By this point, you may want to know if the NHL would want to discipline Evander Kane in the wake of all the controversies he is involved in.
It’s not just with the 2016 incidents at a Buffalo area bar or when he was sued by a woman who says that the then-Sabres forward attacked her, with those charges being dismissed after he stayed out of trouble in the six months that followed.
It’s not just with finding himself back in hot water in 2019, now as a San Jose Shark, when the Cosmopolitan Las Vegas sued him after allegedly walking out on a half-million dollars’ worth of debt. Although the lawsuit was dropped last year, he ran into even more trouble, filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in California, with $26.8M in debt and getting sued by Professional Bank over an unpaid loan.
The latest accusation was when his wife, Anna Kane, posting a story on Instagram about not calling her for a week at the beginning of July, with the news that her house was being seized by the bank, that she would need to sell her wedding ring to get money for baby formula while he was partying in Europe, and then the accusation of Kane betting on NHL games, including his own, asking the NHL in her story, “Can someone ask Gary Bettman how they can let a player gamble on his own games? Bet and win with bookies on his own games?”
That language wasn’t used in association with an NHL player before, and the NHL didn’t hesitate to address it, launching an investigation, with this official statement:
The League was made aware this evening of a post on social media alleging that San Jose Sharks Player Evander Kane bet on NHL games. The integrity of our game is paramount and the League takes these allegations very seriously. We intend to conduct a full investigation and will have no further comment at this time.
– NHL Public Relations on Twitter (@PR_NHL)
Kane led the Sharks in all major categories, with 22 goals and 27 assists for 49 points. However, his worst stretch was during the Sharks’ 8-game losing streak in April, where his only two goals were both against the Wild, the first being a shorthanded one during a 3-2 loss and the second was a garbage time goal that cut a 3rd period deficit to a 5-2 loss.
Had that losing streak in April been where that investigation began, then they would be involved long ago inside the story of someone who has had a history of off ice trouble, gambling issues, and millions of dollars in debt. It shouldn’t get to the point where his wife is the one to publicly call him out while he has had a history of violence towards women, so it may possibly put her in danger.
When Kane denied the allegations and calling them false, you feel like you may get the feeling that this is what the NHL has always been doing: Absolutely nothing when it comes to problems like these. It stands to this day, considering that they have absolutely nothing to say regarding the situation with the Chicago Blackhawks.
However, this leaves several questions to be asked.
What is the Deal with Evander Kane’s Gambling?
Kane has had a history of gambling. He gambled openly on table games at Las Vegas casinos.
When he was in Las Vegas during the Sharks’ 2019 playoff series against the Golden Knights in April of that year, he failed to pay a $500,000 casino marker from The Cosmopolitan, leading to them filing a complaint in November 2019, but the case was dropped by the casino in 2020.
In a 12-month span leading up to his filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in January 2021, he said that he lost $1.5M gambling “at casino and via bookie.”
CapFriendly says that Kane has lifetime earnings in the NHL of just under $59M. He just finished his 3rd season of a seven-year, $49M contract ($7M AAV), with $26M remaining in the contract.
Has Kane Made Bets on Hockey?
It’s one thing to gamble in a casino, but it’s another thing when it comes to sports betting, and that is what the NHL is trying to find out in their investigation. Losing money when playing a game of craps isn’t all that concerning. Losing money when betting on your own games is a whole different matter.
ESPN interviewed several players who knew Kane or were once teammates with him. However, none of them recalled that he ever bet on hockey games.
One of his former teammates was surprised when he read the accusations, telling ESPN that while Kane’s wagering on football and basketball were widely known, he “never once heard him say he bet on hockey.” This skepticism is because betting on hockey games, whether it be through casinos or bookies, isn’t common in the NHL, according to the players being interviewed by ESPN.
Several Nevada bookmakers from multiple casinos said that they never seen or heard of Kane betting on sports in town. It could also be implied that he employed a “beard,” which is a term that is used to reference someone who places bets for someone else.
What are the NHL Rules Regarding Players Betting on Hockey?
The NHL explicitly states in the “Standard Club Rules” section, in the second item: “Gambling on any NHL Game is prohibited.” That rule is posted in every locker room around the NHL.
However, according to the NHLPA, players are allowed to place sports bets on any sport outside of hockey.
According to the CBA, commissioner Gary Bettman has the authority to impose discipline any player for violating an off-ice league rule or a player guilty of conduct “detrimental to the welfare of the league or the game of hockey.”
The CBA has three different types of punishment for Bettman to hand out: A $10,000 fine for a first-time offender; terminating the player’s contract with the team he currently plays for; or suspending the player “for a definite or indefinite period” from the NHL.
The NHLPA has a player assistance program that includes a hotline allowing players to confidentially connect with counselors, including those for gambling addiction.
Kane is not the first player that got caught up in gambling issues. Jaromir Jagr owed more than $500,000 to an Internet gambling site in 2003. Thomas Vanek owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to a bookmaker for betting on football and basketball games. However, the NHL did not discipline either of the two players, because they did not bet on hockey games.
