NHL’s Blackhawks Strike Deal With Prediction Market Leader Kalshi

The Chicago Blackhawks have just become the first professional sports team to partner with futures market leader Kalshi in a deal that will allow both sides to use each other’s intellectual property.

Breaking the Ice

The Blackhawks may be one of the NHL’s oldest franchises, but they will be a pioneer and perhaps even a trendsetter when it comes to partnering with prediction markets that offer sports event contracts. Yet, this is much to the chagrin of the state regulatory gaming commissions and those sportsbooks that are not entering the prediction market themselves.

Kalshi and its major competitor, Polymarket, have already inked a deal with the NHL, but this is the first time a prediction platform has signed an agreement with a professional sports franchise.

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said in November that the agreements with Kalshi and Polymarket were crafted because sports event contracts are “based on real data.” “But more importantly, it gives us control, because we have the ability to take down any contracts we don’t think are appropriate,” Bettman said.

Naturally, the agreement is expected to drive fan engagement, as the Blackhawks will have access to Kalshi’s intellectual property, and the opposite is also true.

Dealing With the Devil?

The state gaming commissions cannot be happy to learn that one of the NHL’s oldest franchises has recently become a partner with the industry leader of prediction platform markets, Kalshi.

The authorities that license mobile sportsbooks view the prediction market platforms as interlopers in an industry in which they are not licensed by state agencies, nor do they pay taxes to those jurisdictions.

Kalshi, Crypto.com, and Polymarket, et al., contend they are licensed under the auspices of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and that that agency’s federal authority supplants the state authority of these regulators. It has come to legal blows in which several states have issued cease-and-desist orders that have been legally countered by the prediction markets.

The CFTC has refused to intervene, and the prediction markets have won several early legal victories. However, the tide may be turning against them after a recent setback at the federal level in Nevada. A federal hearing in February is pivotal to the entire course of the industry that has been offering sports event contracts, which compete directly with mobile and retail sportsbooks.

Although the NHL has partnered with Kalshi, it should be noted that the other three major North American sports leagues have kept their distance. The practice of offering sports event contracts through prediction markets is not even a year old, and the earlier court rulings that were in favor of Kalshi and others like it have recently swung the other way.

It is a legal debate that may wind up in the US Supreme Court, but until then, the NHL and the Chicago Blackhawks are blazing their own trails in partnership with Kalshi.