Wizards Gimmicks

I was once told: if you offer something for everything done, you may never get anything done without having to offer something. ”Yeah, I’ll clean my room, but what am I getting in return?”

Yesterday as I sat in the Verizon Center, I saw more gimmicks than usual to excite the crowd. Do I blame them? No… I understand their thinking with a product like the one we have on the court. At the same time, every passing gimmick had an opposite effect on me, rather than exciting me, it reiterated how sad our team and program is currently that we’ve had to stoop to these levels.

There was this one from the weekend:

This was another one for the weekend:

Yesterday, when a Houston Rocket approached the free throw line, instead of making noise for the sole sake of trying to get the opponent to miss a free throw, Chick Fil-A was offering “free sandwiches” to EVERYONE in attendance if we made noise and the shooter missed both free throws. There were Dunkin Donut giveaways (can’t remember how you won it), t-shirt tosses, giveaways parachuted down from the rafters, Chipotle burritos were throw into the crowd, just to name a few… I’ve been to other NBA arenas, to the level I saw yesterday, is not the norm.

This morning, the gimmicks continued. In the subject line of an email this morning the message read “All-You Can Eat.” I thought for sure Living Social or Groupon had partnered with a Golden Corral or an Old Country Buffett (do they even still exist?). Nope! It was an email from the Washington Wizards. The email looks like this below:

“All You Can Eat Seats” – Unlimited food and drink! Ted may need to be careful what he wishes for, his desire to put people in the seats, despite being essential to pay the bills, could very well have an opposite-effect. Seeing this level of basketball, the players as dis-engaged as they seem at times, up and close in personal makes you dis-like them more than you previously did.