What About the NHL’s Investigation?
Like the rest of the hockey world, the league was caught off guard by the news surrounding Kane. There isn’t a task force that handles these sorts of matters in the NHL.
The investigation team will be led by Jared Maples, the NHL’s executive vice president and chief security officer who has held these positions since May 2021. They will look for paper or electronic trail that could connect Kane with any NHL wagers.
While these are serious accusations, the investigation can take a while. We’re in the offseason, so there is no urgency regarding Kane’s status for the 2022 season and the immediate future. However, the expectation is that the investigation will be completed by training camp in September.
Is It Possible for Hockey Players to Throw a Hockey Game?
There are certain players who play a specific position in every sport that directly influence the result of a game. Their time in the game is significant, and whenever they make a “mistake,” it can lead to the other team winning.
However, when an NHL player was asked by ESPN if a forward can have that much influence, his response was “Time on ice and line changes.” This means that guys like Kane aren’t as influential as other players in other leagues. In baseball, a starting pitcher would play around five innings on average, which is slightly over half a game.
During the 2021 season, Kane averaged 20:12 of ice time, which is a tad over an entire hockey period. The same NHL player that was asked this added that it’s “kinda hard to throw a hockey game.” It can be reasonable for goalies if they allow bad goals, but almost impossible for forwards to throw games.
On the topic of match fixing, another NHL player said, “I don’t think that’s ever happened and I don’t think anyone would ever do that.” But there are ways for a forward to influence the outcome of an NHL game, such as taking unnecessary penalties or blowing defensive coverages, especially at the worst times. To note, Kane took more minor penalties than any other player in the NHL over the past three seasons (89 minor penalties in the last 195 games), something that he brought up when he alleged that NHL officials were racially biased against him.
Hockey is a low-event sport. During the 2021 season, on average, teams scored 2.94 goals per game.
But teammates can make up for mistakes. Successfully killing off a penalty can turn the tide of the game. Huge saves by goalies can happen.
And this may be why match fixing may need to be a team effort.
One notable and infamous example of match fixing was in the 2019 Belarus Extraliga Championship. Dinamo Molodechno had a 5-1 lead over Mogilev only to blow it and lose 6-5. The Prosecutor General’s Office went on a criminal investigation on four players of Dinamo Molodechno for match fixing, including their goalie, Alexei Ivanov. The IIHF suspended a total of six players involved in the match fixing scandal, all admitting that “they had agreed to exert an unlawful influence on the outcome of the Game in exchange for illegal remuneration.”
How Much is Bet on Hockey in the United States?
Although hockey doesn’t generate the same amount of interest as the other three major sports in the Big Four sports leagues in the United States, in Colorado, one of the only states with a regulated betting market that can track wagering on hockey, $73.2M was bet on the sport from January to June, which included all of the 2021 NHL regular season. In that same time, $530.2M was bet on professional basketball with Colorado sportsbooks.
Because of the size of the NHL market, the betting limits in hockey are smaller than the other sports. Six-figure bets on the NHL are extremely rare in hockey in comparison to other sports.
What is the Relationship Between the NHL and Sports Betting?
Back in 2016, Bettman said that hockey “doesn’t lend itself to gambling in the same way football and basketball do” and was concerned about gambling’s impact on the environment of NHL games. However, three years after that statement, after the US Supreme Court’s decision reversed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act to legalize sports betting across the country, Bettman said something different:
I owed it to our fans, I owed it to our clubs, to embrace the evolving world, whether it’s sports betting or changes in technology. In this day and age, you either evolve or become extinct.
– Gary Bettman, during a 2019 conference held by the American Gaming Association
Since 2019, the NHL has established partnerships with several sportsbooks, the first of which being with MGM Resorts, followed by DraftKings, FanDuel, William Hill, PointsBet and Bally’s, and so forth.
Even NHL teams are getting involved with forging partnerships, with the Washington Capitals turning a sports bar in Capital One Arena into a William Hill Sportsbook, the first located in a US sports arena.
The next step on sports betting in hockey is puck and player tracking. After some difficulties last season, the NHL has plans on doing this in time for the 2022 season.
This data generated by the tracking sensors, and licensed to bookmakers, is expected to generate a new category on sports betting on the NHL, such as the total distance traveled by players on the rink.
Bettman added, “Our original goal in creating this technology was to create a broadcast enhancement that can be used in real time, which no other sport has. While not developed with this in mind, the application to sports gaming could create even more fans.”
Is It Possible that Sportsbooks can Prevent Athletes and Team Staff from Betting on Events in Which They Participate?
It is possible, but it’s a challenging process. While leagues and gaming regulators have rules that prohibit players from betting on the games and events in which they participate in, enforcing these rules is hard.
Per the Nevada Gaming Control regulations, bets placed by, or on behalf of, a team official, owner, coach, staff, player, or participant in that event is prohibited and requires the licensees to take “reasonable steps to prevent the circumvention of this regulation.”
One challenge is that sportsbook employees might not recognize a player who can come to the betting window, and the usage of beards is a common practice.
