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Betting On Hockey: Numbers Don't Lie - Oct. 19 2021 - Vol. 75, Issue 05 - W. Graeme Roustan

I placed a bet that I would love hockey at the age of three when I first stepped onto the ice at the outdoor rink in Notre Dame de Grace park in Montreal, and has it ever paid off handsomely.

Placing a financial or barter bet on the outcome of a hockey game has been done since the very first game more than a hundred years ago. Until recent years, many billions of dollars of bets were made between friends, coworkers, teammates and family, usually on a face-to-face basis. Bets placed with strangers were done through third parties, which has been the subject of investigations into organized crime, gangs and offshore illegal activity. The numbers are staggering.

On Nov. 20, 2019, I sat down with Ted Leonsis, the owner of the Washington Capitals, who has been a leading advocate for the legalization of single-game betting on NHL games. Ted has always been a visionary when it comes to big ideas and is always clairvoyant when it comes to being on the cutting edge of technology and trends. Here is an excerpt from my Q&A with Ted from two years ago:

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GRAEME: “I was in Las Vegas learning about gaming and what impact it’s going to have on the league. How do you see gambling coming into, not just hockey, but professional sports?”

TED: “First, you’re in this big, beautiful building. We spent $40 million last off-season reinvesting in the building, the previous off-season we did over $100 million, we pour money into this building. And it’s an iconic building, we have about three million people come in for all of our events and we’ve got the dumbest business model in real estate I’ve ever seen. We own the building and it’s shut down until six o’clock on a game night.

You go to Las Vegas, it’s open 24 hours a day, there’s no clocks, it’s really bright, they’re pumping in oxygen, the last thing they want you to do is leave the resort, the casino. You eat there, you’re entertained there. What do we do in pro hockey? We put a cage up to lock our fans out, ‘We don’t want you in.’ Six o’clock the cage rolls out, thousands of people go in, then the game ends and we hustle people out, ‘We don’t want you in here!’

“It’s nuts when you think about it. Sports gambling will be soon legal here in Washington and we want to be the first arena that has a sportsbook right in the building. And it’ll make our building come alive. When we were in the Stanley Cup final, we opened the building and 20,000 people came and watched the game in the arena and outside there were 50,000 people.

That was a wonderful community-building experience, but they’ll be able to do that and eat and gamble, right? It seems farfetched for us, but all you have to do is look to Europe. There are more William Hill and Ladbrokes betting parlors in Britain than there are Domino’s Pizzas and Starbucks, right? It’s a socially accepted industry there. It’s not legal yet here. It probably will be next year, and we’ll do it next season. I go, ‘OK, we’ll be patient, we want this to be regulated the right way.’ But do you think…the Caps are in first place, best record in the NHL, the Nationals just won the World Series, the Mystics just won the WNBA championship, do you think no one was gambling?

We know there’s $100 billion bet illegally offshore and the bookies. So all we did was empower and activate more illegal gambling. It’s illegal, so that means you aren’t paying taxes. If you’re a consumer, you’re a criminal. There’s no jobs being created, there’s no regulatory body on what are fair odds. There’s no curation of, ‘You’ve got a problem, we’re not going to accept your bet, let us get you some help.’ There’s nothing good that’s happening on the dark web and offshore.

So I go, ‘What are we afraid of? It’s happening.’ We know in Washington, D.C., we have this great social responsibility to do it the right way, but if it can work here and it promises, for the players, for the union, for the league, another revenue stream and more importantly, when you have skin in the game, when you’re doing fantasy gaming, when you’re gambling, you’re watching the whole game.

When you have prop bets, every moment matters. How many power plays will there be? Will Alex Ovechkin score on the power play? These are things that can happen once we put in 5G and do real-time prop betting. The television partners, they want that. That guarantees them much higher levels of engagement. So what do we want as a league?

We want bigger deals from our media partners. If we get bigger deals, then the salary cap goes up, half the money goes back to the players and the union, and the pie expands. So I say, ‘Wouldn’t you rather have the money go to the players and to the owners who built the buildings and own the teams than to the mafia, right?’” (laughs)

Ted knew a decade ago that the day would come when it would be legal to place a bet on an NHL game, and he prepared his team and the NHL for this day’s arrival. By bringing betting out from the shadows and into a regulated and taxed environment, society is better off, as will be the owners’ profits as numbers don’t lie.

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From The Archive: Betting On Hockey: Numbers Don't Lie (2021)