Each Friday, we’ll comb through as many articles, tweets and podcasts as we can find related to the world of sports betting and daily fantasy sports, and publish the good stuff here.
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The NBA said each sports league should get a cut of revenue earned from wagering on their games.
Betting operators should pay each league 1% of the total amount bet on its games, NBA senior vice president and assistant general counsel Dan Spillane said in a statement delivered Wednesday to the New York Senate Standing Committee on Racing, Gaming, and Wagering.
“Sports leagues provide the foundation for sports betting while bearing the risks that sports betting imposes, even when regulated,” Spillane said in the statement. “Without our games and fans, there could be no sports betting. And if sports betting becomes legal in New York and other states, sports leagues will need to invest more in compliance and enforcement, including bet monitoring, investigations, and education.
“To compensate leagues for the risk and expense created by betting and the commercial value our product creates for betting operators, we believe it is reasonable for operators to pay each league 1% of the total amount bet on its games.”
The Philadelphia Eagles opened between a 5-point and 6.5-point Super Bowl underdog against the New England Patriots
Philadelphia is the largest Super Bowl underdog since the Arizona Cardinals were seven-point underdogs to the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XLIII.
The Vegas Golden Knights have accumulated a 19-2-2 home record — which has been bad news for the local sportsbooks.
In a city where fans can show their enthusiasm in the form of a wager before heading to T-Mobile Arena, the dominance has an added dimension.
“We’ve been getting our butts kicked,” South Point oddsmaker Jimmy Vaccaro said. “We should rename it ‘free date night.’ A guy invites a girl out to dinner and stops at the sportsbook on the way to the game. What she doesn’t realize is we are paying for everything.”
A $100 wager on every Knights home game in 2017-18 to date would have net a bettor $1,395. That is an extraordinarily profitable return. And, though hockey losses typically amount to little more than a rounding error for a casino’s bottom line, the phenomenon that has been the first season for the first big-league team based in the only U.S. city where you can make a legal wager has created a perfect storm effect for the books.
“Hockey is usually a very poorly bet sport,” William Hill director of trading Nick Bogdanovich said. “But all of a sudden we have big decisions and we keep losing them. Players just keep rolling over their winnings.”
Local properties are booking between 10 and 15 times the handle on Golden Knights home games than for any other NHL team. And that number increases during the game, as fans can bet from their seats on mobile devices. In total, the handle represents the equivalent of an average NFL game, which is in the six-figure neighborhood for each sportsbook.
The U.S. Supreme Court did not release a decision on sports betting this week.
U.S. Supreme Court issues three decisions today, but sports gambling case not among them. The next scheduled date for the release of SCOTUS decisions is March 5, 2018.
— Ryan M. Rodenberg (@SportsLawProf) January 22, 2018
A lot of different players would try to get in on the action if sports betting were legalized.
Long the province of bookies and Las Vegas casinos, sports betting could become legal in New York as soon as 2019. Casino operators, horsemen and owners of video-lottery racinos are all hoping for a piece of the action.
“I think it will happen,” state Sen. John Bonacic, R-Middletown, said Wednesday after a hearing on the possibility of sports betting coming to the Empire State.