NEW YORK — Zach Leonsis, vice president and general manager of Monumental Sports Network, recently traveled to attend E3 and went around asking the sports fans there if they were watching the NBA Finals or Stanley Cup Finals.
If he was looking to find many mainstream sports fans, he had walked into the wrong place — a gaming expo.
“You go, ‘Oh, are you watching the NBA Finals? Do you know John Wall? Do you know Alex Ovechkin? And they go, ‘Nope, no I don’t,” Leonsis recalled Monday at Hashtag Sports. “‘But I love Faker. Faker is incredible. We can watch him play, and that’s what I want to watch.'”
These kinds of sports fans — ones that haven’t heard of star players on the Washington Wizards and Washington Capitals but worship a professional League of Legends player — are one major reason why Monumental Sports & Entertainment is a big believer in esports.
“As a sports team operator, I think from our perspective we really just have to be conscientious about, ‘Oh, we better make sure we don’t whiff on that next generation of fans,'” Leonsis said. “They’re all viewing from OTT platforms. They don’t have cable.”
Leonsis: Esports fans know Faker but not John Wall
Monumental Sports Network's Zach Leonsis: Esports fans know Faker but not John Wall.https://www.sporttechie.com/monumental-sports-entertainment-embraces-esports/
Posted by SportTechie on Tuesday, June 27, 2017
And so at E3, Monumental was streaming Team Liquid in action during tournament play.
Our first foray into #eSports! Watch @TeamLiquid in a @Quake tournament from @E3 Conference in LA right now: https://t.co/hHniwXDRde pic.twitter.com/E7j118pKWd
— MonumentalSportsNet (@MonSportsNet) June 14, 2017
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Ted Leonsis, Zach’s father, is a co-executive chairman of an esports ownership group that acquired a controlling interest in Team Liquid. Monumental Sports & Entertainment owns the Wizards and Capitals, and as the company’s founder, chairman and majority owner, Ted Leonsis has been active in esports.
In the future, the Wizards will be one of the 17 inaugural esports teams participating in the NBA 2K esports league, as Zach Leonsis called the franchise “a hand-raiser” in that venture.
“I used to describe esports as the biggest thing that nobody had ever heard of. I don’t think I can describe it that way anymore,” Zach Leonsis said. “The viewership numbers online are enormous.”