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00:00Let's get started off here yesterday. Another big announcement as it pertains to prediction
00:04markets. Those of you who may follow folks on Substack, read people's content. A lot
00:10of independent journalists use Substack to get their content out. Well, a new announcement
00:15yesterday and a partnership has been decided. Polymarket is teaming up with Substack. They
00:21announced a new partnership yesterday. So journalism and prediction markets now hand
00:25in hand. Polymarket data and odds will be embedded on some posts on Substack as well. So don't
00:33be surprised if you're logging in to read your favorite columnist or journalist and find
00:37those odds there as well. In terms of Major League Baseball, we'll get to the big news
00:42coming up as far as who the next executive director of the Major League Baseball Players
00:47Association is. But in terms of sports wagering, our big story still surrounding the Cleveland
00:51Guardians and their former pitchers, specifically Emanuel Class A and Luis Ortiz. There's a spring
00:57fraud trial for two of the pitchers that could be postponed until October. A federal judge said
01:03Wednesday they pled not guilty to a rewritten indictment. We'll see coming up later this spring,
01:11summer, and into the fall, the end result for their trial. Class A and Ortiz still under a ton
01:17of scrutiny, especially Class A, who's allegedly through some very illicit pitches to help sports
01:25betters make money, allegedly, even in the postseason a couple of years ago. Kind of crazy.
01:30Okay, Major League Baseball Players Association has named their new interim executive director. No
01:35surprise here. It's attorney Bruce Meyer, and he will replace Tony Clark. Clark resigned after a
01:41scandal that involved him and his family member in an illicit relationship, allegedly.
01:48Meyer's election by the 72 players on the union was unanimous, and so now he and the players will
01:53fight against the owners in the new labor agreement coming up later this summer and into the fall.
01:57Okay, now let's get to the ice here. Compelling finishes, no doubt. First by Team Canada, then by Team
02:03USA. Start off here in the States. USA beat Sweden in overtime, two to one. Team USA was minus
02:112-60 in this one. A huge favorite. Dylan Larkin gave Team USA a 1-0 lead in the second
02:16period.
02:16Sweden tied it. USA wins in overtime. Here is the goal by Quinn Hughes.
02:22Now Quinn Hughes. We played three and a half minutes in overtime.
02:26Quinn Hughes shoots. He scores! He scores! Quinn Hughes in overtime wins it! And the United States
02:35will move on and face Slovakia in the semis.
02:49Meanwhile, Team Canada needed magic as well. They beat Chechia 4-3 in overtime. You talk about a
02:55favorite. Canada was minus 900 to advance. They won it on a goal to win 4-3 in overtime,
03:03and here it is from Mitch Marner.
03:07Next goal wins. Winner on to the semifinals. Nice thing. Through the score!
03:14Mitch Marner delivers Canada into the semis!
03:32Also in college basketball last night, you talk about thrilling when Alabama and Arkansas get
03:37together. I guess a lot of points are in store. How about this one in double overtime? NBA score
03:42here. 117 to 115. Alabama five-point favorites. Four and a half in some shops. And it was a win
03:50for the Crimson Tide. Liberian Phylon had 35 points in this one, but the big story was Arkansas. They had
03:57a player, Darius Acuff Jr., 49 points in this one. You talk about a back-and-forth affair. Here are
04:04Nate Oates and John Calipari about this insane finish.
04:08You know, now we just got five games left, and we got to try to get our guys back healthy.
04:13The good
04:13thing for us is we got a lot more depth. You know, I feel bad for Taylor. He just, I
04:20thought he was
04:20going to be able to go a little bit more, and he just didn't quite have the pop. Great kid,
04:26great
04:26teammate. You know, I asked him if he could go for us late, and he just, he's too stiff, but
04:31hopefully,
04:32you know, he's progressing the right way. Hopefully we get him in. You know, London had some
04:37minutes in a tight game, which is great for him. I thought, you know, some of these guys
04:42played a lot of minutes. We're going to have to get them rested by Saturday, because it's a big game
04:46Saturday, too. That long, the foul trouble kind of piles up on you. I guess just how did that
04:52make things difficult, especially in overtime? It makes it hard. I don't want to talk about
04:56the fouls and all that, just because I don't want to get in trouble. Give Alabama credit.
05:01They fought till the very end. Give my team credit. They fought. I told them after, I'm proud
05:08of you. Fought. Never gave up. Never. We had a chance right down to the end.
05:13I think right now, the biggest upset of the season, arguably, Creighton beating UConn last night.
