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Bulls of the week
Amplified by the afterglow of the World Baseball Classic held two weeks ago and opening days this week in Major League Baseball, the game is hotter than it’s been in three generations and almost 45 years. If you take a snapshot of the sport business landscape going into this weekend, it’s hard to dismiss the notion that baseball has moved ahead of NBA basketball in what is a race for second place behind the NFL when it comes to media, popularity and fan engagement in North American professional sport. As veterans in the business of sport know, success can be fleeting. It can change and will change quickly if baseball doesn’t find a way to avoid a lockout or a strike one year from now, one that could ruin many of the gains the American national pastime has made in recent years. In addition to collective bargaining, MLB also has to address revenue disparities within its 30-team club, not to mention new challenges in television and streaming distribution.
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Basketball has its own challenges. From prop betting scandals, allegations of salary cap manipulation and tanking, it is far from a gratifying product on the court these days. Yet take a look at its television ratings this year, the media and bracketology juggernaut that March Madness is, not to mention the rise of women’s basketball and expansion coming to Seattle and Las Vegas, and basketball itself has considerable room for growth and upside in North America and globally.
Bears of the week
For the second consecutive week, the National Hockey League — in particular its so-called department of player safety — has frittered away some of the tremendous goodwill hockey earned from the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, a strong group of outdoor games this year and of course the dynamic Four Nations Face-Off 13 months ago. The suspension outcomes have been largely dismissed as offside, but it’s in the process itself where there’s been even less confidence expressed. The league is not anywhere close to the consistency required to protect its players and that’s more than just an optics problem for a league whose commissioner has been slow to accept the connection between head shots, concussions and the degenerative brain disease that is CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy).
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Meanwhile, it’s been quite the fall from grace for the Group of Seven Canadian-based franchises in the NHL. Yes, there is a solid buzz in Montreal where the Canadiens are getting closer to clinching a spot in the eastern conference playoffs. And yes, the Edmonton Oilers are still a factor above the playoff bar in the western conference. Yet it’s been disaster for the Canucks and the Maple Leafs in Vancouver and Toronto, the two largest English-language hockey markets in Canada, and disappointing in Calgary for the Flames and Winnipeg with the Jets. Unless the surging Ottawa Senators continue their impressive recent run, springtime will feature only two of the seven Canadian teams, the exact reverse of the five of seven that qualified one year ago.
That’s not what the financial doctor ordered for media rights holders, corporate partners, merchandisers and sports bars and restaurants across the country. It is during the Stanley Cup playoffs where most of them get the payoff on their investment in the NHL and its Canadian teams. Given the circumstances, many of those hockey business stakeholders will be looking for long runs by the Habs and Oilers to offset the absence of the others. Yet first, those two need to qualify in these last three weeks of the regular season.
Sport business commentator and marketing executive Tom Mayenknecht is a principal in EMBLEMATICA and the host of The Sport Market on Sportsnet 650 and the Sportsnet Radio Network.
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