How The NHL Has Embraced Sports Gambling And Why It’s Working

Gambling used to be something to avoid for sports leagues, including the NHL. In the past year with sports betting becoming legalized, the league has learned to embrace it and the ways it can grow the game.

The NHL is usually late to the game when it comes to business models set by other leagues, especially in the fields of digital and interactive media. One place where the league has been a trailblazer, going into territory the other major sports leagues wouldn’t touch, is the area of sports gambling.

Gambling and betting have long been considered a major taboo for professional sports. Leagues thought having teams anywhere near a place where people could bet on games was a recipe for disaster and a one-way ticket to the next Pete Rose scandal. For the NHL, it didn’t help when then Arizona Coyotes assistant coach Rick Tocchet was implemented and charged in a sports gambling ring during the 2006 season.

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While other sports leagues were afraid to touch Las Vegas with a 10-foot pole, the NHL cautiously always had one foot in the pool to test out the waters. They held its first-ever outdoor game in Las Vegas with a 1991 matchup between the New York Rangers and the Wayne Gretzky led Los Angeles Kings in the Caesar’s Palace parking lot.

The game became both a test and a precursor to today’s Winter Classic. In addition to the continued preseason games, the NHL also began holding their annual award show on the Vegas strip in 2009. While these initial moves might not have anything to do with sports gambling, the NHL proved that their on ice game and gambling could both co-exist and thrive in the same market.

Even though the NHL kept a close eye on Vegas’s sin city reputation, they also kept eyes on a storied history of minor league hockey in the area starting in the later part of the 20th century. Vegas residents have wanted a professional sports team for years, but leagues always found excuses ranging from the sports gambling “problem” to a transient tourist population as reasons not to expand into that area of the desert.

The NHL finally bit the bullet and took the chance of expanding into the Vegas market with the Vegas Golden Knights, and the result was nothing short of a massive success. Now, Vegas has become a hockey crazed town rivaling Chicago, Detroit, and do we dare say, Montreal. Maybe they added their own special spin with pregame Cirque Du Solei style shows, but they have a passionate young fan base that proved the doubters of Vegas hockey wrong immediately.

Around the same time as the Golden Knights inaugural season, sports betting became legal nationwide in the United States, although it’s been slow to roll out due to individual state regulations. Two of the biggest states to have sports gambling, Nevada and New Jersey, both had their own NHL team. What a coincidence.

The sports landscape in the United States changed dramatically with legalized gambling, and while baseball, basketball and football may have been slow to embrace that change, the NHL once again showed it wasn’t afraid to take the gamble. The Golden Knights already had hotel and casino partnerships in their home market, and the New Jersey Devils announced a partnership with the William Hill sports book. By the end of the season, the NHL announced a league wide partnership with William Hill as well.

While purists of the sport might not be quick to embrace these changes, the underlying data proves that this partnership can be nothing but positive for the league, as per an article from NHL.com.

"Betting on NHL games has increased 38% during the 2018-19 season at William Hill’s Nevada Sports Books. Additionally, according to a recent Nielsen Sports report, NHL fans, when compared to fans of other sports leagues, are more likely to not only wager on their own sport, but also on all other major ‘Big 4’ sports leagues."

Sports betting gives fans another way to get involved in a game. The more involved they are, the more interested they are and the more they watch. In a way, it would even bring more people to the sport because people who may have had no interest in watching hockey may be drawn to place a bet and then want to watch it once they have a personal stake in it.

Someone may not know what a power play is, who the starting goalie for the Philadelphia Flyers is, or even who won the Stanley Cup last year, but if they place a bet on a game, they might start paying more attention. Maybe they’ll realize they like the sport of hockey, and begin watching games, buying tickets and buying merchandise even when they don’t have bets on the table.

That’s exactly what the NHL wants.

The NHL realizes that they can’t avoid sports gambling, but if they keep the negative aspects of it out, such as players and personnel betting on their own games Pete Rose style, it can be a mutually beneficially relationship. It’s an asset that’s there, so they might as well use it to their advantage.

This is similar to the strategy that the Alliance of American Football is using to get their league off the ground and build a fan base in their inaugural season, but the NHL hasn’t bought into that strategy as much yet. In the AAF, sports betting is part of the game and business model. In the NHL, it exists in its own separate entity from the game, but it coexists.

Even with the NHL continuing to expand into Seattle, a sports betting partnership provides a way for them to grow the game in new areas for a cheaper price. Very rarely are their locations restrictions on what games can and can’t be bet on, so it’s very possible that someone who lives and bets in the New York media market will start developing an interest in other teams outside of their area because they can bet on them. If the State of Washington legalizes sports gambling by the time their new NHL team hits the ice in 2021, interest will increase tenfold.

Remember how good the Vegas Golden Knights were when no one expected it? Imagine if you could have bet on it and have a small financial stake in their historic inaugural season. Well, you might be able to with Seattle, but let’s hold off any opinions on how good they’ll be until after the expansion draft.

So to all those people who think sports betting has no place in professional sports, relax. We’re a far ways away from sports betting windows being next to beer stands in stadiums. We’re even farther away from Sidney Crosby giving a post-game interview where he says he only scored a hat trick so he could hit the under/over on a Penguins game. More importantly, the game itself isn’t changing, just how the fans get involved.