05:2091 to 84, Connecticut, the fifth ranked team in the country. 15 and a half point favorites in the game
05:27last night, and they lose at home. It's the Huskies' first conference home loss of the season.
05:33Dan Hurley, generally pretty fired up after wins and losses, but freely upset of dropping that home
05:39court advantage.
05:42You know, we have a tendency with this year's team to kill the crowd. To kill the crowd in home
05:48games,
05:49you get it to six in the second half with an opportunity to, like, make a three or get a
05:53stop
05:53and keep the crowd in it and blow the game open. You know, but our defense has just been so
06:00bad.
06:03These last four games, I think we're, we've been around 165th best defense in the country.
06:10So, we've been playing with fire with this. Obviously, overall defense, dreadful.
06:17And then, you know, minus Braylon in the second half, you know, just the shot making was just ice cold.
06:25So, but this has been brewing, you know, for us, just based on what the defenses look like.
06:30The defense has been a joke.
06:33St. John's takes care of Marquette 76-70. They were eight and a half point favorites.
06:39St. John's was down late in this game, but came back to win. Here's Rick Pitino and Shaka Smart on
06:43a competitive affair.
06:44So, they're a terrific home court team that's playing better and better and better in the month of January and
06:49February.
06:50So, I said, don't panic. We've been here before. We're going to have our run.
06:54And they 100% didn't panic. Played like a veteran team.
06:58And so proud of these two guys.
07:00And Bryce, once again, for the second time in three, won the Big Bell Award.
07:06We rang the bell in the locker room.
07:08And Bryce has won it two out of three times, which is great.
07:11One of the more prestigious awards he'll ever get in his lifetime.
07:14So, it was a great win. Really proud of the guys.
07:16And we continue to be undefeated on the road.
07:20But I thought when we got the six-point lead, you know, some of our rim decisions really hurt us.
07:27Against them, they're going to try to block everything.
07:29You've got to find the open man.
07:31Definitely some possessions we'd love to have back there.
07:34And then, you know, on the other end of the floor, we just weren't quite tough enough on whether it
07:40was offensive rebounding.
07:41We held them to 33% from the field.
07:43So, you'll take that any day of the week.
07:44But, you know, Hopkins, too many opportunities in the paint.
07:50You know, he's a load.
07:52And obviously, the foul, you know, them getting to the foul line that many times in the second half hurt
07:57us.
07:59Meanwhile, Arizona, in a tough stretch, finally gets a win.
08:03They've dropped from the first-ranked team in the country to four.
08:05They do beat BYU 75-68.
08:08They didn't cover the spread, and they haven't in their last three games.
08:11They head toward potentially March, trying to get themselves into a position to be a top-four seed in the
08:18NCAA tournament.
08:19Kurt Badenhausen is in the house as we break down the latest in sports and sports sales and talk about
08:26the ultimate sell high.
08:28That's where we begin, Kurt, with the Seattle Seahawks.
08:31Thanks for coming on the show.
08:32They win a Super Bowl, and they decide to sell the team.
08:36I mean, if this isn't a sell high in sports, we talk about it with players, I don't know what
08:41is.
08:42And kind of when you think about it, I'm sure I'm living in the moment here, Kurt, and I don't
08:45remember that a team has done this previously.
08:48But I'm going to guess it's not more than a handful of times that a team has won a championship
08:52and decided it's time for us to go.
08:56Well, you don't have to go back too far.
08:58The Boston Celtics, shortly after they won the championship, they went up for sale.
09:04And there's another parallel between these two, and it's estate planning.
09:10In the case of the Boston Celtics, Wick Grousbeck's father was the one who controlled most of the stock, and
09:17he's the one who decided, for estate planning reasons, we're going to sell this now, work this out before I
09:23die.
09:23He's in his 90s.
09:24And this is also an estate planning thing.
09:26It goes back to Paul Allen, 2018, when he died.
09:30His will dictated that all of his assets would be sold and be donated to charitable causes.
09:36So this is that finally coming to fruition eight years later after he died.
09:42It was very clear in his will that Portland Trailblazers, which reached a deal last year to be sold and
09:50was owned by Paul Allen, as well as the Seattle Seahawks, had to be sold.
09:54So this move has been telegraphed for a little while.
09:57And to your point, they are selling high coming off of that Super Bowl title.
10:03It looks like almost maybe $10 billion potentially here coming for the Seattle Seahawks.
10:09So we'll keep an eye on that sale.
10:10And, of course, other owners in the NFL will be having a close eye on that sale as well.
