Friday Dump 🥟 - Ohtani's gambling interpreter, Coyotes new home, WNBA ticket prices

Put your hands together for the Friday Dump 🥟

Each Friday, we’ll breakdown 3 sports business stories that have caught our eye throughout the week. They will be assembled in the following format:

🔴 - Stories that make us stop, think, and question.

🟡 - Stories with a hint of risk and unpredictability.

🟢 - Stories that make us feel good to go and empowered.

Let’s get ready to rumble.

🔴 Interpreter goes down for bank fraud. A day after The New York Times reported Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, was negotiating with federal authorities to plead guilty to federal crimes related to wiring transactions for sports gambling, another bombshell was dropped on Thursday. The Justice Department moved forward to charge Mizuhara with bank fraud, where if convicted, the felony offense carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison. What are the Feds accusing Mizuhara with specifically? Well…

• Prosecutors accuse Mizuhara of wiring more than $16M from Ohtani’s checking account from 2021 to 2024. All this, so Mizuhara could place bets on sports (none of which were on the sport of baseball).

• Bets ranged from $10 to $160,000 per bet, an average of ~$12,800 per bet (looks like we got ourselves a high roller here…kind of).

• According to an affidavit, Mizuhara made ~19,000 wagers during this time, averaging about 25 bets per day.

• Authorities also say, Mizuhara won around $140M on sports bets, but proceeded to lose more than $180M 🤢. That totaled ~$41M in debt. The majority presumably to his illegal Southern California bookmaker, Mathew Boyer.

  • How fitting even though he was allegedly being paid an annual salary between $300,000 and $500,000!

• And if sports gambling just wasn’t enough, he allegedly used Ohtani’s account to purchase $325,000 worth of baseball cards.

• All of this was apparently done without Ohtani’s consent and Mizuhara even went so far as to falsely identifying himself as Ohtani in phone calls to “trick bank employees” into approving wire transfers.

🟡 Coyotes seek to migrate away from the desert. The NHL’s Arizona Coyotes have never had it easy. Since relocating from Winnipeg to Phoenix in 1996, the Coyotes have essentially been the dumpster fire franchise in professional hockey. The franchise hasn’t turned a profit since moving to the desert and according to Sportico, are valued at an NHL lowest $675M 😫. For the last 28 seasons in Arizona, the franchise has played in 3 different arenas in 3 different cities, filed for bankruptcy in 2009, and has undergone 5 separate ownership changes (including being owned by the league for four years after bankruptcy) — frankly, we should give them a round of applause for screwing this up so badly, it’s quite impressive. So what can be done to fix this?

• The state of Arizona is doing everything it can to keep its ever-so-popular hockey team 😂…its last attempt revolves around building a new arena (naturally).

  • On June 27, an auction will take place for the club to buy a 95-acre parcel of untreated Arizona state trust land in North Phoenix where the Coyotes can build a new arena; the starting appraisal price for the site is $68.5M.

  • However, if the club does not possess the winning bid, they will fail to secure land for the new arena and according to the team president, “they would more than likely have to entertain a relocation of the franchise” (*gulp*).

• According to an ESPN report, the NHL is already aware of this longshot and have made the necessary arrangements to buy the team from current owner, Alex Meruelo, for $1B. The league would then sell the club to current Utah Jazz (NBA) owner, Ryan Smith for $1.3B — this would then initiate the relocation of the Coyotes to Salt Lake City!

  • There’s so much up in the air, but the same report confirmed the league has even created two schedules for the Coyotes 2024-25 season:

    • One that assumes the franchise remains in Arizona and a second calendar where the team is relocated to Utah — of course a potential relocation would need to be approved by the other team owners (spoiler 🚨: it’ll be approved with flying colors as the owners would profit from the arranged sale).

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🟢 WNBA already bringing home the bacon. Our muse, Caitlin Clark, hasn’t even been drafted yet and we’re already starting to see the league and teams bend over backwards and cash in on her aura. It also seems like the WNBA decided to take pages out of the ol’ Unsportsmanlike Boardroom playbook from earlier this week, but we digress. The 2024 WNBA draft is scheduled for next Monday and what might be more certain than April being a spring month is the fact that Clark will be selected #1 overall to the Indiana Fever. Why are we so certain? Well…teams and ticket resellers are already jacking up prices for games against the Fever and the WNBA’s television partners are planning ahead as well.

• The league announced on Wednesday they will be putting 36 of the Indiana Fever’s 40 games on national television.

  • They will be shown 13 times on NBA TV, 8 times across the Disney networks (ABC, ESPN and ESPN2), 8 times on ION, 4 times on Amazon Prime Video, and 3 times on CBS/CBS Sports Network.

• As for tickets, resale prices for the Fever’s home opener on May 16, in some cases, have surpassed $500 per ticket and even $100 for upper-deck seats.

• The 2x champion Las Vegas Aces moved their July 2 home game against the Fever from their 12,000-seat Michelob Ultra Arena to the 20,000-seat T-Mobile Arena (home of the Vegas Golden Knights 🏒) due to expected higher demand.

  • The Aces season tickets are already sold out, which would be a WNBA first.

• To give one more example, the Phoenix Mercury (which is the home of the current 🐐, Diana Taurasi) have tickets vs. the Fever averaging ~$110/ticket before fees…usual ticket prices start around $23 🤯.