Conscious Gaming is an organization that is dedicated to responsible sports betting practices. They offer a technology known as PlayPause that helps identify legal and prohibited bettors, but no sports league has agreed to provide the necessary information to this platform, not even the NHL, according to a spokesperson of the company.
Now going back to the “Is it possible for hockey player sto throw a game?” question comes another question related to that matter...
How can a Hockey Player Throw a Game?
Bets related on hockey are commonly on the money line (simply wagering on who will win), the over/under (wagering on the total goals scored for each game), and the puck line [games that have a set point spread: the favorite has a minus (-), while the underdog has a plus (+)].
If Kane were to do actions that involve “throwing” games, then he must have done some actions that caused his team to lose games.
Taking Unnecessary Penalties
Nearly 20% of goals scored during the 2021 season were on the power play. In other words, they can have a huge significance on the game’s outcome, particularly for gamblers paying attention to the money or the puck lines, or the over/under. In theory, a player could throw a game by taking unnecessary penalties, leaving his team on the man disadvantage on the ice.
As mentioned earlier, over the last three seasons, Kane has taken a league-high 89 minor penalties, including four stick penalties during a Sharks game against the St. Louis Blues in January.
The Sharks won that game 2-1 in a shootout.
It should also be noted that the officials were constantly calling penalties, with eight minor penalties on the Blues, so both teams had plenty of power play opportunities.
Likewise, Brad Marchand of the Bruins saw a lot of penalty time in the last three seasons, with 81 minor penalties.
This season, Kane had 28 penalty minutes in the first 13 games of the season, but had only 14 over the final 43 games.
Time on Ice
Kane has regularly led all Sharks forwards on time on ice in 2021, averaging 20:12. He plays on all situations: On the power play, on the penalty kill, and on even strength on the top line as Tomas Hertl’s linemate. Usually, only two or three defensemen spend more time on ice among skaters.
A hockey player in that position could purposely turn the puck over to create a scoring chance for the opposition, fail to skate hard on the backcheck or lose coverage in the defensive zone. However, if they do those things too often, they will see less and less ice time.
For example, Kane was benched for the final period of a February 2020 game against the New York Rangers after some sloppy play that led to two Rangers goals.
He pointed out, “A coach’s impact, noticing that a player’s not giving his best effort—that certainly would be an issue. I don’t care who you are, if you’re dogging it, in our game, you’re going to be on the bench.”
When you consider all the factors, Kane would still have far less influence in a game than an NFL quarterback, an MLB pitcher, or an NBA point guard. He doesn’t have the puck on his stick as much as other players in other leagues controlling the ball in theirs.
Lack of Offense
Players in Kane’s position as top six forwards are there because they can drive the offense and create scoring chances. When they hit a cold streak for an extended period of time, it lessens the team’s chances of winning.
Almost every player could hit said cold streak, simply because of misfortune, the tight-checking nature of the league, or their own mistakes. Kane has had cold streaks with the Sharks before, but one could argue that he is still one of their more consistent players.
He had 152 points in 195 games since the start of the 2019 season and led all Sharks players with 49 points in 56 games. That’s a 0.875 point-per-game pace, which was the best of his career. He was 2nd on the team in points in 2020 and 6th in 2019.
This leads us to the final question.
How Exactly Will the NHL Punish Kane?
As hard as it may appear to be to intentionally throw a hockey game, there is reason for the NHL to take these allegations seriously. It gets to the integrity of the game, not to mention the financial ramifications of a scandal. The fact that this question of “How can a hockey player throw a game?” speaks volumes.
They would say that getting with every gambling company they can find doesn’t apply to players. That betting on his own games is THE cardinal violation. That they have plenty of partnerships and sponsorships that the players cannot take part of: Just because they sign with a beer company, doesn’t mean that they can show up all woozy to a game.
Even physical proximity will soon be a strange coincidence, since NHL and NBA arenas open their own sportsbooks for in-game betting just mere feet away from players who are told they can’t do that.
There is also the debate about the very foundation and how much fans care about it as more fans become bettors. With daily and season-long fantasy plays, betting, and the dedication more to players from the video games they play instead of the teams, then how thick will the line be between winning and losing in the future of sports?
It’s going to be interesting how this turns out if the league has to punish Kane in the event that he indeed gambled on hockey games. How hard do the sponsors want the NHL to go in on this, though?
And it’s not just the NHL itself, but those who supposedly are the regulators are involved in this too. Check out this in-depth analysis by Danny Funt of the Columbia Journalism Review on what sports betting means now and could mean later.
And if you want to get deeper into this, ask yourself what will happen when reporters have inside information about it but can’t report it, but can certainly guarantee it. And before you say that editors and bosses won’t like it, keep in mind that very soon, the editors and bosses could very likely be the gambling companies in the news business.
Who knows what is to come out of this investigation, but leagues like the NHL will attempt to convince you how wrong it is for Kane with all those checks from Caesar’s, FanDuel, Bally’s, etc. on his pockets. It’s an odd look, but it’s what the NHL can still come to a conclusion should it be true when punishing Kane.
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