Bulls & Bears
Tom Mayenknecht hosts The Sport Market on TSN 1040 and TSN Radio, where he rates and debates the Bulls & Bears of sports business. He reviews the major winners and losers of the past week every Saturday.
BULLS OF THE WEEK
Lots of sport business to go around this Easter weekend, from heritage brand logos to curling as a television sport and the growing clout of the Los Angeles sport market and Canadian basketball. The Saskatchewan Roughriders deserve kudos for recognizing that history, tradition and identity are among their greatest assets as the most popular CFL franchise in the country. Their new logo is their old logo with only minor changes and that’s the way it should be when your club was founded in 1910 and has brandished a consistent look since 1985. The Green Riders recognize what they are and what they have and govern themselves accordingly. That’s why only the Montreal Canadiens and Toronto Maple Leafs sell more branded jerseys in Canada. Curling TV numbers are down slightly this year but still regularly hitting 400K and above for the recently completed Scotties Tournament of Hearts and Tim Hortons Brier, giving TSN some strong showings among the top-10 sport television shows each of the last three weeks. Meanwhile, fans of the seven Canadian NHL teams can only look wistfully at California where — in a state roughly the size of Canada in terms of population — all three hockey clubs are warming up for the Stanley Cup tournament. It’s noteworthy that L.A. is the hottest real estate in North American professional sport these days, with the return of the NFL Rams, an NHL All-Star Game in 2017 to mark the 50th anniversary of the L.A. Kings and now an NBA All-Star Game in the same building — the Staples Center — in 2018. Yet there’s nothing more bullish right now than the outlook for Canadian basketball after a terrific CIS Final Eight at UBC (congratulations, Carleton Ravens) and the showcase that is NCAA March Madness. With two dozen Canadians in the U.S. college basketball tournament and more than 90 playing Division I NCAA hoops, it’s not hard to envision the current Canadian content in the NBA — 11 players — doubling and tripling over the next five to 10 years. All one needs is look at the fledgling Oregon Ducks program, into the Elite Eight with three Canadians in tow: Chris Boucher, Dillon Brooks and Dylan Ennis.
BEARS OF THE WEEK
There was no bigger individual loser than former South African tennis pro and doubles specialist Raymond Moore, now the former CEO and tournament director of the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif. And the NFL had a bearish week by again playing coy on concussions after last week’s public admission around the link between repeated head trauma and CTE. Yet there is no bigger mess than the dispute between Major League Baseball, the L.A. Dodgers and Time Warner on one side and DirecTV on the other. The Dodgers made headlines with their eye-popping $8.2-billion US regional rights deal with Time Warner, but have made bigger headlines in the two years since because the majority of their fans still do not have access to their games on Sportsnet L.A. It’s an alarming warning for all sports leagues and franchises about what can happen when you push too hard on dollars.