NHL, William Hill relationship good for fans, Commissioner Bettman says

OXON HILL, Md. -- The NHL named William Hill US an official sports betting partner of the League on Thursday.

William Hill becomes the NHL's third sports betting partner, joining MGM Resorts and FanDuel.
"We're thrilled to have this new partnership," NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said at the American Gaming Association Sports Betting Executive Summit at MGM National Harbor. "William Hill has an extraordinary presence in the sports betting space. [It is] the largest sportsbook in the United States and for us to be able to offer our fans an opportunity to focus on sports betting opportunities that William Hill presents, but perhaps as importantly for us to be able to market together to give awareness to our fans, to their customers of this relationship and to give to William Hill a presence on a number of our platforms is the way we think this should work."

The NHL's agreement with William Hill is different from the one with MGM, which also involves a resort relationship, marketing of the M life Rewards program and access to NHL Puck and Player Tracking data starting next season. FanDuel, in addition to sports betting, serves as the NHL's exclusive daily fantasy sports partner.
"This is a pure sports betting relationship where we're going to give and provide William Hill with a presence on our platforms," Commissioner Bettman said. "We think that's good for our fans and equally good for their customers."
William Hill already has agreements with the Vegas Golden Knights and New Jersey Devils. William Hill chief executive officer Joe Asher said becoming a sports betting partner at the League level will be beneficial for both parties.
"A couple of the other leagues have come up with this concept that you must buy official league data and you have to pay a royalty in order to have the privilege of buying something that they can set monopoly pricing on, which is not a particularly attractive thing for a commercial actor like we are," Asher said. "The NHL has not taken that approach at all. They've taken a collaborative approach of working with the industry."
The expected arrival of NHL Puck and Player Tracking technology at some point during the 2019-20 season is an example of this.
Unlike MGM's partnership with the NHL, William Hill's agreement does not include access to the real-time data that will be generated from the Puck and Player Tracking for sports betting. But William Hill will have the opportunity to see how the Puck and Player Tracking is working once it is up and running, then can decide if it wants to expand its agreement with the NHL.
"That's the beauty of starting a relationship now," Commissioner Bettman said. "I anticipate that the relationship that we've built personally and corporately over the last 18 months will continue to grow as we understand and are even more comfortable with each other than we are now and part of what I think William Hill is saying is, 'OK, we understand there may be a new kind of data coming. Show it to us. Let's see if it makes sense, let's see if it works and then we'll talk about it.'"
Using a sensor placed on the shoulder pads of every player on each team and 40 pucks manufactured with a sensor inside for each game, the Puck and Player Tracking system will have the ability to track 200 data points per second on each player and 2,000 data points per second on the puck. Potentially, this could lead to real-time, in-game betting on statistics such as the skating speed of players, the distance a player skates or the speed of shots.

Asher attended a demonstration of the system during a game between the Golden Knights and the New York Rangers at T-Mobile Arena on Jan. 8 as part of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
"[Commissioner Bettman] said to me, 'How come we don't have a deal yet?'" Asher said. "Look, ultimately, the market decides. Customers will decide is this something that is interesting to us and that we want to bet and is that bet incremental or does it somehow displace a different bet that somebody would have made. Typically, our view is to try offer customers as many interesting things as we can and then let them decide what they like, and that will be the case with this."
The NHL has embraced the sports betting industry since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on May 14, 2018, to overturn the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, which prohibited sports betting in many states. By adding a third sports betting partner, the League's hope is to further increase fan engagement.
Betting on NHL games at William Hill's Nevada Sportsbooks has increased 38 percent this season over last season after increasing more than 80 percent from 2016-17 to 2017-18 with the arrival of the expansion Golden Knights.
"Once the Supreme Court ruled, you've got to get with the program and frankly as a practical matter, I owed it to our fans, I owed it our clubs, to embrace the evolving world," Commissioner Bettman said. "Whether it's sports betting or changes in technology, in this day and age, you either evolve or you become extinct. So we understood the practicalities of what happened, we anticipated that it might happen, and we decided to take a very forward-looking, practical approach."
Photo Credit: Chris Ferenzi and the American Gaming Association