NBA STRIKES A BARGAIN WITH MGM RESORTS TO PROVIDE VALUABLE DATA TO BETTORS
The NBA and WNBA will now share official data with MGM Resorts International, a major win for the leagues as they prepare for the anticipated growth of sports betting across the country.
The Las Vegas-based casino giant will pay the NBA for that data to use in determining outcomes of various bets. The NBA's stance has been that getting accurate stats to bettors is critical so players know what they're betting on and so casinos will know when to pay out, and MGM Resorts is the first casino to make an arrangement with the league for those numbers. Terms of the deal announced Tuesday were not disclosed, other than it's a multiyear arrangement.
"I know the value of data," MGM chairman and CEO James Murren said. "To be able to have the official NBA data for sports bettors around the world is very valuable. I was willing to, and I've paid for that."
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, who has been talking with Murren about such an arrangement for weeks, said the leagues believe they're getting adequately compensated for the data.
"It's a leap of faith on both sides," Silver said. "It's a deal moderate in length where I think we can both step back and assess as we go and see, 'Is it working? Is this deal fair? Are we providing the consumers with the right type of experience?'"
It's the first such deal between a major U.S. sports league and a casino.
"We understood the value of our marks, of official designations," Silver said. "But I think then in terms of the data we're providing, we have a sense of the magnitude of the current business and a sense of where things may go over the next few years. And I'd say we generally tried to approximate in a sense to come up with what we thought was fair compensation."
How MGM will get that data remains unclear. NBA stat data is distributed globally by Sportradar, which sends it to media outlets, broadcasters and betting outlets outside the U.S. — but not inside this country, at least for now. With the start of preseason games still about two months away, there's plenty of time for those matters to get worked out.
"What this relationship entails is access to official data for the many casinos that MGM operates," Silver said. "It's the use of the NBA's intellectual property and as we've discussed before we're very focused on integrity provisions to protect our fans.”