The National Hockey League is taking equity in PointsBet, part of a wider deal that will make the gambling operator an official betting partner of the league.
Under the deal, the NHL will receive roughly 43,000 PointsBet shares, worth $531,000 right now, to be paid out in bunches over the next three years, according to a filing with the Australian Securities Exchange. There’s also an undisclosed amount of cash changing hands.
As an official NHL betting partner, PointsBet will be able to use official league and team logos in its app and marketing. It’s not the first to partner with the league in that regard—prior NHL deals include MGM, William Hill and FanDuel. The PointsBet partnership, however, will be enhanced by the business ties both PointsBet and the NHL have with NBC Sports.
NBC is the NHL’s main U.S. broadcast partner, and last August PointsBet signed a five-year deal with NBC Sports that could be worth almost $500 million, including some equity. PointsBet odds and data will begin to feature more prominently in NBC’s NHL game broadcasts, and in pregame and postgame analysis. That includes NBCSN, which will be shuttered by the end of the year, and NBC’s regional networks.
In the equity portion of the deal, PointsBet has agreed to give the NHL 43,106 ordinary shares, priced according to a recent 20-day trading average on the Australian Securities Exchange. Those shares are worth $500,000 according to that average, but worth over $531,000 according to Tuesday’s closing price. They’ll be distributed in equal parts after 12 months, 24 months and 36 months, the filing says.
Though the NHL (and the other major U.S. leagues) opposed the legalization of sports betting for decades, this is not its first equity stake in a sports-betting operator. The league is an investor in DraftKings, a stake it acquired back when DraftKings was a private fantasy sports company. Sportico reported last August that the league had agreed to a long-term data partnership with Sportradar that may also include equity.
(This story has corrected the equivalent U.S. dollar share price in the second and fifth paragraphs.)
