Not everyone’s going to be a winner whenever the lottery commission gets around to implementing legalized sports gambling at some point in the next year. There will certainly be people for whom the easy access to fast-twitch endorphins will pave the way to financial ruin. Then again, the same thing happens with day-traders.
But nobody’s a bigger winner than North Carolina’s pro sports teams from the conversion of sports wagering from an underground, illegal activity into one of the permissible vices that the state is willing to supervise and regulate in return for a cut of the profits – like cigarettes or alcohol (or marijuana, although not here … yet).
The old hypocritical hand-wringing about the morality of gambling was duly consigned to the history books Wednesday, when Gov. Roy Cooper signed the bipartisan legislation that finally crossed his desk, and it was fitting that Cooper chose the Charlotte Hornets’ home arena as the location to apply his signature.
The Hornets and Carolina Hurricanes and Carolina Panthers all pushed for this, and they now can not only partake in the lucrative sponsorship-and-advertising market that has grown around legal wagering but have special dispensation to open sports books on and near their home venues.
“Certainly gambling goes on in our state right now illegally,” Hurricanes president and general manager Don Waddell said. “Legalizing it benefits everybody from a tax revenue standpoint, controlled by the government. For us, this is something we’ve been looking forward to.”
In the case of the Hurricanes, they’ve been looking forward to it perhaps more than any of the others, because they play in a league with a hard salary cap determined by revenues across the league, and the rate they have to pay for players has been inflated by gambling money in other markets. This will bring them back to even.
“Part of the competitive landscape for a lot of teams is having that additional amount of interest in your games, and obviously also the revenue that comes from the ability to market to people who are interested in sports,” Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon said.
After last summer’s false start in the legislature, when the Hurricanes had to put all of their plans on hold, they were approaching this latest dawn cautiously, but there’s a lot of work to be done now, from finding a partner among the major bookmakers to figuring out how to capitalize on what has so far been an untapped market from an advertising and marketing perspective.
Suddenly, North Carolina sports fans are a desirable demographic for online sports gambling sites that might like to air some commercials during Hurricanes or Hornets games, both teams that control a large portion of their local television inventory. The Carolina Panthers, outside of preseason, don’t have that opportunity — ads for FanDuel and DraftKings and MGM have long been a feature of national broadcasts — but every team now has a new sponsorship market to tap.
“We’re in a good position,” Hurricanes president and general manager Don Waddell said. “Obviously we’ve been talking to a lot of the casinos that would be bidding on the project here. We’ll eventually do a (request for proposals) on it, once we get through all the rules and regulations.”
There’s also the trickier question of how, exactly, to build physical, brick-and-mortar sportsbooks on the PNC Arena property. The law allows the team to open one inside the arena and another within a half-mile, but both of those would require the cooperation of the Centennial Authority, the government board that oversees the arena.
That might not be unreasonably withheld under normal circumstances, but it comes at a time when there’s already no less under negotiation than the long-term future of PNC, from an extension of the Hurricanes’ lease to Dundon’s desire to develop the land around the arena to a proposed package of renovations to the 25-year-old arena that could cost as much as $450 million.
“I think it would be a decision made jointly, likely their request for our consideration and approval,” authority chairman Philip Isley said. “But we don’t want some Target tent experience. … I think it’s meaningful for the community. I think it’s meaningful for all of our tenants. We hope that it will also be an enticement for additional visits to the site. I have no doubt that it will make it more active.”
A sportsbook isn’t a big deal compared to all of that, but it’s also hard to separate from those weighty, billion-dollar decisions, especially given the important role physical sportsbooks are expected to play both in a reimagined PNC and the proposed entertainment district outside it.
For Waddell and Dundon, a casino-style sportsbook has always been a keystone of those plans, every bit as much as shopping or dining or a live-music venue. That part of the vision can now become a reality, instead of a blank space marked “future sportsbook.”
“What’s important is, we want to make this a destination place, this sports arena,” Waddell said. “There’s been lots of talk about the expansion of the arena and the development of the property. If you’re going to do these things, you’re going to need reasons to draw people.”
All of which means that even though this took a year longer than it should have, and could take another year before the first bet is actually placed, it may still be several years before the greatest impact of legalized sports wagering hits the fan experience at PNC.
