The Las Vegas Golden Knights haven’t had a whole lot of problems in their unprecedentedly successful inaugural season.
Since 1960, none of the 64 expansion teams to launch in the NHL, NFL, NBA or Major League Baseball managed so much as a winning season. Then, the Knights came along winning the Pacific Division, posting a .655 winning percentage, and sweeping their first-round playoff series with the Los Angeles Kings...
... But their toughest battle may be off the ice.
Read MoreThis weekend is the 83rd Annual National Football League Player Selection Meeting, a.k.a. the 2018 NFL Draft! If a team has a successful draft, Lord knows that its trajectory can change dramatically. Because of these stakes, the league has formalized the process over the years to (try to) become more equitable to every team. As you can imagine, player selection means contracts on contracts on contracts, rules and regulation enforcement, a shift from amateur to professional status, and OH so much more law-related fun. Here are a few fun bits of knowledge y'all should store in your brains.
Read MoreOn March 29, 2018, while preparing for a home game against the Winnipeg Jets, the Chicago Blackhawks suddenly found themselves without prospective starter Anton Forsberg, who was injured during his off-ice warmups. With nobody else available to back up now-starter-by-necessity Collin Delia (making his own NHL debut as a recent call up from AHL Rockford), the Blackhawks signed 36-year-old, former Western Michigan University goaltender Scott Foster to a one-day amateur tryout contract. The catch? Foster last played for the WMU Broncos in 2006 (for reference, Jonathan Toews’s freshman year at University of North Dakota) and is employed as an accountant for Golub Capital.
By now, the rest is history: with the Blackhawks up 6-2 over Winnipeg, and with Delia suddenly incapacitated with cramps with 14 minutes to go in the third period... who is this guy in the black Vaughns and the AC/DC mask?... let’s check the program for #90... he wouldn’t be in the program on such short notice... yep, there he is, emergency goaltender Scott Foster! Foster made seven saves on seven shots, preserving the win and earning a first star of the game and a story of a lifetime. In a rush to beat the April 17, 2018 filing deadline with the IRScapitalize on Foster’s (almost literally) fifteen minutes of fame, the Blackhawks put out this tweet in order to (sorry, can’t help it) hawk some merchandise...
What is wrong with this story, and why am I flagging the Chicago Blackhawks for an audit? Let’s open the books.
Read MoreThe year was 2017. It was a simpler time - no 16 seed had beat a 1 seed in March - but that is when the world of esports revolutionized. League of Legends had announced its 2018 season of the North America League Championship Series would move to a franchise model. The Overwatch League (“OWL”), a franchise league for Blizzard’s popular title Overwatch, was beginning to take shape. And then, like UMBC’s upset, the NBA announced an esports franchise league out of nowhere: the NBA 2K League (“2K League”). For the inaugural season of the League, seventeen of the thirty NBA franchises will participate.
Up until the announcement of the 2K League, every franchise league looked like a shell of what we know. For example, the the OWL has city based teams, like the San Francisco Shock, player minimums, and player benefits. The announcement of the OWL promised more than this shell, specifically announcing a player combine and draft. These events, however, never came to fruition. Then came the 2K League, with not only player minimums and and city based teams, but also a combine and a draft. The 2K League announced an application process, followed up by a player combine, and then a draft. Thousands applied, 250 people participated in the combine, 102 and will be draft eligible. The combine ran through the month of February and the draft lottery order was selected on March 13 (with Mavs Gaming, the Dallas Mavericks, winning the first overall pick). The draft will take place April 4 at The Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden’s Lobby (1 p.m. ET).
“Love them or hate them, unions are a part of the way the working world is organized.
The labor movement has touched virtually every corner of the globe and has impacted every industry, from steelmaking and car manufacturing, to the public service and piloting, to the world of professional sports.
Unions are undoubtedly controversial; on a scale from nuisance to difficult problem, business owners see unions as industry death knells, and on the other side, workers see them as vital to protecting their rights. The debate over the impact and effectiveness of unions is fraught with realities, myths, and hyperbole, and this is particularly true of the professional sports industry, because every part of sports is exciting—even the unions.
Unionism in professional sports boils down to an inherent conflict between billionaire owners and millionaire athletes—the kind of drama that drives daytime soap operas. And due to the overwhelming popularity and cultural significance of professional sports in the U.S. and Canada, the everlasting drama between team owners and athletes has been highly publicised and made accessible to the public.
Read MoreProfessional athletes and coaches are consistently in the limelight, whether they wish to be or not. Sure, some professional athletes and coaches prefer to be at the center of attention, for branding purposes if nothing else. Others, however, would rather maintain a more private life. Regardless of the particular professional athlete or coach preference, they will still be succumbed to defamatory remarks from all types of individuals across a wide range of mediums. As such, in my latest for Sports Law Blonde, I will dissect defamation law in the realm of sports and provide previous and recent case law.
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