The NHL embracing sports gambling was a major mistake

[Tie Domi Esquire]

Just another reason why the NHL is awful to watch in 2024.

 

[Slats432]

Just like when the NHL used to run beer ads, everyone became an alcoholic. Personal responsibility is lost on this generation.

 

[tarheelhockey]

Just like when the NHL used to run beer ads, everyone became an alcoholic. Personal responsibility is lost on this generation.

Personal responsibility means making a choice.

I can choose whether or not to go to the store and buy beer.

I cannot choose whether the broadcast is actively drawing my attention to the progress of a gambling line, and making a big seratonin-inducing deal if it hits.

 

[MartyOwns]

Who would have ever thought degeneracy would lead to degenerate behavior?

 

[Tie Domi Esquire]

The more concerning thing to me, despite all the gambling adds, logos on jerseys, new tv contract, expansion teams, and massive inflation going on, the salary cap isn’t making any sort of massive jump that you’d expect.

At least ticket prices haven't skyrocketed. That's what Gerry and the owners told us about the salary cap in 2004 after all.

 

[tarheelhockey]

If anyone has concerns about the direction this is all going, just know that back when Bally first created their now-bankrupt regional sports network, they were working on having gambling buttons embedded into TV remote controls.

 

[Slats432]

Personal responsibility means making a choice.

I can choose whether or not to go to the store and buy beer.

I cannot choose whether the broadcast is actively drawing my attention to the progress of a gambling line, and making a big seratonin-inducing deal if it hits.

Goes back to who has the responsibility. Does playing Fortnite make kids want to shoot people? Does a beer ad make you drink, or skip the dishes some beer?

Today's society puts all the blame on everyone else, rather than take ownership of your own choices.

 

[Ceremony]

Personal responsibility means making a choice.

I can choose whether or not to go to the store and buy beer.

I cannot choose whether the broadcast is actively drawing my attention to the progress of a gambling line, and making a big seratonin-inducing deal if it hits.

You can choose to ignore that the same way you'd ignore any other advertisement or on-screen frippery.

 

[Beau Knows]

Just like when the NHL used to run beer ads, everyone became an alcoholic. Personal responsibility is lost on this generation.

People have responsibility, but so does the NHL.

It's fair to criticize them for trying to push gambling onto their young viewers.

 

[Golden_Jet]

Goes back to who has the responsibility. Does playing Fortnite make kids want to shoot people? Does a beer ad make you drink, or skip the dishes some beer?

Today's society puts all the blame on everyone else, rather than take ownership of your own choices.

The others aren’t ruining the game, gambling shoved down your throat does.

 

[Lazlo Hollyfeld]

Goes back to who has the responsibility. Does playing Fortnite make kids want to shoot people? Does a beer ad make you drink, or skip the dishes some beer?

Today's society puts all the blame on everyone else, rather than take ownership of your own choices.

It's hard to have a serious discussion with chicken little proclamations like this.

For alcohol, there are studies showing that for drinkers, higher exposure to alcohol ads is linked with higher drinking. So yes, a beer ad does make you want to drink. There's still the argument of personal responsibility but in particular with alcohol ads I think the exposure to underage kids is more of an issue than the industry would like us to recognize.

As for gambling, as people have mentioned this isn't just about putting some sports betting logo in the corner. The announcers are talking about it as part of the game. It's become completely interwoven in an NHL hockey game. I understand the analogy with alcohol ads, but we're talking about a new level of promotion and integration. It normalizes gambling.

Wherever someone falls on the personal responsibility issue, I think we're going to be hearing more and more about young people with gambling problems. It's never been more prevalent and convenient to gamble than it is now.

 

[The Gr8 Dane]

Just like when the NHL used to run beer ads, everyone became an alcoholic. Personal responsibility is lost on this generation.

I totally agree with you , apparently its the big bad gambling company's fault that people have gambling addictions

 

[Golden_Jet]

You can choose to ignore that the same way you'd ignore any other advertisement or on-screen frippery.

