Washington Capitals

Location

Washington DC, USA, United States

Capacity

20,356

Opened

1997

Time zone

UTC -05:00 Eastern Standard Time (EST)

Capital One Arena is an indoor arena in Washington, D.C. Located in the Chinatown section of the larger Penn Quarter neighborhood, the arena sits atop the Gallery Place rapid transit station of the Washington Metro. The arena was opened on December 2, 1997, as MCI Center but renamed to Verizon Center in 2006 when MCI was acquired by Verizon Communications and changed again to its current name in 2017. Owned and operated by Monumental Sports & Entertainment, it is the home arena of the Washington Capitals of the National Hockey League (NHL), the Washington Wizards of the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the Georgetown University men's basketball team. It was also home to the Washington Mystics of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) from 1998 to 2018, after which they moved to the Entertainment and Sports Arena in southeast Washington for the 2019 season. Though the arena project was a commercial success for its backers, it has contributed to the gentrification of the surrounding area, the displacement of most of its Asian-American residents (the local Chinese-American population, which numbered over 3,000 before the arena's construction, was a mere 300 in 2023), and the replacement of most of the small businesses and restaurants that served the Asian-American community by large national corporations.