -which was quite crowded the night before he made these jocular comments to his friend at the radio station – so let no good deed go unpunished. But Luke is a fan; he is passionate – he sells his point of view- he is an audio blogger now – it is quite fashionable to pile on; but we can take it – and I know that Luke will always be a fan and will be positive once we build a winner. That is how it goes when you are rebuilding a team.

This Washington Post article was quite predictable. Picture and captions to; quite clichéd. See those three empty seats in the photo? They are sold and people were in attendance – they were probably just eating in our private club set aside for VIP’s at half time. Headline; “ticket prices fall”. Our ticket prices haven’t fallen; some resold ticket prices have fallen – while some others have risen. I have blogged about supply and demand quite often.

Be this as it may- I get that we are struggling as a team; as I have noted; it will be a difficult process; there is always great skepticism when you try to do something different – radical or when you hold beliefs that are counter to some popular opinion.

But – we shall carry on; we are 100 or so games into a rebuild with 9 players under rookie contract; we are seeing progress; we have strong attendance – we have great fans. We can take the heat. Thanks again Wizards fans.

I thank our fans for being so supportive; and I promise we will work with the city and the police to deal with the illegal scalping outside of our building in a more diligent way – the Washington Post can be thanked for this law of unintended consequence now around scalpers.