So turn the TV off. lol
You can’t get away from it, beer add on the board. I can ignore, constant updates during the on the live betting odds, I can’t get away from.

 

[The Gr8 Dane]

The others aren’t ruining the game, gambling shoved down your throat does.

This I agree with tho , very annoying , but they put adds on jerseys , what do we expect

 

[tarheelhockey]

Goes back to who has the responsibility. Does playing Fortnite make kids want to shoot people? Does a beer ad make you drink, or skip the dishes some beer?

Today's society puts all the blame on everyone else, rather than take ownership of your own choices.

This is more like if Fortnite was embedded into your TV console as a non-skippable ad, so that your kid plays a little Fortnite whether you buy it or not. At what point is a “choice” actually a compulsion? I would say sometime around the point where it stops being advertisement and becomes interactive experience.

You can choose to ignore that the same way you'd ignore any other advertisement or on-screen frippery.

That’s not the way gambling ads work. Watch a game, it’s not just a passive advertisement. They have betting lines running across the screen according to game situation. They have panels explaining today’s pre-game prop betting line, then an intermission panel keeping you up to date with its progress instead of talking about the game.

They’re doing it for a reason. It’s engaging passive viewers in the same mental construct as an active gambler. It’s effectively a taste of the product, same as a drug dealer*. A certain percentage of people can’t resist and will come back, that’s a known statistical fact and it’s the basis for them spending so much money on such a deeply embedded marketing scheme in the first place.

These are the same people who run casinos. They know the numbers and they know exactly how many addicts they need to hit certain profit points. The marketers know exactly how to generate those addicts, given a certain amount of screen time. This is all fundamentally different than showing a 15-second ad to convince people to buy a car or drink a different brand of beer.

* the difference being you have to seek out a drug dealer, they don’t come to your house and sit at your table and drop bits of heroin into your dinner.

 

[Lazlo Hollyfeld]

I totally agree with you , apparently its the big bad gambling company's fault that people have gambling addictions

Has anyone in the thread actually made that argument?

It's not as simple as your strawman. In spite of personal responsibility, cigarette ads are restricted. There's a lot of grey area and people will have differing views on where the line is.

That's not the same as believing "the big bad company made me do it!"

 

[Sol]

The only people who don’t care are the people who are gambling imo. You can’t not wrestle with pigs and not get mud on you. It was stupid to most of us who thought the likelihood of this becoming a bigger problem was high. And not only that, I know there’s a few people who think a multi billion dollar industry wouldn’t match fix, but to the rest of us, I would with a 100 percent certainty say that there is match fixing in the NHL with how much gambling has become ingrained into the sport.

 

[Golden_Jet]

Thanks to the NHL and broadcasters, I now gamble less, to not at all.

 

[Sidney the Kidney]

This is more like if Fortnite was embedded into your TV console as a non-skippable ad, so that your kid plays a little Fortnite whether you buy it or not. At what point is a “choice” actually a compulsion? I would say sometime around the point where it stops being advertisement and becomes interactive experience.




That’s not the way gambling ads work. Watch a game, it’s not just a passive advertisement. They have betting lines running across the screen according to game situation. They have panels explaining today’s pre-game prop betting line, then an intermission panel keeping you up to date with its progress instead of talking about the game.

They’re doing it for a reason. It’s engaging passive viewers in the same mental construct as an active gambler. It’s effectively a taste of the product, same as a drug dealer*. A certain percentage of people can’t resist and will come back, that’s a known statistical fact and it’s the basis for them spending so much money on such a deeply embedded marketing scheme in the first place.

These are the same people who run casinos. They know the numbers and they know exactly how many addicts they need to hit certain profit points. The marketers know exactly how to generate those addicts, given a certain amount of screen time. This is all fundamentally different than showing a 15-second ad to convince people to buy a car or drink a different brand of beer.

* the difference being you have to seek out a drug dealer, they don’t come to your house and sit at your table and drop bits of heroin into your dinner.