10:15All right.
10:15Now let's get to this ongoing saga with regional sports networks.
10:20Heard MSG is no stranger to this because they're sort of lumped in with the others, looking like they're going
10:26to split into two New York franchises, separate businesses.
10:30So you'll have to unpack this one a little bit for me because I'm obviously very familiar with all of
10:35the regional sports stuff going on.
10:37And MSG certainly, I think it would be fair to say, not what it was 20, 30 years ago.
10:42So what does this do for them?
10:45Sure.
10:45I mean, if you think about what MSG is now, I mean, this started as one publicly traded company.
10:51And now it's potentially going to be carved out into a fourth publicly traded company.
10:55You brought up MSG Networks that sits within Sphere Entertainment.
11:01You also have MSG Entertainment as a publicly traded company that controls the buildings, including Madison Square Garden, New York,
11:10the Beacon Theater, as well as some other buildings.
11:13And then you have the sports one, MSG Sports, that holds the Rangers and the Knicks combined in one company.
11:19So what they're trying to do is to create value for shareholders and the biggest shareholder being the Dolan family
11:28in this league.
11:29And so this goes back to a team sale as well.
11:32The stock has traded for probably 50 percent less than the private market valuation of, say, what Sportico has for
11:42the Knicks and Rangers.
11:43Right now, Sportico values the two teams combined at $13.5 billion.
11:48And if you look back at the Lakers sale last year, $10 billion, I think that you could draw a
11:55straight line to the impetus for doing this.
11:57Let's let the Knicks trade on their own.
12:01You have that shiny $10 billion number for the Lakers.
12:05And the Knicks, you know, you make a very good case they're worth more than the Lakers.
12:10Let's see what the stock looks like if the Knicks are carved out by itself.
12:15So I think and this opens the door for a potential cleaner LP transaction.
12:21We've seen a lot of institutional investment in sports teams, NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB.
12:28And this allows kind of a cleaner transaction where an institutional investor maybe is only interested on the NBA side
12:35or the NHL side.
12:36And they can attack it that way.
12:39Kurt, let's get to this exclusive you have over at Sportico here.
12:43You'll have to tell me more about this.
12:45Players' Era, a college basketball multi-team event that we've been hearing about now for years.
12:51Trying to get off the ground here, asking for a significant amount of money.
12:56Tell us more about this story that's up at sportico.com.
12:59Sure.
13:00Yeah.
13:00Players' Era, they've run a preseason college basketball tournament.
13:05We've had preseason college basketball tournaments kind of since the beginning of time.
13:10And they're, you know, they're usually in very nice locales and a place for a team to do some bonding
13:17and to broadcast some games.
13:19There's usually very little TV money in these deals.
13:22There's maybe an ad rev share involved in this.
13:26But Players' Era has, since they launched, November was the second year of the tournament.
13:33But since they've launched, they've come out hot with some, making a lot of big proclamations.
13:39What they're paying is they're paying the schools and the students NIL money, huge, huge numbers that we've never seen
13:50before in this kind of arrangement.
13:52But the rub is there's a lot of teams and players who said, we never got the money.
13:58And they were asking, originally, trying to do a TV deal, you know, for more than $100 million.
14:05Now they've scaled those back looking for $50 million.
14:07But that still is so beyond the pale of what these kind of tournaments really ever have commanded on broadcast
14:16TV.
14:16So it's a very, very, really murky situation going on with Players' Era.
14:20And a lot of these college basketball players are still waiting for their money from last November's event.
14:26Kurt, before we let you go, what are you guys covering now here at Sportico?
14:30I know that certainly we have the great Olympics going on right now.
14:34Go ahead.
14:35We've got our, yeah, our reporter on the ground in the Olympics.
14:37She's flying back tomorrow.
14:39She's been crushing it.
14:40We're looking at MLB right now as this season kicks off.
14:44What does this look like in terms of broadcast and on the labor side?
14:52MLB's got a lot of things, major, major issues to work through.
14:58And now you saw the head of the PA step down this week.
15:03And now we're looking at, again, regional sports networks where the league is having to take these deals on because
15:09of all the problems at Main Street.
15:11So it's a fascinating time right now in MLB when the game on the field has never been more exciting.
15:18So the finances, though, are super tricky.
15:22Know all about them, Kurt.
15:24That's for sure.
15:24Thanks for coming on the show.
15:25Really appreciate it.
15:26We'll catch up again soon.
15:28All right.
15:29Thanks for having me.
15:29I appreciate it.
15:30Thanks for having me.
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