Yeah, the fact that gambling is integrated basically into the broadcast during segments separates it from other "personal responsibility" like commercials. The broadcasters constantly talking about the over/under, the segments during the intermission where they're talking about parlays and various lines, and then even during play you see the ticker at the bottom of the screen with "odds" of things happening (team leading winning, total goals scored, etc.).

It's easier to avoid beer ads because it's literally a 30 second ad that isn't part of the broadcast. Can't really watch an NHL game now without seeing a million references to sports gambling DURING the broadcasts.

 

[Ceremony]

This is more like if Fortnite was embedded into your TV console as a non-skippable ad, so that your kid plays a little Fortnite whether you buy it or not. At what point is a “choice” actually a compulsion? I would say sometime around the point where it stops being advertisement and becomes interactive experience.




That’s not the way gambling ads work. Watch a game, it’s not just a passive advertisement. They have betting lines running across the screen according to game situation. They have panels explaining today’s pre-game prop betting line, then an intermission panel keeping you up to date with its progress instead of talking about the game.

They’re doing it for a reason. It’s engaging passive viewers in the same mental construct as an active gambler. It’s effectively a taste of the product, same as a drug dealer*. A certain percentage of people can’t resist and will come back, that’s a known statistical fact and it’s the basis for them spending so much money on such a deeply embedded marketing scheme in the first place.

These are the same people who run casinos. They know the numbers and they know exactly how many addicts they need to hit certain profit points. The marketers know exactly how to generate those addicts, given a certain amount of screen time. This is all fundamentally different than showing a 15-second ad to convince people to buy a car or drink a different brand of beer.

* the difference being you have to seek out a drug dealer, they don’t come to your house and sit at your table and drop bits of heroin into your dinner.

I know all this. I live in a country where gambling has been a thing all my life. When I was in high school my friends and I would look at the odds for Champions League games in the windows of bookies and laugh at how unlikely some of them were. Betting is a regular storyline on TV shows, compared to "oh I'll phone my guy, wink wink" in American television.

Since about the start of the 2010s the growth of betting and bookmakers has been constant, and although some curbs have started coming in over the past few years (limits on FOBTs, gambling sponsors not being on the front of shirts) it's still pretty ubiquitous as a concept.

I spent a year or two as a vbookie mod on here, on a betting site nearly every day looking at odds to use for events I created on here.

I've still never spent a penny on real life gambling outside of lottery tickets. I do think the presence of it at the expense of actual game coverage in NHL broadcasts is too high, but I can still ignore it because I'm not interested in it. It existing doesn't mean I have to be interested in it.

 

[LeafGrief]

It's hard to have a serious discussion with chicken little proclamations like this.

For alcohol, there are studies showing that for drinkers, higher exposure to alcohol ads is linked with higher drinking. So yes, a beer ad does make you want to drink. There's still the argument of personal responsibility but in particular with alcohol ads I think the exposure to underage kids is more of an issue than the industry would like us to recognize.

As for gambling, as people have mentioned this isn't just about putting some sports betting logo in the corner. The announcers are talking about it as part of the game. It's become completely interwoven in an NHL hockey game. I understand the analogy with alcohol ads, but we're talking about a new level of promotion and integration. It normalizes gambling.

Wherever someone falls on the personal responsibility issue, I think we're going to be hearing more and more about young people with gambling problems. It's never been more prevalent and convenient to gamble than it is now.

Good post!

I think it's fair to recognize what the other user is saying in the complaints about personal responsibility, but that can be a simultaneous truth with these ads a) being predatory, and b) suck major donkey balls for fans.

With regards to the morality, I don't even think it's about kids that much. Alcohol plays a significant cultural role that most of us actively or tacitly accept and is advertised in a way that encourages social behavior. Nobody ever cared about lottery or casino commercials on hockey broadcasts, it's that the current gambling ads are trying to normalize gambling on the tiniest minutia from your phone during every play. If the alcohol ads were encouraging people to take shots alone in their basement the whole of a hockey game and then brush their teeth with Jack in the morning, I think people would be similarly sketched out as to this gambling stuff.

I know that arguing around murky morality concepts isn't going to get anywhere with the more Libertarian minded, but the simple fact is that the majority of NHL fans are unhappy with the product on the TV due to gambling ads. That the league is choosing to prioritize the advertising revenue over the actual fans is cause for real concern, because if the fans leave in frustration (I've cancelled my streaming subscription) eventually the league will lose money.

 

[Slats432]

It's hard to have a serious discussion with chicken little proclamations like this.

For alcohol, there are studies showing that for drinkers, higher exposure to alcohol ads is linked with higher drinking. So yes, a beer ad does make you want to drink. There's still the argument of personal responsibility but in particular with alcohol ads I think the exposure to underage kids is more of an issue than the industry would like us to recognize.

As for gambling, as people have mentioned this isn't just about putting some sports betting logo in the corner. The announcers are talking about it as part of the game. It's become completely interwoven in an NHL hockey game. I understand the analogy with alcohol ads, but we're talking about a new level of promotion and integration. It normalizes gambling.

Wherever someone falls on the personal responsibility issue, I think we're going to be hearing more and more about young people with gambling problems. It's never been more prevalent and convenient to gamble than it is now.

Chicken little is on the other side. The sky is falling because the NHL has ads for betting. So does TSN on every broadcast. So does the NBA.

My son who is 22 does a little wagering. I say remember, gamblers lose more than they win. Do it for fun, and don't gamble more than you are willing to throw away.

The world wants choices made for them because they don't want to do stupid things. When I was young, we were taught, don't do stupid things. People want inhibitors in place to protect them from themselves. (I remember when the first "Caution Coffee is Hot" label was put on a cup)

If people want to turn off the TV because there are too many gambling ads, no problem here, that is their choice, but some of us like the ability to make our choices.

 

[Arthur Morgan]

was this not part of the reason the NHL is making money again though? like without gambling would we have gotten out of the flat cap era by now or would we have had another year or 2 of 1m or less cap rises?

 

[Slats432]

Good post!

I think it's fair to recognize what the other user is saying in the complaints about personal responsibility, but that can be a simultaneous truth with these ads a) being predatory, and b) suck major donkey balls for fans.

With regards to the morality, I don't even think it's about kids that much. Alcohol plays a significant cultural role that most of us actively or tacitly accept and is advertised in a way that encourages social behavior. Nobody ever cared about lottery or casino commercials on hockey broadcasts, it's that the current gambling ads are trying to normalize gambling on the tiniest minutia from your phone during every play. If the alcohol ads were encouraging people to take shots alone in their basement the whole of a hockey game and then brush their teeth with Jack in the morning, I think people would be similarly sketched out as to this gambling stuff.

I know that arguing around murky morality concepts isn't going to get anywhere with the more Libertarian minded, but the simple fact is that the majority of NHL fans are unhappy with the product on the TV due to gambling ads. That the league is choosing to prioritize the advertising revenue over the actual fans is cause for real concern, because if the fans leave in frustration (I've cancelled my streaming subscription) eventually the league will lose money.

I can agree that there is some dangers, and they can cause issues. And this is a very solid post. If enough people act on their dissatisfaction with betting ads, the NHL would have no choice but to respond.

 

[Golden_Jet]

Chicken little is on the other side. The sky is falling because the NHL has ads for betting. So does TSN on every broadcast. So does the NBA.

My son who is 22 does a little wagering. I say remember, gamblers lose more than they win. Do it for fun, and don't gamble more than you are willing to throw away.

The world wants choices made for them because they don't want to do stupid things. When I was young, we were taught, don't do stupid things. People want inhibitors in place to protect them from themselves. (I remember when the first "Caution Coffee is Hot" label was put on a cup)

If people want to turn off the TV because there are too many gambling ads, no problem here, that is their choice, but some of us like the ability to make our choices.

Lmao, make your damn choice without shoving the odds during the broadcast, go on your favourite gambling app then, whatever you want. keep it off the telecast.
if Boston scored ,I don’t give a crap what the new updated odds on them winning, scoring 5 goals etc. Go on the damn internet if you want to know the odds.

It’s literally terrible now.